The Cradle that Rocked the World

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. In times of persecution, you don't need a sentimental Jesus who simply makes you feel warm at night. A Jesus who is one part genie, one part therapist, one part life coach, and the rest one blanket. You need, in the midst of tribulation, you need a Jesus who is sovereign over all the other powers that are at work in the world. Welcome back to Summit Life with pastor, author, and apologist, J.D.

Greer. I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. We trust you had a wonderful celebration yesterday with friends and family, but we also understand that for many people, Christmas is not really a season of hope and joy. Good cheer and glad tidings are actually a painful reminder of a broken relationship, a long sickness, or an empty place at the table. Well, today pastor J.D. draws from John's vision of Jesus in the book of Revelation to uncover for us why we need that same vision today. When God takes us through tribulation, remembering his love and power will help us stop shouting and start worshiping. As always, you can listen to any of our teaching at J.D.

Greer dot com. But for now, let's join pastor J.D. as he shares a message he titled The Cradle That Rocked the World. Get out your Bibles if you have them and open them to the book of Revelation. Most of you, I realize, are not that familiar with the book of Revelation.

To you, it probably seems like the Lord of the Rings installment here in the New Testament, and you are not quite sure exactly what to do with it. But I was very familiar growing up with the book of Revelation because the Christian tradition that I grew up in, that was the Christian school that I went to, was pretty obsessed with the book of Revelation because we were really obsessed with the end times. We had our charts and our timelines and with our depictions of the last days, our educated guesses about which political figures and which Hollywood stars were represented by the various beasts in Revelation. We had our annual prophecy conferences that was the highlight of our church calendar every year. We had our end time movies. We had our rapture board games.

None of that is a joke. I personally was particularly obsessed with the rapture, which is the belief that Jesus will come again in the clouds one day and believers will rise to meet him in the air, after which point Jesus will unleash basically hell on earth for the space of seven years called the tribulation. And so as a young boy, five, six, seven years old, if for any reason at all, I could not find my parents in the house or they did not respond to me calling out. I would run through the house in a panic, just sure that I would find my mother's clothes neatly in a little pile as she is ascended to be with Jesus, because that's always how it happened in the movies.

They always left their clothes behind, which I'm not sure why we thought everybody was going to fly through the atmosphere naked, but that's just how we saw it. So anyway, there was a there was a book. Oh, by the way, I had this recurring dream.

I kid you not. I had this recurring dream when I was about that age that the rapture happened. And this was like the worst nightmare I had as a kid. And the rapture happened. And, you know, Jesus there blows the trumpet and we all begin to ascend up to him.

And I get to the top of our house and then I fall back down to the floor, because that was kind of like just how good of a Christian I was to the ceiling and no farther. And so that that was the world that I grew up in. There was a book that came out when I was in high school that became an instant bestseller. It was called Eighty Eight Reasons Why Jesus is Coming Back in 1988. It was put out by a guy named Edgar Wisnett.

He was a NASA engineer. And so you had spaceships and scripture. That was a perfect recipe for capturing the attentions of superstitious Christians.

This thing sold two million copies in the space of just a few weeks. Now, of course, a lot of people pushed back on Edgar Wisnett and said, Hey, man, you know, the Bible clearly says that no man knows the day or the hour of Jesus's return. And Edgar Wisnett's response was, Hey, I don't know the day or the hour. I just know the week. It's going to be a September 11th through 13th. But the day or the hour, that's still a mystery. I went to a Christian school and September 11th through 13th was right at the beginning of soccer season. September 13th, if my memory serves me correctly, was a Tuesday. And so at the end of our soccer practice, our coach pulled us in about 15 minutes early and said, Hey, it's September 13th. That's the last day. So we're going to just sit here on the bleachers and we're going to wait and see if Jesus returns, he said.

And if he does, J.D., make sure that all the equipment gets back into the gym and locked up and make sure that's taken care of. Well, you should. That's not a joke. That is exactly what he said.

Suffice it. Suffice it to say that September 11th through 13th came and went. You would have thought, of course, that that would have been the end of Edgar Wisnett's teaching ministry. But the next year he came out with a book claiming he had just done the math wrong. It was entitled 89 Reasons Why Jesus is Coming Back in 1989.

I kid you not, I own that copy as well in my library. Now, I realize that you may not have had that experience. Exactly. Some of you did. But I also know for a fact that some of you still have some Y2K food tucked into a closet somewhere.

And I know a bunch of you own known every single volume of the Left Behind series. So I know that there are some of you that at least resonate a little bit with what I'm talking about. Personally, I am glad we are not obsessed like that at this church.

But I actually think we might fall into an opposite and maybe even more pernicious error. And that is most Christians in churches like ours rarely, if ever, think about the second coming of Christ at all. But I want you to understand this. The second coming of Christ is the most talked about doctrine in the Bible. The Bible talks about the first coming of Christ a measly 129 times. And we got a whole holiday for that one called Christmas. It's the biggest holiday of the year. Yet the New Testament alone talks about the second coming of Christ 329 times.

And we rarely even mention it. For every one prophecy in the Bible concerning Christ's first advent, there are eight that talk about his second. And really, to even understand his first advent, what we call Christmas, you've got to see it through the lens of his second, which is what the book of Revelation is all about. Now, the bad news is, disappointing news, is that we do not have time for a full series through Revelation. That is definitely on my future sermon wish list for another day. As we head into Christmas, I wanted to look at glimpses of Jesus that are given to us in the book of Revelation. Because you see, that is really what the book of Revelation is all about. Who Jesus is and who he is indicates about what the future holds for all of us.

Okay? In fact, look at the very first verse. You'll see this established in the first verse. John, the apostle John, apostle John wrote five books in the Bible. Revelation, the Gospel of John, and then 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, the three letters in the New Testament. So John tells you what he wants to do in this book in the very first verse. This is, he says, the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. Revelation means unveiling. This is the unveiling of Jesus Christ.

But an immediate question comes out of this verse. What is it that is being revealed? What is the revelation of? Is it a revelation of Jesus Christ as if Jesus himself is being revealed?

Or is it a revelation that Jesus Christ is doing of something else? You understand the question? If I told you this morning, we were going to have the presentation of Hank Murphy. Does that mean that we are going to present Hank Murphy to you? Or does that mean that Hank Murphy is going to stand up here and present his solar system he made that won the science fair? Because he's still in high school. So is that what I mean?

Right? So is it the revelation of Jesus or is it a revelation by Jesus of these future things? And the answer is yes, yes. The way it is written in Greek, scholars tell us, is deliberately ambiguous. Because the book of Revelation is both a revelation of Jesus, who he is, that's the most important part, and a revelation of what he sees about the future and what his role is in that future. You see, the main point of Revelation is not to give you a specific timeline of events or to help you figure out which beast is Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, although that sounds like a pretty vicious three-headed beast to me if you ask me. The point is to pull back the curtain of history so that you can see the powers at work behind the politics on earth. People read the book of Revelation with all the dragons and the beasts and they imagine that it is this delusional fantasy world. But what Revelation is doing is looking at the world through spiritual eyes to show you the powers that are at work behind the powers that you see. It is, in fact, one of the most accurate depictions of the world that you will ever encounter. It is the unveiling, it is the unmasking of what is really going on, where you see the real identities of what is happening out there.

It is the unveiling of both the powers at work in the world and the unveiling of Jesus' power above them all. As I was studying it this week, it reminded me of one of my favorite Nicholas Cage movies, Face Off. You're like, is that really your favorite? Yes, next to The Rock, Raging the Arizona, Family Man, Con Air, and both national treasures.

It is absolutely my favorite. Nicholas Cage, this is a little bit older movie. You may not be familiar with this one. Nicholas Cage works for the government, I think. He's some kind of weapons specialist. And so John Travolta, who's the bad guy, wants to get access to these weapons. So Nicholas Cage has an accident, goes into a coma, and so John Travolta gets the doctor to take off Nicholas Cage's face and put it onto him, right, because they're about the same size. And so Nicholas Cage wakes up from the coma without a face, which is always a bad day.

So he gets the doctor to put John Travolta's face on him. And so throughout the movie, they're going around, and everybody thinks that John Travolta is Nicholas Cage, and Nicholas Cage is John Travolta. And so the climax of the movie is when they are unveiled, unmasked, and you see which one is actually who.

You see who's the bad guy and who is the good guy. Well, what you got in Revelation is the unveiling, the face-off of the New Testament, where you see that the ones that look like they had power didn't actually have power, and the one you thought had no power actually had all the power. And so the book of Revelation is the face-off of the New Testament. And I realize that I might get my seminary degree revoked for that analogy. I'm fully aware of that, but I've always wanted to be able to say that Jesus was the truer and better Nicholas Cage, and so that's about as close as I can get. All right, you see, the church at this point in history, the church in Revelation is not really doing particularly well. I know you got these glorious images of the early church, and it was awesome, and they were just singing Kumbaya.

That is not true. The church is not doing well, especially John, the author of the book of Revelation. All of the other apostles have been martyred by this point, except for John, and John has been exiled on the isle of Patmos, which is the Roman equivalent of Alcatraz. John had been tortured.

Eusebius, the church historian of the third century, said that John had been tortured with one of the Roman's worst torture techniques. They put him into a scalding pot of oil and then slowly heated it up until it came to a boiling point, and right before it killed him, they pulled him out, and they would have done this repeatedly. His skin would have been marred. He wouldn't have even looked like himself.

He would have lived in constant pain. Christians were scared all over the empire because Nero had made Christians a scapegoat for a number of Rome's calamities, and then he'd use that as a pretext for hunting them down and killing them. And then one of Nero's successors, Emperor Domitian, was preparing to unleash, John knew, a far worse persecution against Christians unless they would worship Caesar as Lord, which of course they could not do. And so John, from his remote isle in Patmos, John can see these storm clouds of tribulation beginning to build up on the horizon.

This was not a great day to be a Christian. And so there on this lonely, forsaken isle of Patmos, Jesus appears to John in his prison cell, and Jesus gives to John a revelation of who he is and what he is doing in all of this. out of the generosity of God's people. When you give to Summit Life, you're making sure that cost doesn't get in the way for anyone who wants to learn and grow in their faith through this teaching. Your generous gift, especially this time of year, helps people dive into the message of the gospel. So we would love for you to consider joining with us today in that mission.

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The number is 866-335-5220. Or you can always visit us online at JDGrier.com. Now let's get back to our teaching on Summit Life. Once again, here's Pastor JD. Now I realized this weekend that most of us are not facing the same kinds of persecution or any of the kinds of persecution that John and those early Christians were facing. It is not illegal where we live to follow Jesus. Now of course, I should hasten to add, many of our missionaries are in places where it is illegal to be a Christian. But for most of us, it is not illegal where we live to confess and to follow Jesus.

But regardless, we wrestle with many of the same questions that John and those early Christians had. Because many of you face powers at work right now, powers in your life that you believe vastly overwhelm your own. And when you look into the future of your life, you can see storm clouds beginning to rise on the horizon. Or maybe you're in one now and you don't see any way out of it. That might come in the form of a chronic illness. Maybe something that you've prayed for healing for. And you can't understand why Jesus hasn't given it to you.

And it doesn't look like it's going anywhere. Or maybe you're beginning to walk through divorce. Or maybe you just concluded a divorce. Or maybe it comes in the form of an addiction that you can't shake.

Maybe it's a problem with one of your kids. Or maybe it's just a dark cloud of anxiety or depression that just hovers over your life and seems to follow you wherever you go. And now along comes Christmas, this season, which is supposedly all about happiness and good cheer. But truth be told, you can't stand this season anymore.

Because all it does is remind you of the empty place at your table that's not supposed to be empty. Maybe you came into this place this weekend and you're just ready to give up. In fact, if you were honest, you're not even sure why you're here. You certainly did not come in this weekend looking for some kind of hope.

You're long past good cheer and long past looking for some kind of hope. I need you to understand that as strange as it sounds, John wrote the book of Revelation for you. He was thinking about you when he wrote this book.

You know how I know that? Revelation 1, 9, here's what John said. I, John, your brother and companion, end suffering.

I'm writing this for those of you who, like me, are in the midst of pain and you are suffering. Which means if your life is going hunky-dory, everything's fine, you got no problems, there's not much in Revelation that's gonna help you. But if you this morning are in pain or you are looking into your future and what you see are the dark clouds of tribulation and it looks like they're in front of you, John's got something to say to you.

Here's what it is, verse 10. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet. And I turned to see the voice that was speaking to me. And on turning I saw seven golden lampstands. Those you're gonna find out represent the churches, the seven churches that depict all churches in the first century there in Revelation. And in the midst of the lampstands, one like the son of man, Jesus, clothed with a long robe with a golden sash around his chest. Those are images that conjure up the high priest of the Old Testament. What John is saying is that Jesus is the ultimate high priest. He's what everything in the Bible was pointing to.

He's our representative before God. Verse 14, the hairs of his head were white, like white wool, like snow. His eyes were like a flame of fire. His feet were like burnished bronze refined in a furnace.

His voice was like the roar of many waters. Verse 16, in his right hand he held seven stars. You're gonna find out those represent the leaders of those seven churches and Jesus holding them is showing his presence with the church, his control over it. From his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword and his face was like the sun shining in full strength. We go from symbols that depict the high priest of the Old Testament to these images of ultimate power and control. You see white hair in those days symbolize wisdom. So saying that Jesus has brilliant white hair like snow means that he is wiser than the wise. Having eyes of fire means that his insight penetrates more deeply than the sharpest laser. Having a face that's brighter than the brightest sun or a voice that is louder than the loudest ocean, which, you know, communicates not just decibel level but volume and intensity and fullness is saying that this is a person whose power just goes beyond anything John can imagine.

His words are like a sword, which means they possess the ability to pierce, to separate truth from fiction, to separate into parts and to destroy the seven stars he holds. I told you in chapter two you'll see these are the leaders of the seven churches, which symbolizes Jesus being in the midst of all the turmoil and holding securely the church in his hands in this hour of tribulation. John says, verse 17, when I saw him, I felt his feet as though I were dead. Now I want you to keep in mind that this is the first time John has seen Jesus since the ascension. And if you know much about the New Testament, you might know that Jesus and John had been BFFs on earth. Jesus loved all the apostles, of course, but he had three that were particularly close to him, Peter, James, and John. And you can make a very compelling argument that of the three of those, Peter, James, and John, John was the closest to Jesus.

He got a couple of pieces of evidence here. The first one is that whenever John refers to himself in the Gospel of John, one of the other books he wrote, he never refers to himself by name. He always refers to himself as the disciple whom Jesus loved, which I always thought took a lot of nerve to actually put into print.

Imagine that as his email signature in the first day. He's like, hey, Jesus likes you guys too, but I'm his favorite, I'm his favorite. People are like, well, what does that mean?

Why does it, let me give you serious for a minute what it actually means. The way it's written in Greek is it's, the disciple that Jesus kept on loving. And it's a reference to the statement John made in the Gospel of John, that Jesus loved his disciples until the end. And what John is saying is, even after I failed him over and over and over and over again, even after I walked away from him, he kept on loving me.

And I am just amazed by that. And so it's a statement about Jesus's grace, not about his being in the favorite position, but that doesn't change the fact that John and Jesus were super close, maybe even more close than the other disciples, because here's the other piece of evidence, John 13. At the last supper, John says that he reached back and reclined his head and leaned it on Jesus's chest. Now y'all, I got some guy friends that I feel pretty close to, okay? But ain't no one of them close enough that they would lean their head back on my chest during dinner. If so, that is a fundamental redefinition of the relationship. There is one man, one young man who would do that. And if he did that, I wouldn't think twice about it and neither would he, and that man is my son. That's the kind of relationship that John felt with Jesus. It was more than just friend. It was like a child in some ways with his very protective and loving father. Suffice it to say, Jesus and John were close. And y'all, this is the first time that they have seen each other in 60 years.

What's that reunion look like? He falls at Jesus's feet as though he had died. And that's not even intended y'all to be a figure of speech.

He literally thought he was going to die. You know, I grew up with this image of Jesus that came from these pictures that we had up in our Sunday school classroom or our Christian school classroom. Back in those days when I was a kid, there was only like two or three of these pictures. Like, I think everybody had the same one.

You know the one I'm talking about, right? The picture of Jesus, looks like an Olin Mills picture. And it's Jesus with this perfect kind of olive skin. And he's got this beautiful robe on and not a blemish on his face anywhere.

Nice full lips. I just grew up with this image of Jesus is this like sad jobless guy who wandered around Israel and his flip-flops, you know, talking about his feelings all the time. Well, y'all, first of all, I don't know where we get that image from, come from anyway, because Jesus was a carpenter, a table maker, which means as far as guys go, he would have been rugged.

He probably would have been pretty buff, but that is definitely not the image that we're getting of Jesus here in the book of Revelation. I mean, once you got a guy, just take it at face value, you got a guy with wild hair. He's got a crazy look in his eye. Just take it at face value.

That's not the kind of guy you'd ever want to run into in a back alley. And then when you understand the symbolism, you realize all this is pointing to somebody so powerful that John in his presence feels like he's gonna die. Now, is this a different Jesus than the one John had known?

The one he leaned his head back on during dinner? No, no, it's just that when Jesus was on earth and even now, even now in our day, part of Jesus is veiled. Part of Jesus is invisible to the naked eye. Truth be told, Jesus has always had the power that you see demonstrated in Revelation 1. Always had it. It's just that during his ministry on earth and during our day and in John's day, part of that power had been veiled.

Every once in a while, it breaks out and you see it. So the question is, why is Jesus appearing this way now to John? Why not appear to him as the way John knew him on earth?

Why not come up and give him this embrace and this tender hug and let him leave his head back on his chest and dinner? Listen, it's because Jesus' plan right now is not to deliver his church from persecution and pain. Jesus is not showing up to John with the news, hey, John, don't worry. Don't worry, man, it gets better. It's not going to get better.

At least not in the short run. So instead, Jesus shows John his power, his majesty, and his love, so that John can hope in that power, majesty, and love in the midst of this kind of tribulation. You see, in times of persecution, you don't need a sentimental Jesus who simply makes you feel warm at night. A Jesus who is one part genie, one part therapist, one part life coach, and the rest warm blanket. You need, in the midst of tribulation, you need a Jesus who is sovereign over all the earth.

All the other powers that are at work in the world. This is the first message in a brand new Christmas series called Revelation of Jesus. Remember, if you missed any of Pastor JD's teaching, you can watch the video, download the audio files, and even find transcripts free of charge at jdgrier.com.

So JD, it's back again. It's time for our annual day planner. This is a staple resource so many of our listeners have come to rely on. Yeah, Molly, you know, when we first started this a few years ago, I'm not even sure exactly how many. We knew people would like it, but we didn't realize how much it would catch on.

It's one of the most popular resources that we provide each year. I think, you know, there's nothing magical about the new year. It's, you know, one sense like every other day, but it just gives you a natural place to pause for reflection. And so this is a tool that allows us to take stock of our life, to, you know, Psalm 90 verse 12, to consider our days, consider what's going on and what we're spending our time on.

We all know the experience of coming into the new year with a lot of goals and a lot of intentions and, you know, having it completely wash up by week three of January. This will help you turn those intentions into reality. It's going to be your trusted companion in this. We're going to throw in a one-year Bible reading plan to sweeten the deal on it.

Don't miss out on this. Let's go into this year together, partnering together to reach the people that God has put in our lives to reach. As we're coming to the end of 2023, your gift today is even more important. We're getting ready to close the books on yet another year and we need your help to finish well.

We know God will provide, but we'd love for you to be the one He uses to do that. So will you join with us today? Ask for a copy of the 2024 Summit Life Day Planner when you give a generous year-end gift today by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or request the planner when you give online at jdgrier.com. I'm Molly Vitovich. Be sure to join us Wednesday as we continue this unconventional Christmas study in Revelation here on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.