Meet Revelation #1

Welcome to the Truth Pulpit with Don Green, Founding Pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Hello, I'm Bill Wright. Thanks for joining us as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.

Don begins a new message today, so without further delay, let's join him right now in the Truth Pulpit. Well-adjusted people understand that there is a process involved to get to know someone new, and for most of us we understand that intuitively and operate accordingly, but I want to just kind of highlight it because I think it will help us approach our text here this morning. When you first meet someone, you basically ask questions of a most fundamental, simple sort to gain a basic familiarity with the person in front of you that you've just met. What's your name? What do you do for a living? Where do you live?

Do you have any family? These things hardly need to be highlighted, don't they? This is just what you do when you meet someone new and are trying to get acquainted. You learn basic things before you go into more personal aspects later in the relationship. No one in their right mind starts a relationship with questions like, how much money do you have in the bank? You really should wear different clothes.

That outfit makes you look fat. And again, just meeting somebody for the first time. How was your relationship with your dad? These are just things that when you're first getting to know someone, you just don't jump into those kinds of questions or themes. You have to know basics before things can become more personal.

Part of the aspect of that, I guess, is that there's an element of personal respect that you show to someone by respecting boundaries and responding as someone either opens up or says, that's enough for me for now. In a similar way, we have to approach the Bible in a like manner like that. When you come to study a new book of the Bible, as we're doing in the book of Revelation here in our life of our church, you need to know some basics about the Bible book before you begin to get into the meatier details of its message, before you address interpretive difficulties. And in keeping with what I said about meeting someone new, think about the book of Revelation.

And I'm more committed to what I'm saying here now than what I was even a month ago in light of some of the interactions I've had, not just here at church, but in other places. As you begin the book of Revelation, you do not start with the things that you've heard over time and that are the most controversial and the things that are of a particular interest to yourself, perhaps. And so when you begin the book of Revelation, not just teaching from the pulpit, I'm speaking more broadly, when you as a man or woman come to the book of Revelation to begin a serious study of it, you should not say, I've got questions I want answered. I want to know about the mark of the beast. I want to know about the final conflict of Armageddon without addressing more fundamental matters. You don't jump in immediately with your preconceived agenda and say the first thing that I want to know, the first thing that we must address is what is the timing of the rapture, or let's talk about different millennial views, or let's talk about how other parts of the Bible relate to the book of Revelation.

That's a serious mistake. It betrays a lack of respect for the book of the Bible, even if people don't see it that way right away, because it's bringing your agenda to the book rather than coming to this book for what it is, the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. We're coming to a holy book of the inerrant inspired word of God that speaks of profound things about the purpose of God, and so you have to come to Revelation in my judgment and in my understanding in a much slower way, you might say, a much more reverential way, kind of checking your biases at the door and saying rather than me telling this book what it must tell me, come to the book and say, what does this book have to say? Let me let the book of Revelation speak first, in other words, rather than coming and saying I must have answers to my questions, which in matters of prophecy and matters of revelation is just a tremendously difficult bias to overcome if you're going to teach people about it. You cannot rightly or intelligently discuss those matters that I alluded to without a prior and proper context.

You need to ask some basic questions to get to know the book generally before you are in a position to go and answer questions like that specifically. And so with that in mind, today we're going to meet Revelation. We're going to meet Revelation as if we were meeting a fellow human being for the first time, just in a loose analogy there.

We're going to show respect for God's Word by letting it speak first and getting to know it in the most general way before we enter into the exposition in weeks and even months to come. And I want to say this to put your mind at ease. This is, in my opinion, this is an easy listening message.

There's such a thing as easy listening music, I guess, but there's just that kind of music that doesn't demand much upon your mind and your energy. You can just kind of take it in and enjoy it at a level. This is an easy listening message, and you'll see what I mean by that as we go along. Now, last Sunday, we started our exposition of Revelation, and we read through, last Sunday, we read through the entire book, our entire service was devoted to reading the text of Revelation from start to finish.

You might think about that in terms of the analogy that I used to open it up. We came to Revelation, we said, what's your name? We let Revelation identify itself in its full context, and we just let Revelation speak to us. And we read it that way, and I'm grateful for the expressions of appreciation that I received from some of you about that aspect of the way that we began. Now, last Tuesday, there was an equally important message that I hope that you were able to hear if you were not able to be with us. One of the things about our pulpit ministry is kind of hard to just kind of drop in and out and come and go.

Everything kind of fits together like a seamless garment, and if you rip out one part and just see that one part, then you're kind of left with a hole in a garment that leaves it a little bit unseemly and not capable of being worn. This past Tuesday was a very important message that we titled Revelation and Personal Holiness. And if you haven't heard that message yet, I really encourage you to go back and listen to it. That was the starting point, because we addressed the spiritual traits that someone needs to understand the book of Revelation. This book is not open for just anybody to come and to understand. It's not a book like that.

In fact, the Bible is not like that. The Bible says in 1 Corinthians chapter 2 that the natural man, the unsaved man, the unconverted man cannot understand the things of God. There is a spiritual component.

A man must be born again if he's going to understand the Bible. And so there's this sense of which we have to think about going into someone's home. You need to know, well, should I take my shoes off here?

If I'm not taking off my shoes, do I have any mud on my shoes before I enter into the home that they've welcomed me into? Well, in a like manner, we have to come to the book of Revelation and ask ourselves and check our hearts about where we're at spiritually. And so we saw from the text of Revelation itself that there are certain godly traits that are necessary before anyone can rightly understand the book of Revelation. Before you get to questions about the rapture or the millennium or Daniel or Ezekiel or the mark of the beast, I keep going back to that one.

That's just a reference for other like questions about details. There must be godly traits in our heart as we approach this book. This is a holy book.

This is not for carnal hands to come and mangle and handle roughly in pursuit of their own agenda because they want to have an argument online with somebody who has a different millennial view or whatever. No, the book of Revelation is hidden from people that use it like that and want to do it like that. So what we said on Tuesday was this, is that to come to the book of Revelation, there must be an aspect of a pursuit of biblical holiness in your life. Revelation teaches us about the glory of Christ. It teaches us to fear God. It teaches us to worship God. It teaches us about the essential nature of true repentance and that those who would know Revelation, who would know the word of Christ given to us in the book of Revelation, must manifest, must come with a sincere, profound, unfeigned spirit of repentance. And you can see that for yourself.

Go home this afternoon if you have any questions about what I just said. Go home and simply take 10 minutes to read Revelation chapter 2 and Revelation chapter 3 and notice how many times the Lord Jesus Christ, when he is addressing the seven churches to whom at one level this book is written to, how many times he tells those seven churches to repent, how he confronts them in their doctrinal error, how he confronts them in their immorality, how he confronts them in their cold, lukewarm spirit, and says, my message to you is to repent. Five of the seven churches are specifically rebuked by Christ and told to repent before they move on in the development of their congregational life, you could say. The glory of Christ, the fear of God, the worship of God, true repentance. Now, beloved, what are churches except a collection of individual people at one level?

In other words, the people in those churches were individually and specifically addressed by Christ and said, you need to repent here, here, and here if you're going to be my disciple. You need to repent here, here, and here if you're going to truly enter into the kingdom. And so as we come in the 21st century to read this book, beloved, nothing's changed.

Nothing's changed in that regard. The Lord Jesus Christ comes through his word here in Revelation and addresses your life. It addresses your spiritual mediocrity, perhaps, for some of you. It addresses your sexual immorality for some of you and says, if you have any interest in this book, you have to repent of these things.

And it addresses you in turn and asks you questions. Do you fear God? Do you worship God? Is that what motivates you to come to Revelation?

Or are you just here out of an idle sense of curiosity that you want to hear the latest take on eschatological matters and just kind of add that to your prophetic repertoire in matters? Look, I'm speaking sympathetically. I'm speaking to help you. It's just so important to do that. God, as my witness, that's always the spirit with which I speak to you, beloved, to help you to honor the word of God and to not be content with going through motions or letting people dwell in self-deception.

Sometimes a pastor needs to speak directly and candidly in order to help people. You know, I have no interest. I have no interest in being the next agitator for a particular millennial view. I don't.

That's not why we're doing this. And I was mindful as I was moving and preparing the study here that there needed to be a spiritual preparation in our church and for whatever audience we have outside of the church, there needed to be a spiritual preparation for people to enter into the right spirit of the study of Revelation. And I call you to that. Christ calls you to that. And again, again, if you have any question about that whatsoever, just read chapters 1, 2, and 3.

It'll take you 15 minutes at the most. Read chapters 1, 2, and 3 and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. An exalted view of Christ, a commendation of Christ for the faithful, and a rebuke and a call to repentance for the unfaithful. And unless we're willing, beloved, unless we're willing to enter into the book of Revelation on its terms, which are the terms of Christ itself, we're wasting our time. And I was mindful when I announced the study of Revelation that it might stir up some interest because Revelation is a book that people tend to take a particular interest in. And all I'm doing here is saying, check your shoes at the door. Before you walk into the study of Revelation, look and see if there's any mud on your shoes. Don't track across the living room carpet of the Word of God with your muddy, unrepentant, spiritual shoes.

Check your heart and check it in terms of whether your affections are for the glory of Christ, the fear of God, the worship of God, a true spirit of repentance, or not. And once we've done that, then we're in a position to study the book together, okay? And that's the way that God's Word should always be approached. God's Word is not given to us to become a grist for the mill of contention. It's just despicable to see the way the Word of God is treated on social media, for example.

Without any lack of reverence, people just, yeah, I don't need to dwell on that. We just need to come to the Word of God with humble, repentant hearts, see it on its own terms, and let the Word of God, let God the Holy Spirit work in our hearts through what the Word says. And one of the ways that you do that is by, you slow down, you say, okay, let me learn some basic things, let me learn the structure, a little bit of the outline, some of the key themes of the book of Revelation, and then we're able to enter into it on its own terms. So today, in this easy listening message, we're going to introduce the book of Revelation in a most general overview.

If you take notes and you title your notes, today's message is titled Meet Revelation, and we're going to meet it in five different aspects here this morning. Just looking at it on its own simple terms, plain things that the youngest reader who's just learned, just begun to learn to read can see for themselves, and we humble ourselves to take in that simple information. And one of the things that it does when you slow down is it starts to purge out some of your bias, and you just come with a preconceived idea of what Revelation says and what it must say, and you just look for it to confirm your opinions or what you were taught in the past. When you slow down, you're able to kind of silence some of those interpretive biases and be able to just let the Word speak for itself.

That's all we're trying to do today. There's nothing threatening about this to anyone. We just want to get acquainted with a key part of the Word of God, and it is a key part. Sometimes people have a temptation and they'll speak in these ways. Revelation's not that important.

It all comes out okay in the end as long as you're a Christian and it's not as important as other parts of the Bible. That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. Those of you that are sports fans, basketball, football, today's Super Bowl Sunday. I didn't even think about that. I'm not even going to watch the game. Here on Super Bowl Sunday, think about it this way.

Can you imagine how foolish it would be for someone to say, I'm just going to watch the first three quarters of the game? That's where the action is. That's what's really important. Who cares what happens in the fourth quarter? Who cares what the outcome is?

That's just kind of secondary. No one in his right mind talks about sports that way. The fourth quarter is where the most intense action takes place. The fourth quarter is where the outcome is determined. That's the whole point of competition.

That's why they keep score and count points. It's so that at the end there is a winner and a loser and it's made known to all. Well, Revelation is the fourth quarter of the Bible.

Of course it matters. And so on the one hand, we have those that come with their own biases and just looking for contention in the book of Revelation. And on the other hand, we have some that, you know, speaking really broadly about the way Revelation is thought of, you say it's really not that important.

You know, it all comes out okay in the end. In either way, beloved, it should be obvious to you that that is no way to approach the Word of God. There is no reverence in that. There is no concern to know and to understand in that. And so with those things in mind, let's meet Revelation in five different ways here. First of all, we want to meet the author. We want to meet the author.

And here I'm just speaking in a human sense. The ultimate author of the book of Revelation is God himself. We see that in verse one. The Revelation, chapter one, verse one, Revelation. The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant, John. This is a revelation from God given to his son, the Lord Jesus Christ, that he communicated to an angel to deliver to his servant, John. And so in an ultimate sense, the author of Revelation is God himself. Now, when you can look at it that way, on a human level, Revelation was written by a man named John.

And so we just read that in chapter one, verse one. God made it known by sending his angel to his servant, John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. John was the human receiver of this revelation. And he puts into writing at the command of God the things that were given to him. And we see the emphasis on the human author, John, at the beginning and at the end of the book. It functions as bookends so that this isn't lost on anyone. So that in Revelation chapter one, verse four, we read John to the seven churches that are in Asia.

Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come. So we see John again after the introductory portion in those first three verses. He picks it up and says, John, here I am.

I'm identifying myself. I am speaking here. You know, in the times in which this was written, they wrote letters in what I think is really a better, a more intelligent way than what we write letters, at least those that used to write letters. You'd get a letter and it'd say, Dear Don, and you'd read the body of the letter. And only until you get the end, technically speaking, do you know who wrote the letter. You know, it said, Sincerely yours, John Smith. Oh, John Smith wrote this. Well, they did it just the reverse in ancient times.

They'd identify, the writer of the letter would identify himself at the very start. John to the churches of Asia. Paul to the churches of Galatia. Paul to the church at Colossi. Paul to the church of Rome.

So that the author is identified right from the beginning. I think that makes much more sense than what we inherited from our forefathers. Going down to Revelation chapter 1 verse 9, we see it again. I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom, the patient endurance that are in Jesus was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus. And then if you go to the very end of the book, Revelation chapter 22, after everything that comes in between the great meat of the sandwich between the pieces of bread, in Revelation 22 verse 8, as the book is coming to a conclusion, we read in Revelation 22 verse 8, I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me.

Now he wasn't supposed to do that. The angel corrected him. But it just comes full circle to what we saw there in chapter 1 verse 1.

God about Christ gave it to the angel who gave it to John. John is saying, I fell down before the feet of the angel who showed all these things to me. And so we see that somehow there was a process where a man named John received these things and he has written them out for the edification of the church and a warning to the world for all time to come until Christ returns and brings all things to a conclusion. Now from the beginning, beloved, I'm not going to go into any history on this. I'm just going to state the fact and we'll move on from here.

Remember, I'm making this an easy listening message. From the beginning, the church considered John the Apostle to be the one who wrote this book. John the Apostle, the same one who was the beloved disciple of the Lord. John the Apostle who wrote the Gospel of John, wrote the three epistles, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd John, and that's who wrote this book. John wrote this book. John the Apostle wrote this book. Now, sometimes there are alternate Johns that are suggested for it, but look, John was the last living apostle when he wrote this and everybody in the church knew the name of John. He doesn't clarify, he doesn't identify himself further because there was no need to do that. Everybody would have known John in the first century church.

And I can give you a little bit of an illustration of how sometimes qualifiers and additional information is not necessary. If you go to the campus of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, and you talk to anyone on the patio, say, is John speaking today? Everybody knows what you're asking and who you're talking about. Say, well, yeah, John is speaking today, or no, John's away, he's not speaking today.

You don't have to use the last name MacArthur. You know who you're talking about just because the context and the long-established prominence makes it so that you could be talking about no one else. No one thinks, and I'm using real names here of real elders on the board at Grace Community Church, if you go up and you say, is John speaking today? No one thinks that you're talking about the lovely man John Bates. No one thinks that you're talking about John Street. No one thinks that because everybody understands the context and the prominence, and you don't talk that way. It's just assumed. It's not necessary.

It would be extraneous to the discussion. And so when the point here is that in the early church to a much greater and a far more important way, the apostle John was the eminent one in the church. And so when they would read John, they knew exactly.

They knew exactly who was being discussed. It was the apostle John. And so that's the author. The author is one who was a commissioned apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Just generally speaking. He was one who had seen the Lord during his earthly life, who was there at the cross, the one who was, Jesus specifically, delegated to care for his mother during the course of, after his death, after his ascension. And Jesus made that assignment on the cross when he said, behold your mother, behold your son. This is John of the most intimate and authoritative representative of the Lord Jesus Christ that gives us this book. And so we come and we learn from the man who literally sat at the foot of Christ, who literally was so close and intimate with Christ, leaned his head on his chest at the Last Supper, the one who was literally at the cross and saw our Lord in the midst of his sufferings, the one who literally took in the Lord's mother after his death and departure from earth, the one who literally served the church with many writings. We have the most credible and the most authoritative author giving us this book that we could possibly have. And so on a human level we respect this book because we respect the author and respect his prominence. And that is before you even calculate in the reality that this is ultimately a book written by God, given to us. So this is the author. We have someone that we pay heed to, that we respect and we listen to, and someone that can be trusted because he was a directly authorized representative of the Lord Jesus Christ to declare revelation on his behalf, as stated in the first three verses of the book itself.

It's remarkable to think about, isn't it? And just by way of a very brief side note, we've covered this in the past in our teaching on the apostles. There are no apostles in the church today. Don't let anyone in some kind of apostolic reformation tell you something or make claims that they are apostles of Jesus Christ. There are no apostles today. To be an apostle you had to be a direct eyewitness of the life ministry and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That was a non-negotiable requirement. And so after the first century, after those witnesses of Jesus died, there were no more people who held the qualification, and there are none today. When someone claims to be an apostle, you can and should walk away without any fear that you are missing the purpose of God in your life. This is a unique author that has given us this book.

So that's number one. Meet the author. Okay, it's the apostle John.

We could go into a lot more depth about this, but I promise you an easy listening message today. The apostle John is the author who gave us this book. Well, my friends, before we go for today, I just wanted to let you know about a companion resource to this series that we're doing on the book of Revelation. There is a perennial interest in the end times from a biblical perspective, and there are so many different opinions about things that are out there. There's amillennialism and premillennialism and postmillennialism and various views of the rapture, and it's hard to sort all of that out.

I get it. Well, I wrote a brief book that functions both as an introduction to end times and also examines an aspect of end times that you're going to want to get. The book is titled When Christ Shall Come, and it gives you an overview of biblical end times, deals with matters like Israel today and the question about dispensationalism, and also has an expanded study on the topic of preterism, if you're familiar with that term. And so you can go to our website, thetruthpulpit.com, and look for the link to my books. And when you click on that, you'll find a link that would allow you to purchase a copy of When Christ Shall Come. It is a resource that will help you. So go to our website, thetruthpulpit.com, and look for the link titled Books. We'll see you next time. That's Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. Thank you so much for listening to The Truth Pulpit. Join us next time for more as we continue teaching God's people God's Word.