The Glorious Return of Jesus Christ, Part 1 B

Heaven opens, on the edge of heaven is Jesus Christ seated on a white horse, bursting out of heaven, collides with the earth and merely with the sword which comes out of His mouth, which is nothing more than His Word. He devastates.

He is able to destroy with His mouth in the same way that He could create with His mouth. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm your host, Phil Johnson. The great Puritan Matthew Henry said we'd no doubt be alarmed if we knew we had only a month to live, and yet we're careless even though no one knows if he'll live even another day. Of course, that goes for you and me as well. We don't know how long we have or when Christ will return, and so that calls for a different approach to day-to-day life, a perspective that the rest of the world doesn't embrace. You might call it expectant living. Today on Grace to You, John MacArthur is going to show you why living in expectancy of our Lord's return is crucial to living the life God desires. It's part of John's current study titled When Jesus Comes.

So now follow along with John MacArthur as the lesson begins. We're going to be looking at Revelation chapter 19, verses 11 to 16. So often I am asked the question, I guess people know that I'm a preacher, a pastor, one who studies Scripture and teaches the Bible, and they often will say to me, will things in our troubled world ever get any better? Is it just going to continue to get worse and worse, or will there be an end to all the war, to the hostility and the inequity and the crime and the chaos? And I always answer the question by saying, it's going to get better.

It's going to be better. There's no question about it. I can give a resounding yes to will the world get better. But that yes is directly associated with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. That and that alone is what is going to remedy the problems of our world. That and that alone is what is going to bring peace instead of war, justice instead of inequity, righteousness instead of wickedness. Jesus Christ will come and He will rule this world someday.

He will return to be the King and to establish His kingdom. This particular passage prophesies that greatest of all moments in human history and in the saga of redemption. Now as the scene opens in verse 11, you might want to look at it. We are taken to heaven and we see heaven opened.

And right on the edge, a white horse and He who sat upon it called Faithful and True and in righteousness He judges and makes or wages war. What is going to happen here is going to happen very fast. Speedily and triumphantly the gates of heaven are going to burst open and the Lord is going to appear in glory with angelic and saintly hosts. There's going to be a speedy triumph. There's going to be a catastrophic and sudden collision as He comes out of heaven and hits the earth. And I just want to emphasize the suddenness of this text. Heaven opens, He's there and He comes. And as soon as He comes, there is a holocaust that is described in verse 17 as the great supper of God and the birds of the heavens are called to eat the flesh of the corpses.

They're going to be covering that part of the world. Sudden capturing of the beast and the kings of the earth, the false prophet, even Satan himself and all of them cast into the lake of fire which burns with brimstone and the slaughter of any who remain in verse 21. And this whole thing is very sudden and very fast.

And that's important to point out. It's not a prolonged engagement. It's not a siege. It is an instantaneous battle that is fought really with one weapon. And that one weapon is described in verse 15 as a sword coming out of the mouth of Christ and with it He smites the nations. And immediately then He establishes His rule and His rule is that with a rod of iron. Now I want to emphasize the suddenness of this for a very important reason because I want you to understand. Biblical history does not tell us that there is a quiet sort of coming of the kingdom, that there is a sort of merging of this age into the next age, that maybe we could even be in the kingdom and we just really can't perceive it.

We're just sort of sliding into it and there's a bit of a transition period. You say, who would believe that? Many do. They are called post-millennialists. They believe that things will get better and better and there will be sort of a spiritual movement and the church somehow will capture some of the human institutions and a gradual merging into the setting up of the kingdom.

That is what post-millennialism is, millennium being the thousand-year kingdom. They also could be classified under the term reconstructionists. Sometimes you'll read about reconstructionists. Those are basically post-millennialists who believe that we as a church will reconstruct society around a framework of spiritual reality and therefore usher in the kingdom of Christ. Some of them are called theonomists who believe that somehow we can merge the economics of our time, the economy of our time, the social structure of our time with a theological reality and create a theonomic kind of kingdom. Some of them are called kingdom theologians and they believe that somehow the church is going to gain great miracle power and by this great power we're going to overcome demons and we're going to conquer the forces of darkness and we're going to wrest them from the powers of Satan and therefore we're going to establish the kingdom.

And this will be some kind of process. It gets wrapped up in the spiritual warfare kind of mentality and praying against great cities and demons supposedly that hold cities captive and we want to wrest these human things away from the powers of darkness or away from the social architects of our time and create by the power of the church either express supernaturally against demonic forces or naturally against political and social forces and therefore gain the kingdom, establish the kingdom and offer it to Christ. That is utterly in my judgment foreign to Scripture, the establishing of the kingdom in which Christ rules with a rod of iron is a sudden, immediate cataclysmic event and cannot be described in any other way in Scripture. Heaven opens. On the edge of heaven is Jesus Christ seated on a white horse, bursting out of heaven, collides with the earth and merely with the sword which comes out of His mouth which is nothing more than His Word. He devastates.

He is able to destroy with His mouth in the same way that He could create with His mouth. Mark it then, history does not quietly and gradually merge into the kingdom of Christ. It comes with a fury and a viciousness and a cataclysmic divine intervention from heaven that is sudden. The end will come violently in fiery judgment. And furthermore, the end will not come because things get better, the end will come because things get worse. The church will never conquer the kingdoms of this world. The church will never take over the social institutions of this age. There are not going to be better and better days ahead because of Christian influence in the world, nor will we by some exercise of imaginary spiritual power conquer the kingdom of darkness and bring the kingdom.

We will not do that. The world is not going to get better, it's going to get worse. And it's clear in the book of Revelation that it's getting worse and worse and worse and worse until the King intervenes. The last blow to a world already engulfed, neck deep in blood because of the slaughter and the murder and the bloodshed and the violence that's already gone on is the holocaust of Armageddon which is followed by the establishment of the kingdom by the Lord Himself.

He alone can establish the kingdom. That's why we say we are pre-millennialists. We believe Christ comes at the beginning of the millennium and sets it up, not at the end of it after we've set it up. That's what post-millennialism believes. And then there are the a-millennialists who don't believe there is any kingdom. And then there are the pan-millennialists who believe it will all pan out somehow in the end. But anybody who takes a chronological and literal course in the book of Revelation is going to wind up with a pre-millennial coming of Christ in which He returns and sets up the millennial kingdom in which He rules for a thousand years.

Nothing else makes any sense in the chronology of the book of Revelation. Now the prophets tell us that when Christ comes, the battle will rage in Megiddo, in the plain of Megiddo. Also that it will range down to Edom, through Jerusalem, the Valley of Jehoshaphat. But Megiddo is the place which seems to be the greatest battlefield, the greatest place of bloodshed. And those of us who have been to that place are struck by the awesome capability of that particular piece of real estate to be a battleground.

In fact, Napoleon said it is the greatest battleground on the face of the earth, at least that he had ever seen. There Barak and Deborah fought against Sisera, there Gideon fought the Midianites, there Saul was slain by the Philistines, there Pharaoh Neko slew good King Josiah, and so it goes, it's in that place that much blood has been shed. Through the years, every battle fought there, whether by the Druze or the Turks or the armies of Napoleon, all of those battles combined were only a harbinger of the great day of the battle of God Almighty. So man's day is going to end and God's day is going to begin. The glorious return of our Lord Jesus Christ whose marks and description here identify Him as the same Jesus who went into heaven from the Mount of Olives is going to come. And I have to believe that it's going to come sooner than any of us really think. Remember now, Christ came the first time He was despised and rejected, spit on, mocked and ridiculed.

When He comes a second time, it's going to be just the opposite...just the opposite. Now the imagery of this section, and I don't want to hurry through it, the imagery of this section is really marvelous. It pictures Christ as a warrior King and He's coming back in that sort of motif or that sort of mode. And it really is very similar to the eleventh chapter of Isaiah. In fact, you might even think that the writer John who's seeing this great vision was familiar with the book of Isaiah and would have made in his own mind a parallel. For in Isaiah we read in chapter 11, a shoot will spring from the stem of Jesse, a branch from his roots will bear fruit. And, of course, the line of Jesse was David and then the son of David, the Messiah, and so he came from the line of Jesse. And this one who will come out of the stem of Jesse, the Spirit of the Lord will rest on him.

The Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and strength, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And he will delight in the fear of the Lord and he will not judge by what his eyes see, nor make a decision by what his ears hear. But with righteousness he will judge the poor and decide with fairness for the afflicted of the earth. And he will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth. And with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked and righteousness will be the belt about his loins and faithfulness the belt about his waist.

That's very similar to the imagery. He is called faithful and true in Revelation. Here he is called the faithful one, or having faithfulness, the belt of his waist. His righteousness is celebrated in Revelation 19 and also here. He smites the earth with his mouth here in Isaiah 11 as well as in Revelation chapter 19. He establishes his rule here as he does in Revelation 19. So that same picture of the coming king, the warrior king, the conquering king in Revelation 19 is certainly very close to the imagery of Isaiah 11. And Isaiah 11 also, the very next verse which I didn't read, verse 6, describes the kingdom that he sets up. The wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard lie down with the kid, the goat, the calf, the young lion, the fatling together, a little boy will lead them.

In other words, no more hostility in the animal kingdom. It talks about the cow and the bear grazing together, their young lying down together, the lion eating straw like an ox, no longer a predator, the nursing child playing in the hole of the cobra, the weaned child puts his hand on a viper's den. They will not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

And he goes on to describe more about it. So it is definitely a kingdom picture in Isaiah 11 and the coming of the king even depicted there in very similar terms to Revelation 19. Now go to Isaiah chapter 63 for a moment and you'll see another very similar set of pictures.

I'm just pointing out that this is imagery which is not brand new. Who is this who comes from Edom? And this tells us, of course, that the battle stretches from Megiddo in the north to Edom in the south and the east. Who is this who comes with garments of glowing colors from Bozrah? Literally crimson red garments. Who is this coming who is majestic in his apparel, marching in the greatness of his strength? It is I who speak in righteousness mighty to save.

Why is your apparel red and your garments like the one who treads in the wine press? I have trodden the wine trough alone and from the peoples there was no man with me. I also trod them in mine anger and trampled them in my wrath and their life blood is sprinkled on my garments and I stained all my raiment for the day of vengeance was in my heart and my year of redemption has come and I looked and there was no one to help and I was astonished there was no one to uphold. So my own arm brought salvation to me, my wrath upheld me and I trod down the peoples in my anger and made them drunk with my wrath and I poured out their life blood on the earth.

And there is the Messiah answering the questions. Who is this one who comes to shed blood? And that bloodshed imagery of Isaiah 63, go back to Revelation 19, appears here as well. Verse 13, He is clothed with a robe dipped in blood and He is called by name the Word of God.

He is a bloody conqueror, blood-spattered garments characterize Him. This great event is not only previewed in Isaiah 11 and in Isaiah chapter 63, but it is also previewed in Matthew chapter 24. You remember that in Matthew chapter 24 in that Olivet Discourse, Jesus made a very important statement in verse 29, Matthew 24, immediately after the tribulation of those days, that seven-year period, the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.

The whole universe goes dark and then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory and He will send forth His angels with a great trumpet and they will gather together His elect from the four winds from one end of the sky to the other. There, too, is a picture of the coming King, the event of Revelation 19. Over in chapter 25, as Jesus continues this sermon on His second coming in verse 31, when the Son of Man comes in His glory and all the angels with Him, He will sit on His glorious throne. So the Old Testament prophets anticipated it and certainly the Lord Jesus Christ anticipated it. Earlier in the book of Revelation, the apostle John saw imagery related to the coming of Christ. Remember chapter 14, verse 14, I looked and behold a white cloud and sitting on the cloud was one like a Son of Man having a golden crown on His head and a sharp sickle in His hand. And another angel came out of the temple crying with a loud voice to Him who sat on the cloud, put in your sickle and reap because the hour to reap has come because the harvest of the earth is ripe. We find even in verse 20, the wine press was trodden outside the city and blood came out from the wine press up to the horses' bridles for a distance of 200 miles. That's the distance from Megiddo all the way to the south through Jerusalem and down to the southern parts of what would be near Edom.

So, plenty of previews. Chapter 16, verse 14, we find there the battle of the war of the great day of God in verse 14 of chapter 16, and then in verse 16 there gathered to the place called Har-Magedon. Well, all of that sets us up to grasp the return of Christ. And by the way, we now get very chronological in the book of Revelation. He returns in chapter 19.

He sets up His kingdom. In chapter 20 we learn about the kingdom and then the kingdom ends and enters into the eternal state in chapters 21 and 22. So the rest that is to come is all wonderful, glorious fulfillment of the hope and anticipation of all the believers of all time. We who know and love the Lord Jesus Christ are going to be raptured, right? We're going to be at the Second Coming, but we're not going to be here waiting for it, we're going to be coming with Him.

That even makes it more interesting. I want to know what I'm going to be doing, what I'm going to be involved in. Am I going to be part of the judgment? Am I going to have a sword? Am I going to get in on the action? Or am I not? Well, I'm going to answer that question.

What is going to be my role? And wonderful of all wonderful things is the fact that Jesus Christ is finally going to be exalted. All the defamation, all the slander, all the dishonor that's been against His name is going to be over forever. And He will be vindicated and glorified. That and that alone makes it the most precious event of all events.

Don't miss it. Let's bow in prayer. Father, as we think about this tremendous reality that Jesus is coming, we are so grateful to know this. Else we would be in such despair, such confusion about what's going on in the world. It doesn't get better.

It's just the same, only worse. And where would we hope and where would we look for a gleam of light if we didn't have the confidence that Jesus was coming, that He was going to come and make the world the paradise that You intended it to be, but only for those who love His appearing, who name His name? And we would say with the apostle John, even so come, Lord Jesus, the sooner the better.

Who needs any more of this? The only reason we're reluctant to say come now is that we would wish that more could come to faith in Christ. We're not eager for the damnation of the lost, nor are you. And that's why during those final days of the Tribulation, the gospel will be preached more far and wide than ever in history. And men will have a greater opportunity to hear and believe than they've ever had because you're not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.

You find no pleasure in the death of the wicked. But, Lord, we want the gospel preached. We want people to believe, but at the same time we want Christ to come and be exalted and receive the honor that He is due and we want to be a part of the kingdom, the glorious kingdom over which He reigns.

We can only wish that the thing we read about here in Revelation 19, that heaven was opened, was in fact a reality, that heaven was opened and Jesus was coming soon. Thank you for the promise that we are not set for wrath, but before that unfolding wrath comes, you're going to take us to be with yourself and that we'll return with you in the glory of your coming. Give us a love for your appearing that affects our life, the way we live, the way we think, the way we invest our time and money. Help us to live in the light of eternity and not the passing world. Help us to lay up our treasure in heaven where moth and rust do not corrupt and thieves can't steal. Help us to take that which is carnal and purchase that which is eternal. Help us to set our affections on things above and not on things on the earth, to remember that we are not citizens of this world, but our citizenship is in heaven from which we wait for the Lord who will come to change us into His own image. Give us a love for the appearing of Christ that affects us, knowing these things shall come to pass. May we remember, as Peter did, that we are to be blameless and holy in our living, growing in grace and in the knowledge of Christ. Help us to live in the light of our returning King and until then to be faithful, to serve Him and to call many to righteousness, that they might glorify Him with us. In whose name we pray.

Amen. You're listening to John MacArthur as he continues his current study titled, When Jesus Comes. Along with being the Bible teacher here on Grace to You, John is a pastor, author and chancellor of the Master's University and Seminary. This study is focusing on Christ's return, His second coming, an event that's so pivotal it can seem like it's the focus of the entire book of Revelation. But John, I know you'd say there's a lot more going on in this last book of the Bible. Yeah, we're looking down a little bit at the details in Revelation 19 and 20, but I think it would be helpful to people if we could sort of pull up and instead of kind of get the worm's eye view as we move along, verse by verse, word by word in that section of Revelation, pull back, pull up and get the bird's eye view and look at the whole book of Revelation.

It can be grasped and understood. It was a number of years ago now that I felt that the congregation of Grace Community Church could benefit by getting an overview of Revelation. So I did what I called a jet tour through Revelation. And in one message, one Sunday night for an hour and a half at least, I went from the beginning to the end of Revelation and showed how it flows, how cohesive it is, how clear it is.

What a together revelation it is. That is now available in a booklet called A Jet Tour Through Revelation. This is one of the longest messages I've ever preached. One sermon, the whole book of Revelation, we put it into a booklet form. This one book will give you the sense and the flow of the book of Revelation.

It's a high-altitude, panoramic view of the whole book. What a tremendous ministry this has had through the years through our ministry. We'd love to get one to you. Here's the good news. It's free.

That's right. We'll send you free of charge a jet tour through the whole book of Revelation. All you have to do is contact us. Tell us you want a free copy of A Jet Tour Through Revelation. We'll get it out to you as quickly as we can.

Yes, we will. And friend, there is no need to feel intimidated by the book of Revelation. John's booklet will show you what the last book of the Bible is all about. To get your free copy of this booklet, A Jet Tour Through Revelation, contact us today. Call us at 800-55-GRACE or make your request at our website, gty.org. If you have questions about the tribulation, the antichrist, or if you just want to make sure you're ready for Christ's second coming, this booklet can give you the biblical answers you're looking for.

The title again, A Jet Tour Through Revelation. We'll send it to you for free. Call for your copy today, 800-55-GRACE or go to gty.org.

That's our website, gty.org. When you visit there, you'll find numerous ways to take in John MacArthur's verse-by-verse teaching. You can listen to radio broadcasts you may have missed. You can watch Grace To You television. You can search John's entire sermon archive by date, by book of the Bible, or by topic. That's 3,500 sermons and all of them are free to download. You can get the audio or transcript format. And if you're not sure what to listen to first, a great option is Grace Stream. That's a nonstop broadcast of John MacArthur's teaching through the New Testament. That web address again, gty.org. Now for John and the staff, thanks for being here today and come back tomorrow when John continues his series, When Jesus Comes, with another half hour of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.