Ryan Hale

We prefer to talk about God being, in His very essence, love. We prefer mercy and grace. We prefer forgiveness.

But chapter 14 in the book of Revelation gives us the other side of the coin. It gives us a true understanding of what we are referring to when we talk about love, mercy, grace, and forgiveness. When you think about mercy, grace, and forgiveness, you must weigh it against the reality of the punishment that you deserve for what you have done.

In this case, God is a holy God. Perfect. Without blemish.

And yet, we are a sinful people. Rebellious. Willing to leave God and His plans and commands behind in a moment.

Because of our sin and disobedience, we deserve punishment. But even the word “punishment” doesn’t really capture what would come from God. That word, at least in my mind, brings about images of a momentary and temporary pain, disappointment, or lack.

That isn’t really what we are talking about. Because God is holy, his glory is infinite and eternal. And if God is robbed of His glory, what He truly deserves, then those that have robbed Him of it will receive His wrath.

And that brings us to verses 9 through 11 in Revelation 14:

“If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives its mark on their forehead or on their hand, they, too, will drink the wine of God’s fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. They will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment will rise for ever and ever. There will be no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and its image, or for anyone who receives the mark of its name.”

Revelation 14:9-11

The angel is saying that if worship and glory goes to another, in this case another that stands in direct opposition to Christ, the one who truly deserves the worship, the glory, and the honor, they will receive the wine of God’s fury. That wine has been poured into the cup of God’s wrath, and that wrath will be poured out upon those who have worshipped the beast. Jesus and the angels will be there to see the wrath that is poured out upon those who worship the one who stands in oppostion to Christ as witnesses to the wrath that God will put upon them.

I don’t always find it very easy to understand each of the intricacies and detail of the book of Revelation. That’s not to say it isn’t worth the time. I think it is. It just isn’t easy for me to try to dig into it and keep it all straight.

For example, in today’s reading in Revelation 12, there is a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and a crown of 12 stars. Then there is a dragon who appears with seven heads and ten horns, with seven crowns, one for each head. The woman has a child that the dragon tries to kill but is unable. Then the dragon tries to kill the woman but is unable.

The imagery is amazing, and again, I do think it is important to try to understand what John is saying through the imagery. I think he is trying to use the language that he has to describe what he is seeing, but at times it is difficult for me to follow or understand the detail of what is being said.

But I think that there are some pretty important points that we can get out of what we find here. For example, after the dragon is defeated, we see that a loud voice calls out and proclaims the following:

“Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.”

Revelation 12:10-12

So, what do we see here:

First, we can see that salvation has come because the Messiah has come upon the earth. This is, of course, speaking of Jesus. It is speaking of the he who came to the earth to reestablish his Kingdom here upon the earth. God came in the form of Jesus to reestablish His kingdom.

But the Messiah did not come with weakness. He came to defeat evil. He came to throw out the ruler of this world. That ruler is Satan and he has been defeated through Christ’s death on the cross. While it seemed that Satan had won, Jesus rose again, stood back up, and lives again. Satan is defeated because his ultimate weapon is death, but death has now been defeated. If Jesus can overcome death, all of those that come with him can do the same. So what can evil do? It can kill, but as followers of Christ, we will overcome death to spiritually live with Christ forever. Satan has no more weapons that can defeat us.

But that doesn’t mean that he won’t try. He will continue to wage war. Satan knows that he is defeated, but he is in a rage and will try to take down as many people with him as he can. The dragon is now on the earth and is waging war against God’s people, against those who hold fast to their testimony about Christ.

So what does this mean? We must be ready to fight? Are we brandishing our swords and guns? No, of course not. While there are other religious leaders who call for the destruction of their enemies – Mohammed, for example – Jesus calls us to love our enemies. Our weapons here on the earth are the word of God, prayer, and telling others the Good News of what Christ has done for us. We allow God to use us to expand His Kingdom here on the earth, but we know that Satan, and those who choose to follow him, even if they don’t realize that they are doing it and think that they are doing God’s will, will continue to wage war against the people of Christ.

I wrote about this yesterday in thinking about the mystery of God that has been accomplished. Some people have wondered: what is the mystery? To me, I think the answer is simple. God will reign as King over all of the earth. He will come again in the form of Jesus Christ to reign over his people on the earth.

And that is where the breaking of scrolls leads us. The Lamb is breaking the seals one at a time, and upon breaking the seventh seal, there are seven angels who blow their trumpets with various events that follow each of these trumpet blasts.

And then we come to the final trumpet blast. The end. The final judgment. And what happens?

The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said:

“The kingdom of the world has become
the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah,
and he will reign for ever and ever.”

Revelation 11:15

The world becomes that of the Messiah. Jesus is King already, but now we see that he defeats all of his enemies. Everything that stands in opposition to Jesus is wiped away. Destroyed forever. Instead, this kingdom of the world becomes Jesus’s Kingdom. And he will reign over this Kingdom forever.

This is the reality of the end of time that we are waiting to be accomplished. Are these times near? Only the Father knows the timing, but it certainly seems as if history is culminating and aligning with the scripture in these days. So to this I say Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus!

In Revelation 10, an angel comes to John, this time with a smaller scroll – or a smaller book, in some translations. The angel tells John that the seventh angel is about to blow the trumpet, and as he does, the mystery of God will be accomplished.

But in the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.”

Revelation 10:7

There is a lot of speculation about what this mystery is and what it is that will be accomplished. However, I don’t think that there needs to be much confusion. Jesus had come to reestablish his Kingdom, his rule and reign, on the earth. It had been his, but God’s people had rejected him, choosing instead to have a human king just like all of the nations that surrounded them.

But as Jesus came, he proclaimed to the people that the Kingdom of God had come near to them and that they needed to repent and believe. They needed to repent from their sins and believe in Jesus as both Savior as well as Lord, or King, over their lives. And so this is the mystery, that God Himself comes in the form of a man, in the form of Jesus Christ, to seek both Jews and Gentiles that he will purchase for God through his own blood, his own death on the cross. God Himself becomes the sacrifice that will bring forgiveness.

This is the same outcome that had been announced as the reason that the Lamb was worthy to break the seals on the scroll:

“You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased for God
persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.

You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
and they will reign on the earth.”

Revelation 5:9-10

And this is the same outcome that is proclaimed just as soon as the seventh angel sounded his trumpet:

“The kingdom of the world has become
the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah,
and he will reign for ever and ever.”

Revelation 11:15

The mystery, I believe, is exactly this, that God has returned to the earth in the form of Christ to rule and reign on the earth. He has done it once before, and he is returning to do it again.

Continuing on with the seven angels who were to blow their trumpets for the seventh seal that had been broken in heaven, we see that the fifth angel signals a time that Satan is given the key to the Abyss. He opens the shaft to the Abyss and from it comes a smoke that, within it, is found the demons of Hell.

When he opened the Abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. The sun and sky were darkened by the smoke from the Abyss. And out of the smoke locusts came down on the earth and were given power like that of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were not allowed to kill them but only to torture them for five months. And the agony they suffered was like that of the sting of a scorpion when it strikes. During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.

Revelation 9:2-6

We see here that these locusts are the creatures that come up from the Abyss, out of the pit of Hell. Their power is to torture, but it is limited to that as God does not give them the power to kill. These locusts do not prey upon the grass, upon plants, or upon trees, as normal locusts would, but instead upon those who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads.

So those that God has not sealed are the ones that they are allowed to torture. What is this seal? This the seal of the Holy Spirit as we’ve seen previously in other scriptures such as in 2 Corinthians:

Now it is God who makes both us and you stand firm in Christ. He anointed us, set his seal of ownership on us, and put his Spirit in our hearts as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come.

2 Corinthians 1:21-22

Or in the book of Ephesians:

And you also were included in Christ when you heard the message of truth, the gospel of your salvation. When you believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession—to the praise of his glory.

Ephesians 1:13-14

As we can see here, when we have heard the message of salvation, the Gospel, and we have believed in Christ and his message, God gives us the Holy Spirit. We are sealed in Christ. We are marked with the seal of the Holy Spirit, and that is the seal that we must have so that we will not experience this terrible trial from the seventh broken seal of the scroll. God has given us a way to be marked in Him, but that way is only through Christ. May we be found in Christ on that day, sealed by the Holy Spirit and not tormented by the spirits from out of the depths of the Abyss.

In public gatherings following a tragedy, the organizers of the event will often call for a moment of silence. It is a recognition of the tragedy that had happened, a call for a demonstration of respect for those that had been wronged or who had lost their lives, and a moment of remembrance. It can be a time for prayer, a time to ask God for mercy upon those that remain after the tragedy, or a moment to call for peace or blessing upon us.

John also saw a moment of silence take place, but this time it was in heaven. And this wasn’t even just a moment, per se, but instead a full half of an hour. It was a very long moment, but in this instance, not for something that had already happened, but for what was about to happen.

When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.

Revelation 8:1

The Lamb had just broken the seventh seal, and if the inhabitants of earth hadn’t already understood God’s wrath through the demonstration of his power and might, they were about to. Of course, we had already seen that many people had fled to the mountains and the caves and called upon the rocks to fall upon them because of the terror that had come upon them.

So that was the people’s reaction from the first six seals, but there was no moment of silence in heaven before breaking each of those seals. And now heaven recognizes that upon breaking this seventh seal, the real terror will begin.

The wrath of God is going to be poured out upon the earth. Massive numbers of people will be killed. Large swaths of the earth will be wiped out. And all of this before the true final battle for the earth.

Do we have any more doubts about the nature of God’s wrath? He will come to judge the evil that has been done on the earth, and it is not going to be pretty. It is going to be terrible. God’s judgment is not roses and rainbows. God’s judgment is wrath…and even to say that is to minimize the terror that people will feel as the recipients of His judgment. John’s words cannot even begin to help us feel the weight of what the people on the earth will experience.

May God help us and may we know Christ. Jesus is the Lamb that is worthy to break the seals. To know God, we must know Christ and come through him. There will be a moment of silence in heaven for the judgment that will be unleashed on the earth. May we be found in Christ so that we will know God and live with him instead of being the recipients of God’s eternal wrath.

John was allowed to see the end of time and how God would judge the world. One of the important scenes is the moment at which people from every nation, from every people group, are around the throne. Here is what it says:

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:

“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.”

Revelation 7:9-10

It says that there is a great multitude that no one could count. The number of people in this crowd was immense. They were all standing before the throne of God and before the Lamb. They are celebrating the Father and the Son, pictured as the Lamb in this case.

These were the people that, as noted back in chapter 5, were purchased for God by the Lamb with his blood. They were made clean from their sins, so this is why they are wearing white robes as the white signifies cleanliness, purity from sin as a result of the work of Christ, his sacrifice for them.

But I want to focus on what they are holding. They are holding palm branches. Palm branches signify victory in battle. As the kings and emperors would return home from war along with their armies, the people would line the streets and wave palm branches to welcome them, hailing their victories, and ultimate triumph in battle. These victories would mean defeat for their enemies, an expansion of the kingdom or empire, and peace for the people. All of these would be considered good things for the people.

In this case, as they hold palms in their hands, the people cry out for the victory that God has achieved.

God has defeated the enemy – he has defeated Satan and evil.

The Lamb has purchased for God people from every nation, tribe, people, and language. It is an incredible expansion for the Kingdom of God.

And now there will be peace for the people within the Kingdom of God. There will be no more struggle with sin. There will be no more fight against the Evil One, Satan. We will live under the protection of Christ as our true Shepherd.

And so the people cry out for God’s ultimate victory. They say that Salvation belongs to our God, and to the Lamb! Amen. Hosanna. Come Lord Jesus!

John saw the Lamb begin to open the seals, starting the time of the judgment of God. We initially see the first horse go out, a white horse whose rider bent upon conquest, but this conquest will bring with it a lot of destruction. And we then that is exactly what we see: Wars, scarcity of food, death by plagues and famines as well as by the wild beasts of the earth. The martyrs even call out to God asking for Him to avenge their deaths, but they are told to be patient because more people yet must be killed.

All of these things happening will make the people, including the kings of the nations, run to the mountains and the caves so that they can be saved. But even in the midst of these “protected” places, they experience such terror that they call out to the mountains and caves to simply fall on them because of their fear of the God’s wrath. God’s judgment is so strong that it strikes fear in the deepest places within even the greatest of men and women on the earth:

Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”

Revelation 6:15-17

So frequently, we think that we are in control. We think that we are an advanced society. We think that we have everything in hand. And yet, in this book of Revelation, we see that it all comes crumbling down. Through nothing more than a call for the riders of the various horses to come, God and His Christ send his judgment out into the earth causing terror amongst everyone. There will be no resistance and there will be no standing against their wrath. When it comes, it will not only be known, but it will also be felt. Deeply.

So for us, we must know the One who will bring judgment. We must come to the Father through Christ. And only through Jesus may we pass through the coming judgment into eternal life.

Jesus had called the Apostle John up into heaven in the spirit to reveal to him what would happen following the time of the church. In Revelation 5, we get a true picture of how heaven, and all of the creatures in heaven, whether they would be the angels, the elders around God’s throne, or otherwise, look upon Jesus.

First, let’s remember what John the Baptist said about Jesus:

The next day John saw Jesus coming toward him and said, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!

John 1:29

Here, we see John call Jesus the Lamb of God. Why a lamb? Because this lamb would be a sacrifice for the sins of the world. But a sacrifice completed by whom? John says that it was God’s Lamb. It is God Himself who is offering this sacrifice. And in fact, it is always God who provides. Even if others are offering the sacrifice, God is the One who provides the sacrifice.

For example, let’s look back to Abraham. What did he do? God called Abraham to offer his very own son. God had now asked Abraham to offer Isaac, the one legitimate son that he had with his wife Sarah, back to God as a sacrifice. However, as we can read in Genesis 22, just as Abraham raises his knife to kill his son, God calls out to him through an angel and Isaac is spared.

However, a sacrifice is still offered. God provides a ram, whose horns are caught in a thicket, to be killed and sacrificed instead of Isaac. So we see that, even though Abraham would go on to kill the ram, God was the one who provided the sacrifice.

Or we can also think about the prophecy in Isaiah 53. There is a man, of whom a prophecy is spoken, that will come to take on the sins of the people. He will be beaten, bruised, and crushed, but will then return back to life. This is, of course, a prophecy that foretold the life of Jesus and we can easily trace back several parts of these 12 short verses to direct actions in Jesus’s life.

But if we focus on verse 7, we can see that this man is referred to as a lamb that is being led to the slaughter:

He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.

Isaiah 53:7

So again, we see this imagery of a lamb that would be a sacrifice. And if we continue on into verse 10, we can also see that it was God who offered the sacrifice so that instead of us receiving the punishment for our sins, Jesus would take that punishment upon himself.

Now, having understood the we can return back to the book of Revelation and we can see that there is, once again, the imagery of a lamb. This is, yet again, the Lamb of God and this Lamb receives honor and worship for what he has done:

Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing at the center of the throne, encircled by the four living creatures and the elders. The Lamb had seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. He went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who sat on the throne. And when he had taken it, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb. Each one had a harp and they were holding golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God’s people. And they sang a new song, saying:

“You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased for God
persons from every tribe and language and people and nation.

Revelation 5:6-9

Jesus, in this revelatory image of a Lamb, is worshiped by the elders and the four living creatures. He is worthy to take and open the scroll, the scroll that would spell out, step by step, the coming judgment of the world.

So, why Jesus? Why can this Lamb open the scrolls that will judge the world? Because he is worthy. He is worthy because he is God Himself who came into the world and offered himself as a lamb, as a sacrifice for the sins of the world, just as John the Baptist had proclaimed. With his blood, Jesus offered himself so that he could purchase for God people from every tribe, tongue, and nation those that would come into God’s Kingdom. And because he had done that, because he had offered himself as a sacrifice to make this purchase, this Lamb – Jesus himself – is deemed worthy to open the scroll and receive glory and honor and worship for what he has done.

It is difficult for us to even begin to imagine what true holiness is, or what it would mean to be holy. In Revelation 4, we see the creatures, covered in eyes, around God’s throne who, all day and night long, continue to cry out and proclaim God’s holiness.

Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night they never stop saying:

“‘Holy, holy, holy
is the Lord God Almighty,’
who was, and is, and is to come.”

Revelation 4:8

I’m reminded of a similar story when Isaiah was called by God to go and speak for Him. As I say, it is difficult to understand what holiness truly is, but we can begin to get a sense of what it means by seeing Isaiah’s reaction just upon entering into God’s throne room and seeing the scene in that place:

“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty.”

Isaiah 6:5

We can see that Isaiah immediately understood how broken he truly was. We can see that he understood his sin, that he understood the sin of the people from whom he came, and now he has seen the Lord.

I think that this is critical to understand. God is perfect. He is the definition of perfection. He is holy.

But we are not.

Isaiah was a prophet who was called by God to speak for God to the people of Israel. So surely, if there was a holy man in Israel, it would have been God’s prophet, wouldn’t it? But yet, Isaiah, at the moment that he understands and sees for whom he is speaking, what does he say?

Woe to me!

And so we can begin to get a sense, through Isaiah, the level of perfection that we are speaking about when we hear the creatures crying out Holy, Holy, Holy! We can begin to understand the gulf, the spanse of difference between God and man, the perfection and holiness of God and the imperfection of man.

So this is why it is such foolishness for us to think that we can be “good enough” to be able to reach God. Muslims, for example, but also Catholics, tell me that they hope that their good deeds will outweigh their bad and that they will, therefore, be accepted by God into heaven. I saw this recently with a friend who wanted to honor his friend who had passed away, posting on Facebook that he hoped God would allow him entrance into paradise and that God would add his friend’s desire to clean the mosque to his list of good works.

It deeply saddens me that my Muslim friends are blind to God’s holiness. Despite the words that we may have shared with them, they have been unable to see the holiness of God and our absolute spiritual poverty before Him. We have nothing to offer. We have nothing that we can give. Like Isaiah, we are men and women of unclean lips, and that is all that we can say. God is holy and we are not.

And so we need a savior. We need one who can cleanse us to make us clean. God did this for Isaiah by bringing a coal from the altar to cleanse his lips. And God did this for us by offering Himself in the Person of Christ as a sacrifice for our sins. This is all God’s doing. In our sin, we can do nothing, and we remain in our blindness if we think we can. But God can and will, if we will let him. He will also make us holy and clean so that holy can be with Holy. This is our desire, that through Christ, we can come to the only one who is Holy.