One minute the elders are sitting on their thrones, and the next minute they're down on their faces worshiping the God of glory.
The response is ecstatic, it is spontaneous, it is electrifying, it is pure praise. And this is what true worship, ladies and gentlemen, is all about, whether you're singing or praying or cleaning the house or whatever. When you acknowledge the sovereignty of God played out in and through your life, and no matter what the mundane events of life may be, you are his willing servant.
This is pure worship. A day is coming when all believers will have the opportunity to worship Jesus through the face to face. The Apostle John gave us a glimpse of what that time will be like, and we're looking at that today. Stephen Davey continues through his series, The Trumpets of Seven Archangels. We're at the end of Revelation chapter 11. We're going to see a time when it will be glorious and pure worship for all of us who have bowed the knees to Jesus Christ and claim to him as our King. You'll be encouraged as we explore this passage of scripture together.
So let's get started. A recent issue of World Magazine carried a brief article on the rather unusual security measures used recently in the transference of information from one location to another. I found it fascinating, so I thought I'd share with you. After spending decades locked away in a secret cabinet with multiple locks inside a triple-locked vault, company officials carefully removed a yellowing piece of paper and transferred it to an undisclosed location. The entire process was carefully guarded, and security was a top alert. The yellowing piece of paper dates back to 1940, and the handwriting on it is by the corporate founder, whose name was Harlan Sanders, and the company he founded, Kentucky Fried Chicken.
This is true. The yellowing piece of paper bearing his signature in his own handwriting is the only copy of a secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices, which supposedly holds the key to KFC's worldwide success. Corporate executives, this article said, needed to consult the original recipe once more as they prepared to release a new line of chicken strips, which happened this past summer.
That consultation prompted the need for heightened security, and so, following their top-level, top-secret meeting, the paper was locked in a small safe, handcuffed to a guard, who got into an armored car that took him and the recipe to an undisclosed location where the secret lies safely hidden away once again. This is proof that corporate theft is a real problem. It's also proof that we take our chicken way too seriously. KFC could argue the point. They've made $840 million this year, and I would imagine they would say that's proof they need to keep their little recipe yellowing away on that original piece of paper.
But that's the way it is, isn't it? I mean, you keep whatever it is that advances your wealth, your worth, secret. You've got your codes.
I've got my codes. We're all a little concerned about identity theft nowadays. In fact, one of our staff, somebody got ahold of his numbers. Don't know how it happened, but next thing we knew, somebody was using that to email everyone on his email address asking for them, telling them, look, I'm in financial trouble. Long story. I'm embarrassed by the debt.
If you could just help me out, don't tell anybody. Just wire this money to this location. Had the account numbers and everything. It was one of our pastors. So, you know, I knew it wasn't true.
He's amazingly, unbelievably wealthy. So it had to be a farce. But it's actually true. They tried to track it down. You know, you're kind of afraid of that kind of stuff. You keep your trade secrets to yourself.
You surround it, your corporation with filters and cameras, right? You lock away your valuables. You lock your front door and your back door at night. Probably lock the door of your car. My F-150 has an alarm system built in it.
A little red light ding, you know, it blinks away on the dash. In fact, whenever anybody in the church parking lot opens their door and dings my truck, it takes your picture and emails it to me. Can you imagine KFC saying, we're going to photocopy that recipe and if anybody would like it, we're going to hand them all out for free. Can you imagine Apple Computer or IBM or General Motors saying, we're going to lay out for you our corporate secrets. We're going to make it available to anybody and everybody who'd like to take a look.
Not on your life. Well, the wonderful thing is, for those who care enough to look, God is doing something wonderful, if not breathtaking. He's opening the vault of heaven and he is showing us secrets unveiled for anyone who cares to see. Now, for those of you who might be feeling a little overwhelmed by now with all the strangeness of Revelation, you know, the weird animals and the flying creatures and the trumpets and the seals and the markings on foreheads and the horsemen and the blood and the gore and the pestilence and all of that. Our Lord stops for a moment as we arrive at this new paragraph. He stops for a moment and then he gives us a beautiful picture that's easy to see and easy to understand of what the future is going to look like. Corporate executives might lock away a chicken recipe or hide away trade secrets, but God is literally opening the vault and revealing the future for all the world to see. Now, as you turn in your Bibles to chapter 11, which is where we left off, you need to understand that often in this book we're given a big picture with just a few details and then later on we're given a close-up snapshot that shows us all of the facts. Well, in this paragraph in chapter 11, we're given the big picture where everything is just sort of condensed, but we see from one end to the other.
He gives us the big picture revealing some wonderful secrets about future coming days. And it all begins with the sounding of the seventh trumpet. Notice verse 15. Then the seventh angel sounded and there were loud voices in heaven saying, the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ and he will reign forever and ever. Now, this trumpet, the seventh trumpet, is the last in the sequence of these trumpets. It is not to be equated with the last trumpet that Paul refers to in 1 Corinthians 15.52 where he talks about that trumpet and the sound of that will, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trumpet, the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable and we will all be changed. Well, the seventh trumpet here in Revelation covers an extended period of time, not an instantaneous in the twinkling of an eye moment.
In fact, the seventh trumpet will call for prolonged waves of judgment that will be given to us in close-up snapshots later on in the book of Revelation. Now, verse 15 tells us, you notice, that this trumpet sounds and loud voices in heaven were saying. We've already encountered that word saying, legantes, it's an amplification of a ducen which literally refers to singing. These hosts of heaven, these angels separated from the church which we'll sing in a moment, so these angels are singing and what they are singing, the word saying means these are the lyrics of their wonderful, wonderful hymn. Now, we've already learned how many angels there are that sing.
They're on ready. They sing it several times in the book of Revelation and they're referred to simply as a myriad of angels. Myriad means ten thousand.
It was the largest unit used in Greek mathematics in the ancient world and whenever you see the phrase myriads of myriads, it means ten thousand times ten thousand. Well, if you do a little math, you know, then we have about a hundred million angels plus singing what we're about to look at and you can't imagine as I can't the incredible sound this will be of praise. One author wrote that if you wanted to hear a little bit of what this sounded like, what you ought to do is try to listen to Handel's Messiah at some point in the future, especially its Hallelujah chorus.
In fact, George Frederick Handel took the words as a foundation to his oratorio, especially his Hallelujah chorus from this text, this chapter and verse, verse 15. Notice again, the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ and he will reign forever and ever. This is what the prophet Daniel saw and prophesied of when he predicted. One, he says, I saw like a son of man was coming and to him was given dominion and glory and the kingdom, then the sovereignty and the dominion and the greatness of all the kingdoms will be given to the people of the saints of the highest one, that is you, that your inheritance and his kingdom will be an everlasting kingdom. So God here informs us that he's going to open up the vault of heaven, literally the vault of the future and show us the end of history. And you could say it's all over but the shouting or the singing, I guess, in this text.
And what I want to do is pull out several elements that are found within these angelic lyrics. First, I want you to notice the singularity of the coming kingdom. The angels sing the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord, not kingdoms. Whatever translation is kingdom, one kingdom.
And that sounds a bit strange. That's why the interpreter has inserted the plural to try to make sense of it. But it's intended to be rather different because he's intended to reveal a secret and a perspective that is wonderful. You see, even though our world right now is separated into a thousand kingdoms plus with all their princes and potentates and parliaments and presidents, here's the astonishing truth. All the world's diverse national, political, social, cultural, linguistic and even religious groups are in reality one kingdom under the dominion of one king. Who is that king? Well, three times in John's gospel, our Lord referred to Satan as the ruler of this world.
Now, follow me. On one occasion, Jesus was accused of being empowered by Satan. You remember they told him that you're just casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul or the Lord of the Flies, literally the devil. And our Lord responded by exposing that rather ridiculous logic when he said, if Satan is casting out Satan, he is divided against himself, how then shall his kingdom stand? Singular kingdom, Matthew 12, 26. Furthermore, when Christ was tempted by Satan in the wilderness, the devil showed our Lord all of the individual kingdoms, didn't he? All the presidents, princes and potentates. He showed them all of that. But then he said to the Lord, interestingly enough, he said, if you will worship me, I will allow you to rule over this domain.
Singular. Here's the secret exposed. The world is temporarily ruled by this usurper, Satan, which God has given delegated authority to do so. The world's systems, separated though they may be by language, culture and border, they are literally under his thumb, so to speak.
They might think they have the power to do whatever they want. They might think they know where they're going, but in reality, they are under the temporary delegated sway and dominion of this deceiving angel of light. The nations then do not just happen to or coincidentally happen to follow other gods and just so happen to really not like the name of Jesus Christ and despise the believer and often persecute as they are doing even today around the globe, the Christian. The nations are actually influenced as puppets on strings manipulated, as the apostle Paul wrote, by the God of this world who has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God.
2 Corinthians 4 verse 4. Now, although Satan is a usurper and not the permanent and rightful king, he is the present delegated ruler of earth's kingdom and he rules through those who disbelieve the gospel and who themselves hate the name, hate the authority, hate the thought of the rule and reign of Jesus Christ. This is a frightening thing to consider in relation to our world today and the unbelieving world. The world system is in the grip of the enemy of the true and living God. Certainly his power and rule and reign is delegated and temporary and yet he is considered by Jesus Christ himself the current prince of the power of the air. He will not loosen his grip without a fight. Even though he knows the end of the book, even though I can only imagine what an expert the enemy is in this book of the revelation of Jesus Christ, even still he and those who follow him will not give away the kingdom when Christ comes.
It will have to be wrested away from them. I want you to notice that not only the singularity of the kingdom, it's really one kingdom from the perspective of God, but I want you to notice secondly the certainty of the kingdom. This kingdom the angels are singing about, the kingdom of the world which has become the kingdom of our Lord. The verb translated which has become the kingdom of our Lord is a proleptic errorist.
You don't need to know that for the quiz so don't write it down. But what I want you to get is the point. It's a rather amazing tense. What it means is it's viewing an event in the future as historical reality and in fact historical truth here and now.
It's that certain. Listen, at this point on the planet, remember the context of chapter 11. We're in the middle of the tribulation just beyond the middle point when Satan has consolidated his global influence.
We're about to be introduced to the antichrist and given a biography of this individual later on in chapters 12, 13 especially. But he's consolidated his powers, setting himself up as God through his puppet antichrist. People might be led to believe that God has lost everything.
God has lost control. But listen, do you hear singing? Do you hear music? You can hear it here in heaven. One hundred million angels plus are singing the kingdom as an historical reality and in fact even now is the kingdom of the Lord. Everything is going right on schedule with our sovereign Lord's plan. He knows the future and before it happens he has the angels go ahead and sing about it. He knows the future and unveils its secret to the hosts of heaven and through the apostle John to the entire human race, those who want to find out about it.
God knows the future and frankly it's simply this, God wins. It's already in the books. It's in the book. Now thirdly I want you to notice not just the singularity of the kingdom and the certainty of the kingdom but the sovereign of the kingdom.
Look again. The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ. Now what does that mean? Well the title Lord or Kuryu is often used as a title for Jesus Christ throughout the New Testament. In the book of Revelation it's most often used to refer to God the Father. So you could understand this phrase and maybe mark in the margin of your Bible, the kingdom of God the Father. It's a reference to God the Father. So what does that last part mean and of his Christ? Christou, the Greek word translated Christ simply means anointed one or you could render it Messiah. So what the angels are singing are lyrics about the anointed one of God the Father who will rule.
That's what he means. In fact they're singing lyrics that reveal the fulfillment of prophecy from centuries past. I mean how could David the psalmist have known had not the Holy Spirit breathed through him the truth of secrets yet unexplained to him? Listen to one of them as he uses the same terminology in the Greek Old Testament known as the Septuagint as the nations wage war against the Lord and his Christ.
Same idea. In other words the futility of the nations who wage war against God the Father and his anointed son, the Messiah. In fact David goes on in chapter 2 verse 12 of Psalms to say this, worship the Lord with reverence and rejoice with trembling and do homage to the Son. Capital S-O-N. Way back in David's day he is singing about God the Father and God the Son, the anointed one, the Messiah who will reign.
In fact it's hinted at the unity of their sovereign rule. When the Father rules the Son rules. When the Son rules the Father rules with the Spirit presiding. John wrote of the union of Father and Son earlier when he said in his letter in 1 John chapter 2 who is a liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ. Again the anointed one, the Messiah.
This is, he says, the spirit of antichrist. You cannot have God without God the Son. You can't, as you talk to people on the street and you say what do you think about God? They'll say oh yeah I believe in him. What do you think about Jesus Christ?
Well I'm not too sure about him. Now you can't have God the Father without God the Son. You can't have the kingdom of the Father without the rule of the Son.
You're only deceived. In fact John will say later in that same letter, whoever denies the Son does not have the Father and the one who confesses the Son has the Father also. Now this would be this revelation here wonderfully encouraging to see the prophecies of King David now coming to pass in Revelation chapter 11 especially to the Jewish readers of this day and the Christians both Gentile and Jew because you see when John was writing this revelation he was on the island of Patmos and why was he there?
Was there a nice resort there and he wanted a vacation? No he was exiled to this island by an emperor named Domitian. Domitian hated Christians with a passion and so he exiled the famous Christians because he didn't want to get into too much political hot water and he killed the ones who weren't really all that well known. Domitian is also the first Roman emperor to have himself officially titled in Rome God the Lord.
He also had himself officially titled Lord, kurios, Lord of the Earth. You can imagine of course he had no idea until it was too late that he was actually doing the bidding of the king of earth the usurper the one who hates the worship of God but you can imagine now the believers hearing these titles addressed to the true and living God whose son will reign as Lord. Well this is what the angels sing and what is the church going to do about it? Well we're actually going to be in heaven to hear this because this is our future and after we hear it here's what happens verse 16 and the 24 elders who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped God. The 24 elders surrounding the throne representing the bride the church all immediately the sound of a hundred million angels singing this they fall on their faces in worship to God. This is an amazing sight. One minute the elders are sitting on their thrones and the next minute they're down on their faces worshiping the God of glory.
The response is ecstatic it is spontaneous it is electrifying it is pure praise and this is what true worship ladies and gentlemen is all about whether you're singing or praying or worshiping or cleaning the house or whatever when you acknowledge the sovereignty of God and his will played out in and through your life and no matter what the mundane events of life may be you are his willing servant this is pure worship. Well friends I'm going to interrupt this message right here. Stephen's not quite done with this message from God's word but we're going to bring you the conclusion to today's message on our next broadcast. The message is called no longer top secret.
Well Stephen it's good to have you here in the studio. Late last year we released a special booklet for men and women in our armed forces and thanks to the generous gifts of our ministry partners we've been able to send it to these military personnel free of charge and we've heard back from some of them. Yeah and I have in my hand a number of comments from friends who are serving in our armed forces around the world actually so let me read a few of them to you friends. Here's Olivia who's stationed at an airbase in Germany. She writes the truths in scripture and the encouragement from this book helped me stay grounded during long deployments. Thank you for thinking of those of us who are serving abroad. Here's a Marine Aaron who writes I'm currently stationed at Camp Pendleton and the spiritual reminders in this book have been vital to me. It's easy to get caught up in the day to day grind but this devotional has helped me set aside time to focus on God and his word.
Well here's Jasmine in the Navy. My grandmother told me that I could receive this book and as I serve on the USS Theodore Roosevelt life can feel chaotic and overwhelming. I've only completed the first two weeks but I've been so encouraged as I've worked through this book.
Thank you for caring about service members. David writes from South Korea your gift came at the perfect time. Sometimes I feel a bit isolated and I'm often surrounded by a rough crowd and coarse language.
It's hard to go against the flow because I want to fit in. Your devotional book has reminded me that God is with me every step of the way. The lesson on trust was exactly what I needed to hear. Thank you for your prayers and for sending resources that help keep my eyes on Christ no matter where I'm stationed. Thank you so much for that David. Matthew writes from Fort Liberty, North Carolina thank you so much for sending the booklet Battle Ready. As a soldier I am now finding this devotional to be such a blessing. The wisdom shared in its pages reminds me daily that God has a plan for my life even when the challenges of service feel overwhelming.
It's easy to lose perspective when life gets busy. Well Matthew we would all say the same thing no matter what we're doing in our day. Nathan writes I want to thank you for sending Battle Ready. My life can feel like an endless series of challenges and even though I just received it a few weeks ago it's already become a source of encouragement and strength. Thank you for this. Caleb writes thank you for thinking of me.
I'm serving in the Air Force currently stationed in Qatar. Being so far from my family I have found solace in the Christian friends I've made here and the devotionals in your book remind me daily to depend on God's strength. Thank you for being the hands and feet of Christ. Sarah writes I can't thank you enough for sending me your book allowing me to sign up for more resources. Life as a Coast Guard officer often pulling in many directions it's it's often hard to find time for God in his word but I've been blessed and encouraged by this book. Well friends thank you for these wonderful comments from around the world. And we're so thankful to our donors who have made it possible for us to send this resource free of charge to men and women serving all over the world. Thanks so much for joining us today. As I mentioned Stephen will conclude today's message on our next broadcast. Be sure and come back for that right here on Wisdom for the Heart.
