Introduction to Revelation

We're starting into this awesome book of Revelation. Hello. Go ahead and grab kind of a group here of handouts. You get one group. Hold on. Not just one. The whole group. Yeah, that's right. The whole group at once. Missed a page there. OK, so do feel free.

And so anyway, with this book, here is this book of 22 chapters. We're going to take the entire year to go through it. Today, we're not diving into any specific part of it yet. Next week, we will. We'll be beginning at the beginning, going through it sequentially. But today is kind of an introduction, looking ahead. What are we looking at it? And particularly this morning, how do we look at it?

That ends up being critical. How many of you have read through the book of Revelation and wondered what on earth or what in heavens is going on, right? Yeah, you read through it and you go, whoa, what is this? A great many people are baffled by it. It happens to be, I'd have to say, one of my favorites. I love it. And this is going to blow some circuits, perhaps.

It is one of the easiest books in the Bible to interpret. It is a piece of cake to interpret. Yeah, that's right. It is one of the simpler books out there to understand, if we understand it correctly. And we're going to lay out here, just this morning, what are the principles by which we're going to understand it. First of all, we're going to look at it, John the Apostle is the author.

He, at that time, was, as far as we know, the last living apostle. Quite on in years, he was likely among the younger of the apostles in his time with the Lord. But now he has likely outlived them all. The record that we have was that he was the only one that died a natural death. All the rest of the Apostles had died by this time, and they had died a death under persecution. So here's John in a rather unique position. He is the same one who wrote the Gospel of John, the fourth Gospel, and the same one who wrote the relatively brief letters, the Epistles of John.

The date and place, about 96 AD from the Isle of Patmos. It was a prison island just off the coast of what is now the west end of Turkey. And so this island was this kind of prison slave island. There is a cave there that has traditionally been called St. John's Cave. the place where he would have been. Tough to tell with certainty if that's the cave, but the island is the place where he was situated.

There are certainly a variety of teachings. We're going to address that here in a little bit. There are even those who deliberately shied away from teaching and even commenting on this book. John Calvin wrote a commentary on almost every other New Testament book. He threw up his hands at this one. Nancy and I, prior to living here, after a short jaunt in Texas, we were in Carson City, Nevada. A pastor there started in the Revelation. After two weeks, he gave up and said, we're changing.

Basically, a lot of people get exasperated or puzzled by it. Here's how we're going to approach it. In the middle of page one there, We're going to interpret the book of Revelation literally, and that of course includes understanding figures of speech and what the symbols mean. We'll talk about that. But we're going to take it literally.

That's the first step. If the plain literal sense makes sense, seek no other sense is one of the axioms we'll be using. And here's why. Here's one of the reasons. When the over 100 prophecies of Christ's first coming were given in the Old Testament, they were given and fulfilled literally. Let me give you a for instance. We just saw it in the Christmas season.

The wise men came to Herod. Herod apparently didn't understand the scriptures, but he called in the scholars of his day, because after all, he was right there in Jerusalem, right? So the wise men come in, Herod calls in the scholars, and he asks them, where is the Messiah to be born? And what did they answer? Where was the Messiah to be born?

Bethlehem, right? The Bethlehem, even Bethlehem in Judea. Because by the way, there's another Bethlehem up near Nazareth. It's the one in Judea. Where do you get that? They read Micah 5.2 and they took it literally. They didn't take Bethlehem as some symbol for something else. They took it literally. And so they interpreted prophecy literally. And that principle is how they understood all the Old Testament prophecies.

Then the next one there, when Christ spoke repeatedly against the teachings of the Pharisees, he never rebuked them or argued over their literal interpretation of prophecy. He didn't dicker with them or call them on the carpet over that point. Orthodox Jews today, based on the New Testament alone, and I met with an Orthodox rabbi here a couple years back just to kind of talk with him about these points. Based on the Old Testament alone, and about 70% of Revelation is straight out of the Old Testament, believe this.

There will come upon the earth a terrible time of tribulation. The tribulation will last seven Jewish years, 360 days each in the Jewish year. The Antichrist, whom the Orthodox Jews call Armaless, will come to deceive and destroy. And at the end of the seven-year tribulation, the Messiah will come, defeat his enemies, the earth from Jerusalem for a long time. They don't have the 1,000 year figure out of chapter 20 of Revelation, but they say it's a long time. So basically the outline is very similar to what we see a literal understanding of scriptures indicating. Yeah. Yes. Pardon? Yes, and you will in fact find passages that talk about everlasting. The question mark they didn't have resolved in their own mind is how long is this present earth good for? And they didn't have that settled.

And in fact, that's not well resolved until 2 Peter and Revelation chapter 21 verse 1. So the new heavens and new earth thing was something that they had a foggy sense of. The end of Isaiah makes some reference to it, but it's not clarified until 2 Peter And Revelation chapter 21 verse 1, those two passages say, there'll be an end of this present heavens and earth and the beginning of a new. And that was what was not clear to them. The other thing is Revelation chapter 20, six times, says a thousand years.

And they didn't have that figure either. So they just said, well, as we read this, it sounds like a long time, but we're not sure how this all works out. So it's a matter of things that weren't revealed to them but are revealed in the New Testament towards the end of it. Okay, let's go on to page two there.

Here are some additional principles for interpreting literally. And these, I think, are some powerful tools for us to have a solid insight into what the book of Revelation is telling us. When John uses like or as, as he does over a hundred times, We take that to be a comparison with the thing he uses as a comparison. Examples.

Revelation 1.16, which we'll look at in just a couple of weeks here.

His face was like the sun shining in its strength. How is that different from saying his face was the sun? Yeah, it's making a comparison, and it's very clear he's making a comparison, isn't it? See? Like or as is used many times. And so what John would do, imagine, here's John, he's trying to write down for our benefit, here's what I saw. And so what he does in order to make things clear is again and again and again, from the first chapter all the way to the end, he compares things that he sees with things that he was familiar with and I would say in most, if not all cases, we're familiar with as well. It's like the sun, hair like wool, etc. Comparisons again and again and again so that we can understand what he was seeing by making the comparison with what we do know and see and understand. The next one is, a great star fell from heaven burning like what? like a torch. And he does that again and again.

That was from chapter 8. Here's the next one. When the text explains the symbol right in the text, we simply take John's explanation. Isn't that easy? And in fact, I went and charted this thing up and I filled a whole page full of things that he explained. This means this. This means this. This means this.

So if you start putting these things together, all these like and as, and he uses that all the way through the book, and then this means this, all through the book, I mean, things start getting real clear. It actually becomes one of the more simple books to read and understand once we begin using these principles. Let's take a look at the next one. Number four, we will examine carefully the word usage, grammar, and verb tenses that John uses. This is just simply, you know, what is he saying, looking real carefully at how the words are put together. John is not terribly complex in the way he writes, by the way, which makes it easier. He's not a complicated writer.

We'll examine everything in context. We won't be grabbing things. out of their context. We're going to be looking at the context as we read through, okay? So it won't be, oh, I know what this is, boing, and grab it out of context. No, everything will be in context, okay? Next principle. We'll interpret according to history, and it says tea culture should be the culture in which John wrote.

If you were to look at me with exhaustion and tell me I'm out of gas, what do you mean? Do you mean I need to put some petroleum in you? No, it's a figure of speech, isn't it? It's a figure of speech that we use in order to tell somebody I'm out of energy.

We understand the figure of speech. John will use similar figures of speech. And so we're going to understand in the context of John's culture what that figure of speech means. Now think about this. So who is John? He is a guy who is a Jewish fisherman. Do you get that? A Jewish fisherman.

He seems well connected with the priesthood and the Sanhedrin. The Gospel of John reports things about the Sanhedrin and the priesthood that none of the other Gospels record. Because of that, and because of some subsequent writings, it was even possible that he was a priest. Although I would say that that's, while possible, not certain. Now, here's the other thing.

Because he is Jewish, and this is big, this is real big, one of the reasons, and one of the main reasons why people get confused reading the book of Revelation, is we have been brought up with a culture that descends from the Greek way of thinking of things. And the Greek way of thinking of things is, how does it look?

So we read that Christ has this sword coming out of his mouth. And by the way, it wasn't a small sword. It was a ramphaya, which is a five-foot barbarian battle sword. And we think, heaven sakes, man, what does that look like? Well, it looks crazy. Add to that that he's got eyes like the sun, his face is shining, and he's got hair like wool. Well, what we look at with a Greek-thinking background is, what does it look like? It looks monstrous.

The way John wrote was with a Jewish mindset, which meant, what did it mean? Hair like wool, it's white, talks about great age. Eyes like the sun, doesn't mean it's blinding to look at him per se, but he is an incredible source of light. And he has great insight.

It's what does it mean, not what does it look like. Our tendency is to look at the picture. We're going to see this before we get through chapter one. Our tendency is to look at the picture that that describes and say, what does it look like? And it looks like a monstrosity. When the reality is what John is trying to convey is not what does it look like, but what does it mean?

What's the significance? And we will find out that the significance is not just something to guess at. But remember, 70% of Revelation is right out of the Old Testament, right? So I have the entire Old Testament context to give me understanding and insight as to what these various things mean. The sword coming out of his mouth, that's out of Isaiah.

We'll take a look at these, but that's a very important thing. I want to give you a parallel to that that may be helpful. When we sing songs here on Sunday morning, we like the verses to rhyme, right? I mean, if they don't rhyme, we're going to go, man, what kind of weird song is this?

That's the Greek mind. Again, it's how does it sound? How does it look? The Jewish poetry and Jewish songs, the words don't rhyme, except in meaning. They rhyme in meaning, not in sound. Again, in our Greek mind, it's how does it sound? How does it look? In the Jewish mind, it's what does it mean? Every time. Okay? Okay. Number seven.

We will take advantage of the fact that 70% of the book of Revelation is straight out of the Old Testament. All of those Old Testament contexts are available to us to provide insight into the meaning of passages in Revelation. Because we look at these things, we're looking at them, and not only are we looking at them often from a Greek mind, what does it look like? Feel free, by the way, to grab a pen now. Let's get you in context here. Thank you.

As we look at them, rather than looking at them with the Greek mind, we look at them with the Jewish mind, but also with the understanding that More than two-thirds of what John is writing has already been written in the Old Testament. If we understand, oh, that's where that came from, then we can go back to the passage where that came from and get some insight. So it's like we've got a commentary on more than two-thirds of it already. Here's a for instance.

Christ is the Lamb. What does that mean to you? Sacrifice. He is the one who was sacrificed. That we more easily understand. But it's the kind of thinking that's going to help us as we go through the Book of Revelation to make sure we have the right understanding. It's, again, what does it mean, not what does it look like. Very insightful point here. And number eight, we will read that Israel is Israel and the church is the church. We'll differentiate between the saints of the church age and the saints of the tribulation. Number nine, we'll take full advantage of John's amazing consistency. This is the point that I made.

Christ is called the Lamb thirty times, which by the way, he does twice also in John chapter one. No other New Testament author calls Christ the Lamb. but John alone. And he does so in Revelation 30 times. And he does so all the way through. Christ is the Lamb, the sacrifice. And we're going to see Christ again and again as God's sacrifice, even in the new heavens and new earth. He will be called the Lamb. Won't this be amazing? Think about, you know, this is all gone. We're done here, okay? We're in the new heavens, new earth. All this is past and behind.

Christ will still be the Lamb, the one sacrificed for us. Won't that be amazing? It will still say, who He is will still say, He loved and He gave. He loved and He gave. He loved and He gave. Okay? On into eternity. So this is amazing. So John is amazingly consistent. That's number one.

The sword in his mouth, which I mentioned, that's out of the book of Isaiah, five times. In each case, John used the Greek word for the barbarian's battle sword, which is a five foot long sword. In the Roman battle methods, they would have Roman short swords that would be a couple feet long max, and the Romans would depend on great skill with this sword and use it very carefully. and with great practice. The barbarian battle sword was swung overhead and was just intended to hack. That's the word that is used for the sword coming out of Christ's mouth.

And once Christ returns, it's never used again. John is amazingly consistent. He uses it again and again until Christ comes back and returns. And once he's returned to earth and done with judgment, Never again is it used, but the Lamb is. John is very consistent. Let's look at another one.

The phrase loud voice occurs 19 times and the loud voice never comes from someone on the earth. The loud voice is always coming out of heaven. Always. Here's 19 times used again and again and again and again. Always used out of the heavens. Never of an earthly being.

There are other ways we could talk about John's consistency, and we'll get there. But I think this is another thing we can look at. John is such a consistent writer, and he's also a very simple writer. He doesn't use compound words or complex sentences unless he has to. Those things are to our advantage. Let's look at page three.

Number 10, we'll recognize that there are some things that are clearly spelled out, but will not be understood clearly as to their application until the time they're fulfilled. Daniel did not know the fulfillment of all the prophecies he wrote, but those of later centuries did. We don't know, for example, the time when the Lord will come to take us home.

Many people have tried to guess. Many people have tried to guess. Those who become believers during the coming seven years of Tribulation will indeed understand when that time occurred. They'll look back on it and say, that's it. And it will be abundantly clear to them. Some in our time may struggle to guess at the identity of the Antichrist, but those believers living during the Tribulation will come to a place of certainty when the right time has come to pass.

People are forever guessing who the Antichrist is. You know that the Franciscans, who is an accepted Roman Catholic group, begun around the year 1200, they declared the Pope the Antichrist back in their day. This was eight centuries ago. People have been trying to guess for centuries who is the Antichrist. You know what?

I don't think that we'll ever know. Because I think it will not be known until the tribulation period, at which point in time it will be abundantly clear who this guy is. They'll know for sure. We don't need to know. The next one, sometimes the right time must come for a truth to be fully understood.

Oh, that's what it was. Remember the disciples, Jesus is telling them, the Son of Man is going to be, you know, betrayed and crucified and then the Son of Man will rise again. They didn't understand. Did they afterwards? Yes. Yeah, quite well. It will be abundantly clear at the right time. It's not clear now and people try to guess and feel compelled to try to guess and it's not right. And their guesses are wrong.

Isn't part of the difficulty here in regard to when the rapture is between the pre-wrap and the post? Well, yeah, and we'll talk about that. It'll be a few weeks before we get there. But yeah, when the rapture is is one of the other confusions. I don't believe, and we'll explain why, I don't believe it's at all unclear as to when that'll take place. But that is an additional area of confusion. Here's some things we're not gonna do. We won't try to force everything we read to fit into current events. This is what people have done for centuries.

During, let's see, Muhammad died around 632. 632 was the year. The next hundred years was a period of Muslim military advance in all three directions. From the Middle East, they headed east into Asia. leaving Muslim groups in areas like Pakistan, Indonesia, even the Philippines.

They went into North Africa and slaughtered the Christians in North Africa. And they would slaughter tens of thousands of Christians. They went into Europe, and it wasn't until 100 years to the year after Muhammad died, 732, that they finally turned around the Muslim advance just outside of Paris in the city of Tours. There was a guy by the name of Charles Martel who said, Christian Europe good, Muslim Europe bad, and gathered together enough troops to turn around the Muslim invasion. So the Muslim advance there was horrific and thousands were slaughtered, sometimes 10,000 a day were slaughtered by the Muslim sword.

Many people thought, oh, this is the end. This is the end. Finally, they turned around the Muslim advance and got, whew, we turned that around. Then the Vikings came. They thought, oh no, the Vikings are the end. And it's been one thing after another over the centuries where Christians have thought, well, this is the end. And by the way, we had our Y2K thing. There was a Y1K panic as well.

People, you know, Christians have been jumping at setting a date and figuring this is the time for centuries. And the thing we're not going to do is back. Exactly that. We won't set dates for the Lord's return. Here's Acts 1, verses 6 and 7. So when they had come together, the disciples, they were asking Him, saying, Lord, is it at this time that you are restoring the kingdom to Israel? And He said to them, It is not for you to know the times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority. You're not going to know. You're not going to know. Not going to know.

With these words spoken, Why is it that people continue to try and guess? I think it's a few different things. One is it's a compulsion. It's like they didn't have it figured out, but I do. Instead of understanding what the Lord said directly to them, face to face, you're not going to know Him. You're not going to know Him. And part of it is just, in a sense, it must be ignorance or unbelief. But there's also this driven human compulsion.

Oh, I know, I know. It's kind of like the kids in the elementary school class. Pick me! Pick me! You know? And there's this driven compulsion to be the one to say, see, I called it. The only thing is it happens again and again. I've seen a pamphlet, 88 Reasons Why Jesus is Coming in 1988. And the next year, it was 89. Yeah. And guess what? That was 20 years ago and it's still wrong, right? Okay. Yes, there's that. And it is so easy to get confused. 1st and 2nd Thessalonians. We had an elective not too long ago in 1st Thessalonians. 1st Thessalonians and 2nd Thessalonians are both about people claiming, oh, the Lord's already come.

And he said, no, no, no. You guys have got it confused. Here's your point of confusion. Let's get this straight. No, He hasn't come already. That's a false claim. And so, yeah, that error, that compulsion has been around there, not just recently, but for centuries. Well, notice in this passage here, the father has fixed it, right? The father has fixed it by his own authority. This isn't something he's, you know, he knows the time. It's not been revealed to us.

The original date setters were the ones Paul had to correct. He wrote the books of 1 and 2 Thessalonians. Somebody was telling the church that Christ had already come, just as some do today. There is a group called the Preterists who believe that Christ came, and there are degrees of them, but to summarize it quickly, they believe that Christ came in judgment in 70 AD, when the Romans defeated the Jews in Jerusalem, about August of 70, and that group says that Christ, the full preterists, I'll say, says that Christ isn't coming again.

That's it. He came and it's over. And by the way, those guys also teach that we're in the new heavens and new earth and Satan is bound. Okay, that doesn't sell very well with me. What's that? The so-called Bible Answer Man? Yeah, that's what he holds to. Preterism.

Let's take a look here on page 4 as a chart. that I think is real helpful. Nancy has said that this chart just clarified a lot of things for her. One of the things that people struggle with is that it alternates scenes between heavens and earth. Those are the passages in which it alternates between heavens and earth. One of the ways that we could describe it is this.

The Apostle Paul wrote like a lawyer, like a logician. He made logical statements. As a matter of fact, in the early 1800s and before, lawyers used to study Romans as part of their preparation for being a lawyer because it was a logical progression. Because of this, because of this, therefore this. And Paul laid everything out logically. John instead writes like a musician.

He has this thing that goes into crescendos and then drops down again, then goes into another crescendo and drops down. It does so alternately, just like you see in this chart here. The heavenly scenes we've got colored in blue, and the earthly scenes they're in a brown color. And so that alternation between heavens and the earth, once you get that figured out, is one of the things that helps clarify what's going on. is that it keeps switching scenes and it's helpful to know which scene are we in. Where are we? What are we talking about here? And people losing sight of that just end up seeing the thing as a swimming, indecipherable bunch of messages. When in fact, it's this syncopation between heaven and earth, this musical score, if you will. It's quite systematic. Alright, one more thing. You've got a chart here, page 505.

It says, the book of Revelation, a prophetic masterpiece. And I think that's a very good way to put it. We mentioned the book of Revelation is 70% out of the Old Testament, but what John did is to weave that all into one book. It is a prophetic masterpiece. It is a phenomenal piece of work. written like a grand musical score.

We have as a subtitle underneath that, Christ the Lamb. We mentioned that a number of times. The Lion of Judah. The Root of David. King of Kings and Lord of Lords. By the way, that's his title over the Gentiles. He is the King of the Jews, singular. and King of Kings, plural, and Lord of Lords, plural, over the Gentiles. So those titles have two different directions of application. King of the Jews over the Jews. King of Kings and Lord of Lords over the Gentiles, because there's multiple nations. And then the Alpha and the Omega. We'll talk more about what that means. The Alpha and the Omega are what? What are those?

The first and the last letters of the Greek alphabet. The book of Isaiah, again, has I am the beginning and the end. That's what God says, right? I am the beginning and the end. The first and the last. That's the Alpha and the Omega. The first and the last letters. By the way, the rabbis taught that the first and last letters in the Hebrew alphabet were the way that God has described. He is the Aleph and the Toph, the first and last. So in the Greek language, in the Greek culture, we do the same thing by saying the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last beginning and the end, just like it says in Isaiah multiple times.

All right, now as you look at this chart here, what we have laid out, we're going to continue to come back to this chart, which is one of the reasons why we have it laid out here in front of us and we'll return to it, is it kind of gives us, where are we? Where are we located as we progress our way through this book over the next year?

The first chapter will be John's introduction to the book. But then we'll go on to John's vision of Christ from about verse 9 of the first chapter to verse 20. John's first vision of Christ. And a lot of the things that we'll see later on in the book get begun and started and expressed right there in the very first chapter.

The next chapters 2 and 3 are the seven churches of Asia. The messages, sometimes people use the word letters, but they're actually messages, to the seven churches. And then from chapters four and five we'll see God's throne room. This is a time that we'll see is after what has been termed the rapture. The taking up and it is in God's throne room. This is where the seven seals A seventh-sealed scroll is opened. And by the way, it's really interesting as we get there. Here is John writing what he sees on the heavenly scene.

He is really struggling to maintain context. The invitation goes out to open up the scroll. Who is worthy? And of course it's going to take a while for the answer to come back. This is heavenly time. And meanwhile, John starts crying, because nobody has answered it yet, right? And one of the twenty-four elders says, stop crying! You're out of context here. There's no reason to cry. Christ, the Lamb, He's the one who is worthy to open these, see?

We're going to see 150 verses, remember that alternation? 150 verses on the heavenly scene. And this is one of the things I love about Revelation. It's a narrative description of the heavenly scene, which is wonderful. There's no place like it in the whole Bible that is like that. And as we'll see, it describes it with you and I there with them. That's cool. That's major cool. I like that.

Then from chapter 6 to chapter 19 is the period of the Tribulation. This is the seven-year period that is, well, the Jews expect that seven-year period of time because of the Book of Daniel. That's exactly what they expect. It consists of most of the time in those chapters.

Finishing there with the second coming and then beginning the millennium, chapter 26, six times a thousand years, Christ will reign on a substantially restored earth. We will be with Him in resurrected bodies. We will be with Him during that time, reigning with Him. And if the indications are understood, I think reigning with him will also include us making judgments. Isn't that interesting? You ready for that? Could be as close as seven years from now. And then the new heavens and new earth relating to the question earlier that George had here.

That being chapters 21 and 22. That's kind of the grand sweep as we go through the book and we'll take typically one to three weeks, more often two or three, to go through each chapter. We'll just kind of keep coming back here to say where are we and to stay oriented and to get the picture. The bottom part of this chart uses Revelation 119 as the outline for the book. Let me see what I mean there. Revelation 119 says, write therefore to John, the things which you have seen, that's John's vision of Christ here in chapter 1, the things which are, that's the churches in chapters 2 and 3, he's going to give, here's your current assessment of these seven churches here in Revelation, that's chapters 2 and 3, those are the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter, that is in the future. That's chapter four through the end. We're doing okay so far? Anybody's circuits blown? Yes, George is. I don't disagree. We've marked the rapture, the tribulation, and the Millennium Line. I don't disagree with the order. Someone that does would argue that we're not assuming that we wish to prove. Oh, certainly I would say that.

I'm going to talk briefly about The very thing that you have there, it's the next two pages. The danger of interpreting something is that for the most part, most everybody in this room is probably not going to disagree with the idea that the rapture is going to occur before the tribulation.

There's a literal rain of Christ on the earth, where we probably would have left a long time ago. But in order to be faithful to the text, assuming what we wish to prove. Here's what I'm laying out. We've first of all laid out here is the approach that we're going to take.

Those who will take a different approach will definitely come up with a different interpretation. And we'll go into the reasons why that's the case. As a matter of fact, with that, that's a good intro, let's go on to the next slide there. This is interpretation history, page one and two, one of two rather. This is the history of how the Bible has been interpreted.

The top half, above the timeline, are those who took a generally literal approach to interpreting scripture, and the bottom half is the history of those who took an allegorical approach to scripture. That is, forcing an allegory upon the passage. And that comes to your differentiation of views there in terms of how do I approach the passage. What you'll see on the top there is the literal interpretation approach, the authors of the Old Testament on into the scholars at the time that Herod asked, you know, where is the Messiah to be born?

Took things literally. Ezra and the scribes, Christ and the apostles, interpreted literally. When you look at the 100 plus prophecies about Christ's first coming, they were interpreted literally. Churches in Syria and Asia Minor and the Jews continued to interpret scripture literally for the first few hundred years.

It was after that period of time that the allegorical interpretation worked its way into the church and there is the source of most of the other interpretations. Is allegorical interpretation being forced on the passage? What has happened then is since that time, when the allegorical interpretation began to take over, Jews in some oppressed churches held to literal interpretation, and now some Protestants and Jews hold to literal interpretation. There was a history of allegorical interpretation that began with the Greek skeptics.

That is, the Greeks, for many centuries, while the Old Testament was being written, had their myths. You've heard about all these Greek myths, right? About the time of Plato, they began to write, well, those were really just allegories. They weren't really things that happened and weren't really true. They were just allegories, right?

What we have there is Philo, who was a Jewish scholar, Origen, who wrote in about the middle of the 3rd century, and Augustine, and I looked it up, both of those are acceptable pronunciations. Those three fellows are some of the key names in the progression of allegorical interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures. The teaching came to be that the literal understanding was immature, spiritually immature, and that maturity was achieved by allegorizing the passage. Let's take a for instance, and this is on page two, of allegorical and allegorized interpretation according to Revelation 7, 1-8. Revelation 7, 1 through 8, let me summarize it quickly.

This is the 144,000 that are described there. The 144,000 is 12,000 each of 12 tribes of Jews, and it summarized 144,000 of Israel, of the tribes of Israel. Here is the Coptic Orthodox. This is one of the groups that does the allegorizing. Understanding. This is a commentary I have by Tadros Yacoub Malati.

He keeps the earth, the sea, and the trees. That is, no harm will affect those whose souls rested the earth, nor those who are still confused, the sea, nor the fruitful, the trees. And we come back and confirm that in this chapter the word Israel points not to a state or even a people, but to the spiritual Israel, in other words, to the church. So it doesn't matter that it listed all the tribes, each by name, those are allegorized.

No, that means the denominations of the church. Here's another one, the Jehovah's Witnesses. And by the way, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, those groups almost as a rule allegorize scripture. They take a passage and apply allegory to it. So Jesus is the archangel that you see in Revelation and the one called another angel in Revelation 7-2. force that meaning on it.

Yes. Just going back to the Coptics for a moment. A majority of the Coptics, I think it's the denomination of the country, is Egypt. Are most of them in Egypt? Yes. Right. Typically, there are some Coptics that are here in the U.S., but originally from Egypt. I put together a thing when I was working at the airport public relations manager. they asked me to put together a thing when the Coptic Pope came. Right. And he pulled me out of the group and blessed me. Yes. Because of my disability. Right. And did it one more time as if it hadn't taken before he left. Yes. But I was thinking they were Egyptians. Yes, essentially they originally are of Egyptian ethnic background.

The 144,000 according to Jehovah's Witnesses are those faithful Jehovah's Witnesses. It doesn't matter that the text describes each, you know, gives each one of the Jewish tribal names and says they're of Israel. It says, nope, that's 144,000 faithful Jehovah's Witnesses saved by works and destined for heaven up to the year 1935.

But that's all arrived at by allegorizing, not taking what the text says, but forcing a meaning on the text, allegorizing it. So that's the Jehovah's Witness approach. Here's another one, Matthew Henry. By these winds we suppose are meant those errors and corruptions in religion which would occasion a great deal of trouble and mischief to the Church of God. So he applies this passage, not to Jews, but to the Church of God. Here's Albert Barnes.

The reference to the particular tribes may be a designed allusion to the Christian Church as it would be divided into denominations or known by different names. So again, it doesn't matter that here's 12 tribes, numbered as 12, given as 12,000 each, each tribe named. It doesn't matter. It's nameless, numberless, Christian denominations.

That's what allegorizing does. Now, we talk about the four views, and this is some reference to George's question. Of these four primary views of Revelation, the first three involve allegorizing the book of Revelation and other prophecy passages in Scripture, forcing an allegory on the text in some form or another. The futurist view, which is the one we'll be presenting here, takes a literal approach to Scripture. The four views, to go through them in sequence, are the idealist view, That is, it doesn't have anything particularly to do with time or anything specific. It's just a symbolic picture of the struggle between good and evil. That's it. That's the idealist view. Everything is allegories. Nothing specific about time or people or anything. The next one is the Preterist view. We've introduced that briefly.

The idea that Revelation has already been fulfilled by the time of Constantine. or even by the fall of Jerusalem. And a goodly number of those who will approach the book of Revelation will look at it from that viewpoint. It is really describing how the Romans came in judgment against the Jews, and they leave it at that. For example, it talks in Revelation about hundred-pound hailstones. Well, they'll say, well, that's the Romans' catapult balls falling on Jerusalem. So it's not hailstones, it's the Romans attack. Everything they interpret is the Romans attack. The historicist view, and this by the way is commonly what a lot of the cults will use, but not exclusively.

Revelation is a picture of the church between the first and second comings of Christ. The Seventh-day Adventist Church, for example, I have a lot of prophecy seminars, you may have noticed that, and a lot of their views are reflected here. They look at revelations as describing things that are stretched out over time and history. And then the last one, which is the view we'll be presenting here, is that chapters 1 and 3 of Revelation took place in the early church, but chapters 4 through 22 are yet future. That is, remember, the index or outline from Revelation 119, the things to come.

So anyway, I realize this was a very brief answer, but I think one of the things that helps clarify the fact we've got all these different points is, what is the approach? If I take an allegorized approach, which by the way didn't come from the Bible or Jesus or the Apostles, it came from the Greek skeptics who didn't believe their myths, that approach has been applied to scripture and several of these views that are often easily confused come essentially from the Greek skeptics not believing their myths, not from the picture of what did the Old Testament authors themselves use, and what did Christ and the Apostles use as their approach to Scripture. Really quick answer to your question, but that's where it amounts to. We're out of time, but any quick thoughts?

So the history view would be a Orthodox Roman Catholic. Historicist view would be some of the different cult groups and I mentioned Seventh-day Adventist being one of those. And then several of the other groups that are even mainline church would tend to look at that and make that application. A lot of the Roman Catholic groups and even Luther followed this historicist view and tried to plug everything into, again, it's looking at, it's again trying to pinpoint current events. This is what's happening now, so that must be what it's describing. Yeah? That would be, as a quick summary, the mainline Lutheran churches would follow this historicist interpretation.

However, you can find individuals and smaller groups among them that fall into every group. Every single one of these. So that would be a generalization. However, I would say that it is among, say, the various Lutheran churches and they have different branches.

It's unusual for them to have a fully literal view. Almost all of them, though they spread themselves among these, almost all of them have some allegorized view, including the historicist interpretation. what I was going to say is I think it's important to note that you came to me how you are going to do this.

Not out of pulling stuff out of air, but from good hermeneutics. This is how we study the Bible and applying the same things that we would apply to the book of Ephesians, to the book of Revelation. That's how you got these are the things that we're going to do and these are the things we aren't going to do. It's not he's pulling stuff out of the air and deciding what he wants the text to say, but this is how you study the Bible and this is what has come from how I study the Bible. Sure.

It is essentially an approach that you can find in scripture itself. Again, come back to the point, where's the Messiah to be born? Guess what? There's Bethlehem in Judea, and it's literally that. It's not, gee, I wonder what he meant, you know? Once they pulled out the Old Testament and said the guy's headed about six miles south and went straight to Bethlehem. There just wasn't any question. It was literally understood.

So I think that's a key thing as we look at this. It is the pattern that Scripture itself has used that we're wanting to apply as we look at here at the Book of Revelation. It is the pattern that even the Jews of Christ's time understood and Orthodox Jews still use today.

Well, we've done what we can. Feel free to get questions or whatnot later. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you as we begin this journey through the book of Revelation. You have, by your very intent, intended to reveal truth to us and to give us comfort. We're embarking on the one book that begins with the promise of blessing for those who read it. And so we thank you for that. We take on faith that you will fulfill that as we step our way through it. We thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.