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Revelation - Introduction (C. Trimble 7-21-24)
Good morning, everybody doing okay, guys, good? Good, all right. So if you're new here, maybe something, or maybe you've been here for a while and you didn't know this. So everything we do, like our videos, our art that's on the wall, any graphics you see, we make all that stuff. And if you aren't on social media, well, you're not missing much, but you are missing this. (audience laughs) We released a short video of that video. Everything is hand drawn, we hung all that stuff up. When I say we, our creative team, I did nothing. But it's kind of neat if you get a chance to go back and watch that, how much work goes into all that stuff. So, again, if you are new here, what we do is we go through whole books of the Bible. I don't know, we've been through 36, 38, something like that in the last 15 years. There's several that we've done multiple times. We just got done with second Corinthians, a letter written by Paul. And now we are getting into a book that I have taught a couple of times before, but it's been about six years getting into the book of Revelation. So, the good news, I have good news and maybe news that you won't think is as good. The good news is, is that we are starting the book of Revelation today. The bad news is, we're just going to do an introduction and we're not going to actually get into chapter one yet. And the reason why that is, typically whenever we start a new book of the Bible, I'll do maybe three or four or five slides about the context who wrote it, you know, where they wrote it, at what time they wrote it, a little bit of background, just so we understand, kind of have a good launching pad for what that book's about. This is maybe one of the most misunderstood and I'm going to say complicated, but I'm not going to say that much because you're going to understand a lot more than you think you will. But it's a very misunderstood book of the Bible and so I just wanted to spend, I think I've got 34 slides, just kind of prefacing this book of the Bible. And so, if you brought your Bible today, that's great. You should bring your Bible to church. You won't need it today, but I'm very glad that you brought it. You will need it next week as we get into chapter one and we're just going to take our time with this book of the Bible. It's a lot of fun. It's a blast. It's beautiful. It's sobering in a lot of ways and so we just want to take our time with it. So, anyways, you should have got a notes handout. Everything will be in that. Everything will be on the screen. Everything is on the app and the website. If you get those physical handouts, I recommend you hold on to those. I recommend that with all the books of the Bible that we study, but this is one that you'll be able to go back. You'll be able to reference very easily. If you're like me and you like physical copies of things to highlight or mark up, please keep those. Another thing we're going to do as we go through this book of the Bible is every week, very, very briefly, we're going to go back and kind of recap. So, after we get done with maybe the first three chapters when we get into chapter four, I'll go back and I'll recap chapters one through three very, very briefly. This is what happened. This is what happened. This is what happened. And as we move through, because the narrative and the timeline of this book of the Bible is maybe one of the things that is a little bit more complicated about it. So, we'll make sure that we're kind of going in a straight path, if you will. We'll go back and revisit it. So, anyways, glad you guys are here. It is a pleasure to see you. We're going to have a good time and we'll start a very, very interesting, unique, misunderstood book of the Bible and we'll be in it for probably about five months, okay? So, we'll have a good time doing that, all right? So, glad you guys are here. Let's pray. We'll have to jump into this intro and then I'll see you next week and we'll get into the actual text, okay? Father God, we love you. Lord, we thank you so much. I thank you for everyone in the room this morning. I thank you, God, for a safe, comfortable place, Lord, where we can come in and we can study the Word, God, and we can worship together and later we can take communion and respond to the message you've given us, Lord. God, I pray that as we get into this very unique book of the Bible, that it be a blessing to you, God, that it honor you, but I pray, Father, that we are also blessed, God, that you would keep your hand on this church and not just us, Lord, we pray that you keep your hand on every church in our city, pray that you keep your hand on our other campuses and the churches and those cities, God. Again, Father, we just pray that all of this honors you, Lord. We love you. We thank you. We praise you. We pray all these things in your son's name, God, in Jesus' name. Amen. Okay, so if you're new here and or maybe you've been here for a while, but you haven't been here since we've done this, one may ask, why in the world this book of the Bible, why would we get into this very complicated and very misunderstood book of the Bible? Well, the first thing is this, Revelation is unique in a lot of regards and right off the bat in chapter one, we see something that is unique specifically to the book of Revelation. Now, listen, if you read the Bible, any of the Bible that you read and apply to your life will bless you. Any book of the Bible that you get into, you study, you take note of what it says and you apply it, God's going to bless you for that. Now, the only book of the Bible to my knowledge, and I've taught quite a few of them, that specifically and blatantly tells you that if you read it and keep it, it will bless you, is the book of Revelation. It says, "Blessed is the one who reads, blessed are those who hear and keep the words of this prophecy and what is written in it, because the time is near." Now, we're going to talk about time, not so much, we'll talk about a little bit today, but more as we go on, that word time is relative. The reason why I say that is, time looks very different to God than it does to us. So words like near, this book was written 1950 something years ago, so the word near there is different from God's perspective than it is from ours. But the point is this, if we get into this book, it is a promise by God that we will be blessed by it if we adhere to what it is saying. A common mistake, though, that people make with the book of Revelation is it's the first place they go. Many non-Christians or many brand new Christians jump right to the end. And it's no wonder that it's a very misunderstood book. It's like if you pick up any book, I have a degree in English, that's what my undergrad was in. You can imagine if you pick up any great piece of literature and you go right to the last chapter and you just read the last chapter and you go, "Who are these people? I don't understand. What's this predicament? Why are these happening? Why are these things happening?" Well, it makes sense that one is confused because you haven't read the context leading up to that. You haven't read the things leading up to that last book, that last chapter. And so listen, if you have not read the New Testament, that's okay. You can sit in this. You'll learn from this. Please keep coming. Don't, you know, I haven't read the whole Bible yet. I can't be here. No, no, no. But this is maybe a subtle challenge and encouragement for some of us that if you have not read any of the New Testament, the more you read of the New Testament, the more you'll be able to comprehend the last part of the New Testament, which is the book of Revelation. So the primary function of Revelation is to prepare believers for the return of Christ. And now the second time I've said this, there is a special blessing bestowed to those who take the time to not only get to Revelation but to dive into it and start to start to work it out. So it's a very highly misunderstood book. And with some people, not only is the content questionable, they think the whole value of this book of the Bible is questionable. And I'm not talking about people that are extreme heretics or don't love Jesus. There are some very, very famous theologians that do not even believe the book of Revelation should be in the Bible. Martin Luther was one of those. He's a pretty big deal. Also, people like John Calvin did not believe that the book of Revelation had any value. And so because there has been a history of kind of misunderstanding and neglecting Revelation in the present day, there's very few churches that will get into this. And I don't mean that boastfully about myself, but maybe churches will get into the first three chapters. They will skim a little bit of the surface level things. We might get a worship song or two out of chapter four, but we're not going to dig that much into it. We're just not going to put that much time and energy into it. And that's a shame because it is a beautiful, wonderful, powerful book. So because of this misunderstanding, because of this negligence, we have what a lot of theologians call the human opinion of Revelation. And what the human opinion is, is that Revelation is not that valuable. Maybe it's too complicated. And so I'm not going to tackle it because there's just no way that I can understand it. Or maybe we don't read it because we don't think it's relevant, right? It's not relevant to our day and age. And that low opinion, that human opinion, plays right into what theologians call the satanic opinion of Revelation. Now, the satanic opinion of Revelation is simply this. The devil hates this whole book, right? He hates the whole thing. He doesn't like anything in here. The devil really hates the beginning of this book and the ending of this book. Why? Because in the very beginning of the Bible, in Genesis chapter 3, we start to see the prophesied collapse of Satan. Genesis chapter 3, right? We see the prophesied collapse of all evil and the devil. And then at the end of the book, we see it played out, right? We see what's going to happen. We read about what's going to happen in the future when Jesus comes back and completely deals with Satan, completely deals with all evil and all evil people. And we see the end of that. So here's what the satanic opinion is. If the devil can get people to believe that the book of Genesis is all fairy tales, and if the devil can get people to believe the end of the Bible is too complicated, the whole integrity of the center of the Bible kind of falls apart. And people will not give it credit and they will not read it and take the time to understand it. That is the satanic opinion. Now, we are not to have either one of those opinions. We are to have the God opinion of the book of Revelation, which is called the divine opinion, which means that this book is extremely important. A third time, there are special blessings given to those who keep the words of Revelation. And at the same time, there are unique consequences to those who hear the words of this book and neglect the words of this book. That's actually one of the last verses in the entire Bible. So the book of Revelation completes the Word of God. It reminds us that Christ will return, and it gives us warning signs of how the end is going to unfold. And so I'm going to say this too, and this is going to sound snarky. I'm going to sound like the guy that no one wants to have coffee with. It's also not, it's not revelations. It's one revelation. It's one entire revelation given to John. And people often say, man, in the revelations, it's revelation. It's just one. And you guys are like, it sounds like the guy who you're having coffee with. And he goes, it's whom, not who. And you're like, no one likes that guy. I don't want to be that guy, but we just want to make sure that we're grammatically correct. So imagine reading the Bible. So these individuals who didn't think this should have been in the canonized Bible, imagine reading the entire Bible in an ending, not with Revelation, but with the book of Jude. If you've never read the book of Jude, nothing against Jude, I'm sure he's a fantastic guy. But if the Bible ended with Jude, Jude is a very small book written about false teachers infiltrating the church. Imagine if you read the entire Bible and it concluded with, well, some false teachers are going to come in and mess up the church. Well, that's, there's not a good conclusion there. That doesn't really wrap up the text. And so revelation is so important because it is the climax and kind of the conclusion, the finality of humanity's relationship with its creator. Revelation tells us that tough times are going to come. But Jesus and the people of Jesus, right? The people of God will triumph regardless of how bad it gets. Okay. So let's talk about the author or authors. Look at what I did there, right? It's even, it's even in blue in case you missed it there. So when it comes to who wrote the book of Revelation, the book of Revelation was, was put on paper by John, one of the 12 disciples. He was one of the original 12. He was extremely close to Jesus. John wrote five books of the Bible and he wasn't exceptionally creative with his titles. There was the Gospel of John, John 1, John 2, John 3, and then Revelation. And so he contributed quite a bit to the New Testament and the other four books of the Bible that he contributed, he wrote on purpose. What I mean by that is just like second Corinthians that we just got done with. Paul was, of course, inspired by the Holy Spirit, inspired by God. But Paul said, I'm going to, I'm going to get out some paper. I'm going to get out a pen and I'm going to write a letter. It was very intentional. This book of the Bible was not written like that. It was written unexpectedly when John was in exile and I'll talk about that here in a second. So at the time that John received the book of Revelation, he would have been probably in his late 80s, early 90s. He would have been an older man. He wrote this in about 95, 96 AD and he died in about 98 AD. So not too long after he wrote this book of the Bible. More than likely, he was the only one of the original 12 still alive. We don't know that for a fact, but he was the only one of the disciples to die of natural causes. Oddly enough, he was the only one of the 12 disciples who was present when Jesus was crucified, which that's an interesting little coincidence there. So when he wrote this book of the Bible, even though he hadn't been martyred, he hadn't been killed for his faith like the other disciples, except for Judas, who took his own life. He had been persecuted. John had been boiled alive by the emperor of Rome, Domitian, and then he was exiled to an island called Patmos off of what is modern day Turkey. Now one day while he was on the island of Patmos, he is worshiping at Sunday. We'll get into this in chapter one. It was Sunday. He's praying. He's worshiping. He's spending some time with God. And in the middle of spending this time with God, something unexpected happened. He audibly, with his ears, he visibly with his eyes, saw this vision, this revelation that we're going to be studying for the next couple of months. And God told John, write down everything you see, everything you see, and everything you hear. So revelation is very unique in the fact that all of the things written down were really not John's idea. I know the entire Bible is written by God. I get that. But this book of the Bible is unique in the fact that all John was doing was just writing down what he saw. It was all God's imagery. It was God's voice. It was the voice of different. We're going to get through it all. And he is just recording what he's seeing. Now, a lot of people believe this is not the same John. And the reason why they think it's a different John is if you go back and read the gospel of John, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 3rd, John, and then Revelation, it is written very stylistically different. Not only that, there were grammatical errors and there were things that weren't written as eloquently. It's called inferior Greek. And so some people go, maybe it's not the same John because it's written very differently. Well, the circumstances were extremely different. It is the same John. But imagine this. Imagine if you lived in the 1st century, right? Towards the end of the 1st century. And you were teleported to 2024. And you walk into this room and someone gives you a piece of paper and a pen and says, write down everything you see in here for the next hour and a half. You can't take a break. No one's going to stop. Just write. And you can imagine what that would do. If you were given those circumstances, your writing would probably have some grammatical errors. It would probably be a little sloppy. It would probably be inferior to if you could sit and take the time at a desk and listen to things over and over again and write it out. Imagine trying to describe things that you had never seen. Not only you, that no one had ever seen. Things that were going to happen in the future. Imagine trying to describe those things. And that's what revelation is. That's why it looks and sounds dramatically different. Now, what this book of the Bible is, what John wrote, is what's called apocalyptic literature. Now, that word apocalypse kind of gets a bad rap. For you older cats in the room, you think of Marlon Brando in the jungle with heads on stakes. There's a movie called Apocalypse Now. It's really good. Anyways, we always think kind of doom and gloom awful stuff when we hear the word apocalypse. But this word is not meant to be scary. The word apocalypse means by definition to reveal, to unveil, to show people things. And so apocalyptic writing tells us of things that are yet to come. Now, what is really fascinating about the book of Revelation is it's so neat. Revelation is going to tell us things that have happened, things that are happening right now, and things that are going to happen in the future. And the reason why that is so interesting is as God is outside of time. And so we're going to be able to get to see things kind of from the perspective of God. Now, does that mean we're going to understand everything? No, you're not going to understand everything. I'm going to promise you, you'll be shocked though at how much you'll be able to understand and how clear the book of Revelation is. I think a lot of people when we go through this, they're shocked. They're like, that's not as complicated as I thought. And I say, that's correct. A little bit of work, a little bit of discipline. It's not that bad. Okay. So some of this that I'm going to tell you this morning, and I'll say it later, it's okay if you forget these things. I'm going to tell them to you, but if you forget these things, it's not going to make or break your experience with the book of Revelation. But there are different ways that people view Revelation in regards to time, how time works. There's one group of people that view Revelation as cyclical. And that means that the things that happen in Revelation will repeat itself over and over again. Basically, that the world gets bad, something happens, it gets better for a while, then it gets bad again, and it gets better, then it repeats itself, cyclical. And there's no definitive end time, but eventually Jesus is just going to go, okay, we're done with the cycle. Let me go get everybody. And he pulls us out of here, right? Another way that people look at Revelation is what's called rhythmic, and that is very similar to cyclical. It's the fact that time repeats itself over and over again, but never exactly the same. So there is maybe a template that every generation has, you know, some kind of a world war or some kind of, the biggest one is that every generation has like an antichrist, someone that's trying to take over the world. You know, your grandparents had, you know, Adolf Hitler, your parents might have had the Ayatollah, you know, we have Taylor Swift, or where, no, I'm just joking. It's because she's taking over the world. It's a joke. It's a joke. Someone's going to have a meltdown over that. I can't believe, right? Because no one likes to laugh anymore. We're beyond that in our society. So anyways, this, this is the view that things happen according to, listen, we have some Taylor Swift records in our house. I just want to make that clear. I have teenage girls, you know, someone just got deeply offended. If that offends you, I don't know what to say. So cyclical, rhythmic, they have one called the optimistic view of time. I have yet to meet this person that believes in the optimistic view of time. But this is the idea that as time goes on, things get better. If you're one of those, man, that's something. Not only does the Bible say that this is false, right, allude to the fact that this is false, any research that you do, there is very little research, unless it is greatly skewed, that tells us that humanity is evolving in a positive manner, right? And so the optimistic view would be, man, you know, revelation and time, just everything's getting better. Then you have what's called the pessimistic view of time, looking at the Bible, looking at revelation, a pessimistic view. What that means is this. There are some people that believe, maybe they don't believe in an eternity, they just believe that the human species will eventually destroy itself. The nuclear war or over consumption or overpopulation or, you know, the abuse of the environment, whatever the case may be, we're going to fry this world up. We're going to destroy each other, right? It's a pessimistic view. There is no redeeming us, right, people. And then the last view we have of time, specifically when it relates to revelation in the Bible, is the one that we should adopt, and that is called the apocalyptic view of time. Now, this is what this means, and I've made a fancy little graph here, that things will get bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, right? They're going to get worse, things are going to get worse, something is going to happen, and not only are things going to get better, but they're going to stay that way permanently. Now, there are several groups of people that believe in apocalyptic time. Christians, we believe that the second coming of Christ is going to be the thing in that circle, it's going to change things forever, right, permanently make them good. Muslims believe this, Jews believe this, and communists believe this. And so maybe the one thing that all of those people groups have in common is an apocalyptic view of history and of time, okay. Another popular characteristic of apocalyptic literature is symbols and numbers. Now, people get really intimidated by the symbolism and the numbers in the book of Revelation, and I'll tell you, you don't have to be, right? Here's the thing about that. When we go through Revelation, most of the symbols and numbers are explained in Revelation. So if we read something and we're like, ah, what is that? Just keep reading, and it will tell you what it is. And the ones that are not found in Revelation, the explanation is not found in that book. If we go back to previous books of the Bible, there are a lot of them that are explained by previous books of the Bible. Now, there are very few, there are some, but there are very few numbers and symbols that are not explained at all in Revelation, very few. And this may be the trickiest part of Revelation, and this is where people can get a little weird with the book of Revelation, and they can get all into the numbers and symbols. And what that is, is that's called gematria, and it's garbage. What that means is, in some of you who are old enough to remember this, especially like in the late 90s, early 2000s, you know, all these movies were coming out about, you know, the rapture and all these books and stuff. And so these books like the Bible code came out, the Omega code, it was a really terrible movie, all these different things come out. And it's, well, if I take the third letter of every word of the Bible and multiply it by seven and divide it by this, you know, Jesus is coming back Tuesday. And, and that's a bunch, it's a bunch of garbage. And what it does is it creates a bunch of people who are more dependent on signs and codes than they are the actual gospel to get to heaven. And that's dangerous, very, very dangerous. So remember, Revelation is apocalyptic literature. What is apocalyptic literature? Apocalyptic literature shows us stuff. So Revelation is a book of the Bible that is not meant to hide things. It is meant to reveal things, to show us things. And so we have to be very careful to make sure that we keep the main thing, the main thing. God wants us to grow closer to him and study in the book of Revelation. God does not want us to live in fear. He does not want us to live in conspiracy. Fear, the Bible says, is not a product given to us by God. It is not a spirit given to us by God. We are not meant to live in fear. We are not meant to live in conspiracy about the end times. We are just meant to live prepared. Prepared for it, okay? Now again, I'm going to show you some stuff here in a second that if you forget it, it's 100% okay. But there are different schools of interpreting the book of Revelation. Now the book of Revelation is about 30% prophecy. And so again, I hope that takes a little bit of the fear out of this. A lot of people are afraid to get into it, like, man, all these prophecies and all these things. Well, it's really only about less than 1/3 of the entire book of Revelation is prophecies, about 56 prophecies. And those are quite a few prophecies. And so because of that, there are different interpretations of those prophecies. What is important, though, is this. The book of Revelation, think of if you opened up the hood of a car, right? And there's an engine in front of you. And you have to work on this engine. You have to understand this engine and fix this engine. What we're going to look at is there are several different tools or approaches that we can use to help us understand Revelation. The problem is this, there's a lot of people who say, well, I am, I'll get to this here in a second, I'm a traitorist. That's what I believe. That's the only tool I use when it comes to addressing Revelation. Well, if we're so close-minded to only use one tool, imagine looking at an engine and someone going, Phillips head screwdriver, man, that's all you need, right? That's not going to be all you need. You're going to need other tools to fix the engine. So just like that engine, Revelation takes different approaches. It takes some work, it takes some discipline, it takes some control, but that's okay. That's okay. I think the majority of the Bible takes some work and discipline and control. But the first tool, or the first view of Revelation, is what's called the Preterist view. Let's use that example. All this is, is people who are Preterist look at the book of Revelation as simply a historical document. This is talking about when Jerusalem was conquered by Rome and overthrown and demolished and destroyed in the AD 70. That's all it is. So this book of the Bible is written for a specific group of people, right? In the first century about a specific event and that's it. Now there is a touch of truth in that. Those things did happen and Jesus even predicted those things in the gospel of Matthew that these things were going to happen. So the strength of that tool is it focuses on historical context. That's, that's okay. There's a part of Revelation that this tool works for. The, the problem with this tool is all of the prophecies that are listed in Revelation didn't unfold throughout history. These things have not happened yet. It's, you'd have to do a lot of twisting and turning to get into some of the things that it talks about and apply it to the first century because a lot of these things just didn't happen. So that tool has some uses, but that tool alone does not fix the problem. The next one is called the historicist view. This looks at the writing of Revelation of things that have happened, but things that will also happen every generation, that cyclical rhythmic view, the idea that every generation has similar events, right? Every generation has their, their anti-Christ or that great war or that great evil that needs to be conquered. Now again, the strength of that tool is that it works for every generation, that any generation can read the book of Revelation and get something from it. That's good. Again, the weakness of that view though, is history has not worked out that clean, not every single generation throughout human history has had that anti-Christ figure or that, that great evil, you know, you know, thing that had to be conquered or that world war or whatever the case may be. That, that hasn't worked out consistently throughout history. Another view, which, which a lot of people in this room will fall into, is called the futurist view. And that believes everything from chapter four on. So everything after chapter three is in the future and compressed into a very short period of time. By short period of time, seven years. We're going to talk a lot about seven years. And typically people in this camp who are just like, "I am a futurist. That's all I am." Typically people who fall into this camp believe in, in a pre-tribulation rapture that we will be, and I'm not trying to be a jerk. I put that word in quotations because that word is nowhere in the Bible, but that we are, we are pulled out before anything bad happens to us. And then everyone else goes through seven years of, of, of hell on earth. These are also people who tend to lean on signs and lean on codes. So the strength of this, this tool is that it does acknowledge future prophecies, that there are prophecies that we need to be aware of and acknowledges that. The, the weakness tends to be from this tool that, that people who just hang on this tool are people who tend to, to boil the entire book of revelation down to signs and codes. Okay. And again, I'm not trying to be rude. I'm not trying to be rude. And if you've ever done this, I promise I'm not trying to hurt your feelings. But, but there are a lot of people again who do not live for Jesus day to day, but whenever the moon looks a little bit red, they're like, "Oh, here he comes." You know. And if you're waiting on the moon to turn to blood, it's probably too late by that point. You need to have that relationship with Christ consistently. Jesus even said it's a perverse group of people who are just looking for signs. Jesus said that. So there's going to be signs, but we should already have that found. You know what I think a lot of people do? A lot of people don't want to live for Christ. They just want to get a warning sign so they can quickly repent and make sure that they squeak into heaven. And, and I'm going to go ahead and let you know that's not what being a Christian is. That's not what that is. Everyone good with that? You guys good with that? Okay. All right. Everyone's deleting their post about the last time we had a blood moon. Anyways, the idea, the idealist view is, is views that revelation is all metaphorical. It's all just parables. And so they, they believe the, the themes, the morals of revelation to be true, but they weren't factual events, nor will they be factual events. Now again, this tool, we're going to use this tool right in the middle of revelation. There is a part that is a metaphor. It's a huge drama about a dragon and a woman and stars swept away. And it's this very dramatic kind of, of telling of the battle of good and evil. So we'll use this tool. The problem though with this tool is they don't have a definitive end time. They don't believe there is a literal seven years of tribulation and, and a literal antichrist and things like that. So it's good because it focuses on morals and values. That's a good thing. It's weak. And the fact that it reduces the scripture just to parables. And the scripture is much more than that. So again, the book of revelation is like an engine with, with, with different parts. One through three chapters, one through three is very different than chapters four through 18. Very, very different. And those chapters are very different than chapters 19 through 22. And so we will use different tools. We were used different things to dissect it and look at it and understand it more. But here's something I want to encourage you. Do not get wrapped up in those things. Do not get wrapped up. And I'm a, you know, Preterist, pre-millennial, pre-trip, don't, don't get, look at the scripture. Look at the context of what it's saying. Look at what it's telling us, right? And who it's speaking to. And just let the Bible do the talking. Just focus on the scripture. And that brings us to our last section, our focus. There is a lot of practical application from the book of Revelation. Revelation was written by a normal man to normal people for practical reasons. We will learn about things like the importance of worship. We will learn about persecution. We will learn about God's protection and sovereignty. We will learn about the importance of repentance and perseverance. And we will be reminded that one day Jesus will in fact come back for those who love him and follow him. I believe there are a lot of professing Christians who do not truly believe that Jesus is ever going to come back anytime soon. And we are to live in the anticipation that one day Jesus is going to come back for his followers. This is also a book about perseverance. The book of Revelation is not wildly taught or popular in the western world. Why? Because it's comfortable in the western world. We have tremendous amounts of freedom. We have tremendous amounts of luxuries. We aren't really persecuted for our faith yet in the western world. So we don't touch on it very much. Now if you go to places like the underground church in Iran or China or in places where there is extreme poverty in East Africa and in places like that where there are believers, they love the book of Revelation. Why? Because the book of Revelation gives the oppressed hope. It gives us hope. So we're not oppressed. So why should we read this? We should read this. Listen, I'm not trying to be a jerk here today. I promise I'm not, right? The United States is a very young nation. And we go, well, we're impervious to anything. It's like a 12-year-old going, "I've never been seriously ill." You're 12. You're very young. You have a young body. This nation is very young. Our society, our constitution, our structure, it's all very young. And for us to be so arrogant to say that nothing bad can collapse us is foolish. It's beyond foolish. And so we live in the lap of luxury right now, but I'm going to tell you, when we get into the book of Revelation, there is very little to no mention of the western world. You want to know why? Because I think by that time we have become irrelevant. That's a hard thing for Americans to hear. Wait a second. We're the most important people on planet Earth, maybe to ourselves. But we need to be very careful in our arrogance. We haven't experienced these kinds of things yet, but they may be on the horizon for us. All believers will go through some kind of trial, and we in the western world are not impervious to this. So believers are called to endure, and believers are called to lean on God even in hard times. I'm not trying to be rude this morning. I swear that I'm not. But one of the things I struggle with is whenever people come up to me and they're like, Corey, I just don't know if I can live for Jesus right now. Okay, so we live in a nation where you can go to any bookstore and you can buy any version of this you want, right, this book. You can come into this room and sit on a nice padded seat with air conditioning and a big PA system, and you can go get a cup of coffee and listen to the Word of God. And you don't even have to bring your Bible. You got a phone, a $1,500 phone where you can scroll through, read the Scripture, read the notes, all of this freedom. You can walk around in your neighborhood, holding your Bible up. You can get on social media and say anything about Jesus that you want. If we cannot live for the Lord with that kind of freedom and luxury, how in the world are we going to live for the Lord when it becomes physically dangerous? How are we going to do it? Well, I don't know if I can do it. Well, man, I can rest assured you cannot do it in the future. If you can't do it now, you're not going to be able to do it later. So we are called to lean on God regardless of how chaotic and bad it gets. So by the time we get to chapter 14, we will have covered some crazy stuff, crazy stuff and almost right smack in the middle, a little bit further than the middle of Revelation, John kind of pauses and he writes this down. This is very, very important. This calls for endurance from the saints. How do we endure? John tells us by keeping God's commands and our faith in Jesus. So in the middle of all of this chaos that we're going to read about, right, all of these things that are happening, the world unraveling, not just the world unraveling, the universe around us starting to unravel. As that happens, John says, you got to endure. How do you do it? By following God's commands, by keeping your faith in Jesus Christ. That's how we endure. Another word that we're going to talk about a lot throughout this time is the word overcome. Maybe the central theme of Revelation is that the true church will overcome any persecution. Why? Because Jesus Christ will overcome all evil. And the central idea of Revelation is this. Jesus is victorious. He wins. The question is not does Jesus win. The question is, will, listen to me, will we remember that Jesus wins as the world around us starts to come apart? Will we remember that Jesus wins when the economy collapses? Will we remember that Jesus wins if our government gets out of control or we go to war with the foreign nation or we are persecuted for our faith or whatever the case may be? Will we still hold on to the fact that we know what the ending of the word of God is? Will we hold on to that? So if you and I will approach this book of the Bible with humility, humility, if we will approach this book of the Bible with an open mind, an open mind, not based on the movies you saw or what someone said, some tele-vangelist or what this science fiction book said about all this stuff. If we will approach the Scripture with humility in an open mind, I promise you, you will encounter an absolutely amazing book of the Bible. There is such vivid imagery of God. Do you know that the Gospels never tell you what Jesus looks like? Did you know that? There is nowhere in Scripture in the Gospels that tells you what Jesus' physical attributes look like. The only book of the Bible that does that is Revelation in chapter 1. John looks at Jesus and he tells us what he sees. That's amazing. That's powerful. It's beautiful. We get vivid imagery of heaven. What our eternity is going to look like. John even gives us the exact dimensions of the city that you and I are going to reside in, that there will be a new earth and a new universe. I'm ruining it all right now. You'll forget by the time we get there that the gates will be open. There is such vivid imagery. So here's what I encourage you to do. Do not get lost in the things that are not essential. I'm going to give you a great example. Maybe I won't see you next week because of this. When it comes to the rapture, I believe that we go through all seven years. I believe we go through all seven years and then we go to heaven. Some people disagree with me on that. That's okay. That is a non-essential thing. We can agree to disagree on that. We can both be brothers and sisters in Christ. If you leave this church over that, that's silly. That's as silly as getting offended by the Taylor Swift joke that I told earlier. That is silly. We can agree to disagree on non-essentials. But we need to hold on to the majors. We need to focus on Christ. We need to focus on being prepared for whenever he decides to come back. So don't be scared of this book of the Bible. The true Christian should never be afraid of the word of God. I don't mean that arrogantly. I remember when I taught this in 2016, I had an entire family of four leave our church because the wife said to me, "I can't believe you'd have the audacity to teach such a scary thing like Revelation." And I said, "Ma'am, a true believer should never be afraid of the word of God." It should not be scared of the word of God. If we are living correctly, there's nothing to be afraid of. If we will humbly focus on the themes of this book, I'm telling you, you're going to be challenged by it. You're going to be blessed by it. And it's going to beg three questions from us, okay? I just told you you're not supposed to be afraid of this book, but three sobering questions. The first one is, "How much do we actually love Jesus?" Do we love him more than our own life? Do we love him more than our dreams and aspirations? Do we love him more than our own desires? Do we love him more than our family? It gets a little complicated when you start asking questions like that, doesn't it? Do we love him more than our nationalism? Do we love him more than our dependency on the government or whatever the case may be? We're going to have to really ask and dig, "How much do I really love Jesus? Do I love him enough to be socially excommunicated? Do I love him enough to be maybe even physically harmed for my faith? Do I love him that much?" And that brings us to the second thing, which is similar to the first. How committed are we to our faith? And again, I'm not trying to be rude, but if we're too busy to come to church now, if this is not a priority now, when we get physically threatened for calling ourselves Christians, will it be a bigger priority then? If we don't make the time to pray now, if we don't make the time to re-door of God now, how will we do that when it becomes more difficult? How committed are we to our faith? And then the last question is a little intimidating, it is a little sobering. As we go through the book of Revelation, the whole point of Revelation is not to pinpoint an exact time or an exact event that we can look at and say, "Jesus is about to come back." The point of Revelation is to make sure that you and I are ready to see our Creator face to face. Now listen, we're all going to see God face to face, whether you're a believer or not. For some of us, when we see God face to face, it will be the most beautiful, glorious thing that you can't even imagine yet. And then to some of us, it will be the most terrifying thing to see the face of God because we haven't lived in agreement with him, we haven't lived in a relationship with him. So I just want to challenge you, I want to encourage you, I think you're going to love this, I think we're going to have a great time, I think we're all going to learn a lot, and I think it's going to bless us. Bless us as a church and bless you as an individual. Would you buy your heads with me, please?