When the moment comes to inaugurate this great day of the Lord and the fury of God's wrath and the wrath of the Lamb, it will come suddenly and shockingly, even to believers who will not know its moment. And then comes judgment. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Scripture says that even though God's judgment is imminent, most people will be, as they say, Clueless.
False prophets will be declaring peace and safety. The masses will think everything's fine. They'll be eating breakfast, going to work, dropping the kids off at school, watering the lawn, getting the car fixed. Just like always. But that's all going to change as soon as Christ breaks open seal number six of his judgment.
You'll see the terrors unleashed by the sixth seal as John MacArthur continues his riveting study called The Beginning of the End on this edition of Grace to You.
Now follow along with John in Revelation chapter 6. We return to our study of the book of Revelation. Again, chapter six. and looking at verses 12 through 17. Let me read this text of Scripture to you.
Revelation 6, beginning in verse 12. And I looked when he broke the sixth seal and there was a great earthquake. and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair. and the whole moon became like blood. And the stars of the sky fell to the earth as a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind.
And the sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up. And every mountain and island were moved out of their places. And the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the commanders, and the rich, and the strong, and every slave and free man, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains. And they said to the mountains and to the rocks, Fall on us. And hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come.
And who is able to stand? Right now, man. is having his day. But soon it will be The Lord's Day, the day of the Lord. One of the central prophetic themes in Scripture is the coming of the great day of God's wrath, also known as the day of the Lord.
It is a frightening, inevitable day in the future of the world. We are reading about it right here in this particular section of Revelation. And for us to fully comprehend the sixth seal, we need to expand our understanding a little bit and find out what the Bible teaches about this. Very, very important event called the Day of the Lord. It goes far beyond what is said right here.
It covers texts of Old Testament and New Testament scripture. And I don't want to Belabor the point, but I think it's essential for you to have a larger context in which to fit this description of the sixth seal. As I said last time, the sixth seal really initiates the day of the Lord. There have been already judgments that could be called the wrath of God, but this is the great day of wrath. This is the culminating day of the Lord to which.
All those things that have happened by way of judgment prior have been precursors, preliminary warnings.
Now, an excellent text for us to look at if we're going to get a grip on this. event called the day of the Lord is 1 Thessalonians chapter 5. And just to look at the first three verses as a starting point to get a grip on the teaching of Scripture with regard to the day of the Lord. Verse one says, Now, as to the times and the epochs, brethren. you have no need of anything to be written to you.
Now that Phrase the times and the epochs in verse 1 is a technical term for the time period around the Lord's return. Yeah. The term times is chronos. It has to do with Time itself. The term epochs is kairos that has to do with the events that take place during that time or those times.
So he is saying, as to the various times and events, Around the coming of Christ. You have no need of anything to be written to you. One thing that comes immediately to mind is that there will be many different times and many different events that make up the time of the return of Christ. The Thessalonians, frankly, wanted to know all the details. How long until the day of the Lord?
When will the rapture of the church take place? When will the kingdom be established? They wanted all the details to be filled in. Give us the timing, give us the events, give us the sequence. And Paul's response is that spiritual preparedness does not involve date setting.
It does not involve clocks and calendar watching. It does not involve sign-seeking as such. He says, frankly, you have no need of anything to be written to you. In other words, you don't need to know any more than you already know. It isn't to your advantage.
More details are not available. Jesus had given many in answer to the disciples' question in Matthew chapter 24. You'll remember that the disciples said to Jesus, which really triggered this sermon that we call the Olivet Discourse, they said, tell us when will these things be and what will be the sign of your coming and the end of the age? Give us the chronology, the clock, the calendar, and describe the events. They really wanted to know the same thing that the Thessalonians wanted to know.
And you remember, Jesus went on to give them certain signs, certain things that they could look for, but never gave them the specific time. as to when it would happen. And again in the book of Acts in chapter 1. Familiar words of Jesus, it is not for you to know the times or the epochs which the Father has fixed by his own authority. You don't need to know all the events.
You don't need to know the exact timing. You know as much as you need to know. To understand what he's really saying is to understand this. God has chosen not to disclose the timing of the return of Christ. He has not disclosed to us when the day of the Lord will come, when the events associated with the day of the Lord will come, when the seals will be opened, when the trumpets will be blown, when the bowls will be poured out.
We don't know specifically what time, at what age, in what year, at what date the rapture of the church will take place. We don't know when the tribulation time is going to come followed by. The setting up of the glorious millennial kingdom of Christ. The reason we don't know is because the Lord has not revealed it. Our Lord says, and the Apostle Paul says, and it's recited to us.
Again, obviously, through all the prophetic literature, we don't know when. We know some general events, we know some sequence of things, we don't know when this is going to happen. Therefore, all generations live in a certain amount of anticipation and a certain amount of expectation. In verse 2, he says, you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night. And there he introduces us to the term the day of the Lord.
It'll come like a thief. How does a thief come? Unannounced, unexpectedly, suddenly, and harmfully.
Now, you can't put into your calendar book the day and the hour in which the thief is going to come. He doesn't give you that information. And that's how the Lord's going to come. Unexpectedly, suddenly and harmfully But every generation therefore needs to be Alert. In the sermon that we mentioned earlier in Matthew 24, Jesus said in verse 42, Therefore be on the alert, for you do not know which day your Lord is coming.
That is not something that the Lord has chosen to reveal. Verse 50 of the same chapter, the master of that slave will come on a day when he doesn't expect him and at an hour which he does not know. In chapter 25, verse 13, be on the alert then, you do not know the day nor the hour. And Luke chapter 12, verses 35 to 40 basically say the same thing. We don't know the specific moment which will trigger the events of the day of the Lord.
We don't know the specific moment when the first seal will be open and the following seals as well. Those things are not revealed to us. Even in Revelation 16:15, it says, Behold, I am coming like a thief. again suddenly, unexpectedly, and harmfully. We don't know when the rapture will happen.
We don't know when the wrath of God will be released in the beginning of the birth pangs Jesus talked about. Therefore, we don't know exactly the timing of the great tribulation, so we don't know in what age, what century, what millennium. The sixth seal will be broken, and the day of the Lord will strike. We don't know when that seven-year period of divine wrath is coming. Therefore, in a sense, it's imminent.
It could come at any time, and all generations live to some degree in expectation of it. Every generation is warned that the wrath of God is coming, and they should be ready for it. And we do not know the exact time. Let me take that a step further. Even people who will be alive during the seven-year tribulation, After the church has been taken out, people being redeemed, and then of course there's a vast population of unredeemed people.
Even the people living during that time who can see the first seal and the second seal and the third and the fourth and the fifth will not know the exact time. They will not know the exact time when the sixth seal will be opened. They will not know the day. They will not know the hour. They will not know the specifics of that judgment.
It is not given unto us to know precisely when that is going to happen. In fact, in verse 36 of Matthew 24, Jesus says, of that day and hour, no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone. That is a secret event known only to God. We don't know the exact moment.
So, even if people are living in the tribulation and seeing these events going along, they're not going to know exactly when the sixth seal is going to come. In fact, The believers may be trying to guess because they may be able to see what's going on and they may say, well, it has to be soon. It has to be near. The unbelievers, on the other hand, are going to be so deceived, they don't even recognize that it's coming at all. That's when verse 3 tells us.
While they are saying, and they means false prophets, peace and safety, then destruction will come upon them. What's the next word? Suddenly, like birth pangs upon a woman with child and they shall not escape. The unbelieving world is going to be listening to the false prophets and the false teachers. Jesus talks about them in Matthew 24.
He says, While all these judgments are unfolding, there's going to be false teachers and false prophets and false Christs, and they will effectively deceive people. They will be saying, Peace and safety all as well. They will be killing Christians and killing Jews and telling the world if we can get rid of these people, we'll enter into utopia and peace will be ours. They're much like the false teachers of Jeremiah's prophecy who keep saying peace, peace, when there is no peace. The same ones Ezekiel 13 talks about, saying, Peace, peace, and there is no peace.
The same ones of Micah chapter 3, verse 5, peace, peace, and there is no peace. The same ones of 2 Peter 3:3, the scoffers who say, Where is his coming? Where is his coming? Everything is going on like it's always gone on. And they will effectively deceive The whole world.
So, the whole world, even though they have seen the five seals open and someone can show them a Bible and describe it to them, will be so deceived by Satan and the Antichrist and false teachers who are in accord with them that they will not expect the day of the Lord. And even believers who know its coming won't know the exact moment of its arrival. He says in verse 3: when they are saying peace and safety, then ole thras, disaster, ruin, hopeless ruin, and the loss of everything will hit. It doesn't mean necessarily the destruction of their being, but the destruction of their well-being. It is not the end of their existence.
It is not annihilation. It is the ruin of the purpose of their existence. And he says it'll come suddenly. It's going to come unexpectedly. It's going to come suddenly.
One verse to keep in mind: Matthew 24:27: For just as the lightning comes from the east and flashes to the west, so shall the sign of the Son of Man be. When the moment comes to inaugurate this great day of the Lord and the fury of God's wrath and the wrath of the Lamb, it will come suddenly and shockingly, even to believers who will not know its moment. And then comes judgment. Now this that comes is what the Bible calls the day of the Lord. It is mentioned 19 times in the Old Testament and specifically four times in the New Testament.
Just a very brief and rapid consideration of it. Listen to what the Old Testament prophets said about the day of the Lord. Isaiah 2.12, For the day of the Lord of hosts shall come upon everything proud and lofty, upon everything lifted up, and it shall be brought low. Wail, for the day of the Lord is at hand, Isaiah 13, 6. In verse 9, behold, the day of the Lord comes, here's a definition of it, cruel with both wrath and fierce anger to lay the land desolate.
The prophet Jeremiah chapter 46 verse 10 said, This is the day of the Lord God of hosts, a day of vengeance, that he may avenge himself on his adversaries. The prophet Joel wrote in chapter 1, verse 15: For the day of the Lord is at hand, it shall come as destruction from the Almighty. In chapter 2, verse 11, he said, For the day of the Lord is great and very terrible. In the same chapter, verse 31, he said, The sun will be turned into darkness, the moon into blood before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. The prophet Amos wrote in verse 18 of chapter 5: Woe to you who desire the day of the Lord, for what good is the day of the Lord to you?
Is not the day of the Lord darkness and not light? Malachi 4:5, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord. In Zephaniah 1.14, it says, The great day of the Lord is near. It is near and hastens quickly. The noise of the day of the Lord is bitter.
It will be noisy. The day is a day of wrath, a day of trouble, distress, a day of devastation and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness. Six times it is referred to as the day of doom, four times it is called the day of. of vengeance. Always it is identified as a time when God unleashes his final fury.
And there's always a sense that it is near. In every generation, Ezekiel 30, verse 3: the day is near, even the day of the Lord is near. Joel 2.1, the day of the Lord is coming. It is at hand. Joel 3.14, the day of the Lord is near.
Obadiah 15, the day of the Lord is upon all the nations, and it is near. Zephaniah 1:7, the day of the Lord is at hand. Chapter 14, verse 1 of Zachariah, the day of the Lord is coming. Every generation has lived with the reality that it could come at any time. And so the prophets have warned, and the New Testament writers have warned, that the day of the Lord is coming.
It is a day of fury, it is a day of judgment, it is a day of wrath.
Now, with all of that in mind, as you come to Revelation chapter 6 and you read the statement in verse 17: the great day of their wrath has come, it is. It is only reasonable to assume that this is describing the day of the Lord. The sixth seal then opens the day of the Lord. the final fury of God's wrath. Though all that has happened prior Has been the wrath of God preceding it.
This is the final day of God's wrath. And by the way, in the Old Testament, there were some historical days of the Lord, that is, when God intervened in powerful vengeance, and they too had preliminary indications and warnings as God gave certain judgments which led up to his final fury.
So there are historical precedents for the same pattern here, where you have a series of judgments leading up to the final fury called the day of the Lord. This day of the Lord, I want to add as a footnote, starts toward the end of the seven-year tribulation time, and it really comes in two waves. The first part of it comes to the end of the seven-year tribulation, and the second part of it comes at the end of the 1,000-year millennial kingdom.
So it comes in two phases with a thousand years in between. In Peter's second epistle, I think this is abundantly clear because in verse 10 of chapter 3, Peter says, The day of the Lord will come like a thief, same terminology. And he says, When the day of the Lord comes, the heavens will pass away with a roar, the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, the earth and its works will be burned up. And then he says down in verse 13: ultimately there will come a new heavens and a new earth.
So the day of the Lord stretches all the way from the end of the seven-year period where it starts to the coming of the new heaven and the new earth, which is after the thousand-year millennium.
So, what I'm saying, follow the thought, is that the day of the Lord comes in two phases: one at the end of the seven years, and then a final phase at the end of the millennial kingdom as he consumes what is existing then as the millennial earth and heavens and inaugurates the new heaven and the new earth, which is the eternal state. You say, well, how is it then one great day if it's separated by a thousand years? And Peter gives you the answer very, very clearly in that same text when he says, In verse 8, familiar words to us, you know them well. Do not let this one fact escape your notice, beloved, that with the Lord, one day is like a. thousand years and a thousand years is as One day.
When the day of the Lord comes, the fact that there's an a thousand-year interval in between is not difficult for God to deal with. He is above and beyond time, and with him, a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day.
So that is the larger context biblically in which you have to see the sixth seal.
Now let's return to the sixth seal in our study. The force here, if we can identify a force, we said the first seal, the force, was peace, the second seal, the force, was war, the third was famine, and the fourth was pestilence, and the fifth basically was vengeance. If we identify a force here, the force is fear. What really comes through here is fear. Like no fear the world has ever known.
It will lead to the world's largest prayer meeting, only they're not talking to God. They're praying to the mountains and the rocks, as verse 16 says, and asking them to crush them. Luke 21:26, I remind you, says that some will faint from fear. The word faint means to die. People will be literally scared to death.
Fear is the essence of the sixth seal. The world will fear, and they will now know that what they've been experiencing has been the work of God, and all the warnings that they had from all the believers who were opening the Bible and showing them the truth, all the warnings that they tried to silence, even the gospel preached by the everlasting angel, the 144,000 converted Jews, 12,000 from every tribe, the two witnesses, all of the messages they've heard from everybody giving them the truth will now all of a sudden take meaning and they'll know that what was being said was in fact true. God was sending them warning signs about the coming day of the Lord. And so we come then to the sixth seal. The Lamb taking the title deed to the earth and unrolling it one more time breaks the sixth seal.
This is the title deed that describes his takeover of what is rightfully his as the heir of God to the whole universe, which is in the hands of the usurper Satan and his minions and men. And he unrolls it another time, and the sixth seal brings the day of the Lord. The world refused to believe the warnings of Christians. The world has tried to, under the leadership of Antichrist, destroy Christians, kill them all, martyr them, kill the Jews as well to wipe out the people of God. They have been deceived by Antichrist to believe that what is happening is caused by Christians and Jews, and if they can massacre all of them and remove them all, they can go into utopia.
And now all of a sudden they know that isn't true because of what starts to happen in the sixth seal. Suddenly, as Jesus said, like lightning. Six things take place. We went over them last time. I'll just remind you: seismos.
See the word earthquake? It's actually the word seismos, it means shaking. The whole universe begins to shake. Then he says, the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair. But because of the breakup of the planet Earth and the breakup of other bodies in space.
The exploding earth sends fire and smoke into the atmosphere, which obscures the sun. It may be that the sun itself starts to smoke as somehow it starts to disintegrate. The moon becomes like blood. It is eclipsed in blackness and perhaps the red fringes of the fire of volcanic action on the earth. And then it says, most fascinating things in verse 13: the stars of the sky, remember that's the word sterase, it can mean any body in the sky, not just stars as we know them.
Fell to the earth. Obviously, it can't mean just a star because if a star hit the earth, they are so massive, they are, for the most part, thousands of times, if not millions of times, larger than our own Sun. It would consume us before it ever landed here.
So, it's fair to assume that this has in mind asteroids, meteorites, whatever other objects are flying around in space that begin to pummel the earth. And it is also possible that even the stars begin to fall out of the heaven toward the earth. But all these things coming out of the sky are like a fig tree casting its unripe figs when it's shaken by a great wind. The sky starts to fall. The earth is bombed by careening bodies in the disintegrating heavens.
Then in verse 14, the sky was split apart. That's the fifth component, like a scroll. If you took a scroll and stretched it all the way to its limit, it would be like a canopy. And having stretched it, it split in the middle and just rolled up on two sides. The sky, as we know it, disappears.
Then every mountain and island moved out of their places. The earth begins to tremble. The shifting crustal layers of earth begin to move.
Now, this is what is described as the sixth seal. These are, I think, what Jesus meant when he said in Luke 21:11: there will be terrors and signs in heaven. The stable sky, the sky from which we can navigate, the sky that's always the same, that is absolutely predictable hundreds and thousands of years into the future. Men can tell you what is going to orbit where and where it'll be then because it is so predictable will instantaneously become unpredictable. And the world now knows Who's doing it?
Because in verse 16, they recognize the wrath of the Lamb. The Wrath of the Lamb. and the presence of the one who sits on the throne, who is God. That's John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, and I trust you're being challenged by John's study called The Beginning of the End here on Grace to You.
Now, while the book of Revelation can be challenging to interpret, it's important to remember that God promises blessing to whoever reads and heeds the truth in the book of Revelation.
So, to help you experience that blessing, John has written a book called Because the Time is Near. It's a streamlined version of his two-volume commentary on Revelation. Because the Time is Near. It gets you into the book of Revelation quickly and yet with serious attention to detail. It's 350 pages that you will find hard to put down.
Order your copy of Because the Time is Near when you contact us today. The price for this book is $11 and shipping is free. To place your order, call 855 GRACE or visit our website gty.org. The title one more time, because the time is near. Order a copy online at gty.org or when you call us at 80055Grace.
And if you want to improve your understanding of all of God's Word from Genesis through Revelation, let me encourage you to get our flagship resource, the MacArthur Study Bible. It features 25,000 detailed notes by John MacArthur. You'll find them on every page below the scripture. The notes help you understand the meaning of every verse and help you apply the truth to your life. It's an ideal gift to put into the hands of someone you've been discipling.
To order the MacArthur Study Bible available in the New King James, New American Standard, English Standard, and Legacy Standard translations. Call us at 855 GRACE or visit our website gty.org.
Now, for John MacArthur and our entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Be back for tomorrow's broadcast when John shows you how you can know if you're prepared for Christ's return. It's another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on grace to you.
