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About Jesus Steve Sweetman This Section - Chapter 19 What
we see after this is a great multitude in heaven. This great number, which
I believe are redeemed people, was shouting praises to the Lord.
John said that their shouts sounded like a great roar.
We see this all the time. People
and angels shouting in heaven seem routine.
Either John’s ears were sensitive to the spiritual world in
heaven or else everyone speaks very loud in heaven, or at least loud in
human terms. I think our frail
earthly ears just can't handle the sounds of heaven.
Of course, that will all change once we get there.
The
multitude of people shout “hallelujah”, which means praise God.
The verb tense here expresses more of an encouraging shout.
That is to say; “come on people, let’s praise God”.
They
shout “salvation, glory and power belong to God, for true and just are
His judgements”. All of
these horrific judgements that have taken place over the last number of
chapters are true and just. They
will take place and when they do take place, they are based on God’s
perfect sense of justice. God
is just and His justice demands judgement. The
idea that God is just is not understood in the world today.
People believe that God is love but His love can't be separated
from His justice. Some
people might view God's judgment as seen in Revelation as being overkill.
Those who believe this don't really understand the holiness of God
and the sinfulness of man. Being
human, we just don't know God as He really is.
That is one reason why Jesus came to earth.
We can't understand God, but to a good degree we can begin to
understand Jesus because He became one of us.
In verse 2 we see this great crowd of people shout
that God has condemned the great prostitute.
That's The
multitude also recognizes that God has now avenged the blood of the
servants that Babylon
has killed. Scripture tells us
that we are not to repay evil with evil because judgement belongs to God.
We now see this judgment. Back
in Revelation 6:9 - 11 the martyred saints ask God when He would avenge
their blood. They were told to
wait a while until the total number of saints would be martyred.
This is the time. God
is now avenging the blood of the servants.
Note the word "servants" here.
In our western style, In
verse 3 we see the multitude acknowledge that the smoke of judgement upon
the prostitute goes up “for ever and ever”.
This judgement has eternal implications.
It is not a one time judgement. Note
the smoke in verse 3 from God's judgment on In
verse 4 we see the twenty four elders and the four living creatures cry
out to God. They cry, “amen,
hallelujah”. They say
“amen”, or “so be it” in agreement to what the large crowd of
redeemed people have just said. It
appears that everyone in heaven is participating in worshiping God.
Then
in verse 5 another voice cries out, and this voice is from the throne.
We’re not quite sure just who this voice belongs to.
My assumption is that it is an angel, because we’ve seen angels
cry out from the throne in previous chapters.
This angel's cry is meant to encourage God’s servants to praise
Him. When
thinking of the “fear of God” in verse 5, I think some have minimized
this fear to be only “reverence. It
is reverence, but it's more than that.
I believe there is an element of real fear, that is, being afraid
of God. There’s a dichotomy
here. We are afraid of God
because of whom He is, so we shrink back from Him, but once we shrink
back, His love draws us back to Him. Some struggle with the idea of being
afraid of God, but I would suggest that if you stood in the very presence
of God at this precise moment, you would be afraid of Him.
Those who think they wouldn't be afraid don't really know the God
they think they know.
In
verse 6 we see another great multitude.
These may be angels or they may be the same redeemed people we saw
earlier. This multitude cries
out “hallelujah” because the great wedding feast of the Lamb is now
ready to take place. From
my vantage point I believe most Prophetic Futurists believe that the bride
is the church. It is at this
wedding feast that the church and Jesus are married. They say this because
they understand that the church is in fact the Bride of Christ, especially
since they believe Paul compares the marriage of a husband and wife to that of the
church and Jesus in Ephesians 5:25. Let
me suggest something different. Another
reason why most Prophetic Futurists understand the bride here to be the
church is because the wedding feast spoken of here is called the marriage
feast of the Lamb; the Lamb being Jesus.
I can certainly understand how one would believe this bride to be
the church. It
might just be possible, and this is how I am leaning at the Remember,
the book of Revelation is written in Old Testament style.
It is more Old Testament than New Testament in its wording,
phraseology, and symbols. I
believe Revelation is written about the Jews and for the Jews.
The church has long since been raptured to heaven.
So, it only makes since that the bride is the remnant of saved
Jews. Jeremiah
3:14 in both the NIV and the KJV states that God is married to Verse
7 states that the bride has made herself ready. Verse
8 states that those who comprise the bride were given white linen clothes
to wear. These new clothes
were given them because of their righteous works, not because of their
faith. Again, I think we're
talking Old Testament style language here that applies to the remnant of
saved Israelis. Many
people relate Ephesians 5:27 with this portion of Revelation.
Paul says that the church will be presented to Jesus without having
a spot or wrinkle. Some people
say this is where those in the church get their spotless and wrinkle free
clothes. I suggest that we
have them already because of the cross of Christ.
Again, I suggest that this verse applies to the remnant of Israelis
that are saved at the end of the tribulation.
There
are a couple more things I should say concerning who the Bride of Christ
is before we move on from verse 8.
Ephesians 5:22 and following concerns, that is in part, the husband
and wife relationship.
Most prophetic Futurists conclude then that because of what Paul
says in verse 32, that being, "this is a mystery, but I'm speaking of
Christ and the church", that the church is the Bride of Christ. This
is not so.
In verse 28 Paul says that husbands should love their wives as they
love their own bodies.
He says this because he's already said that the husband is head
over the body, suggesting that the wife is actually part of the man's
body. Paul
probably thinks this because woman came from man.
So, because the husband should love his wife as he loves his own
body Paul says in verse 30 that the church is members of His body, and
Jesus loves His body.
Therefore, we must conclude here that the church is not compared to
Christ's wife, but, to Christ's body.
Simply put, the church is the Body of Christ, not the Bride of
Christ in Ephesians 5.
If
Futurists claim the church is the Bride of Christ, I suggest they use 2
Corinthians 11:2 where Paul says that his intention was to present the
Corinthians believers to Christ as His Bride. Whether
Paul was speaking figuratively or not may be questionable. So,
this verse, in my thinking, does not conclusively say that the church is
the Bride of Christ. In
verse 9 John is instructed by an angel to write, “Blessed are those who
are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb.
These are the true Words of God”.
Who
those are who are invited to the wedding feast?
I would suggest that if the bride is the saved remnant of Israel, then all the other redeemed saints would be those who are invited to the
feast. This would include
Gentile believers and all the Jewish saints that died in the past. The
guests might also include the vary number of angelic hosts as well.
In
verse 10 we see that John is overwhelmed by this wedding feast.
He falls down to worship the angel.
I believe John knew that such worship isn't right.
I'm sure He knew that such worship only belongs to God and to the
Lamb but he was so overtaken by these events that he instinctively fell
down and began to worship this angel.
We might well do the same if we were in John's place.
The angel immediately tells John to stop worshipping him because
he’s just a fellow servant of God. Angels
serve God just as we should serve God.
Angels have their sphere of ministry just as the saints have their
sphere of ministry. This
section ends with the encouragement of the angel directed towards John to
“worship God. For the
testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy”.
This says something about prophecy.
Prophecy is more than predicting the future.
The angel says that the testimony of Jesus, or our speaking about
Jesus, is actually the spirit of prophecy.
Giving a heart felt account of Jesus is prophetic in nature. The Rider On The White Horse (ch.19:11-21) In
verse 11 John saw heaven opened. Whenever
anyone sees heaven open, something significant is about to happen.
Stephen saw heaven open in Acts 7 when he was stoned.
Heavens door was open for him to enter through.
He saw Jesus standing and ready to receive him into His arms.
Here John sees heaven’s door wide open and Jesus ready to come
out through its door. What a
sight that would be to see. Jesus
is seen here as a rider on a white horse who is called “Faithful and
True”. You might well
remember the first seal judgement in Revelation 6 had a rider on a white
horse. We said then that the
rider was the anti-Christ, but here we have the real Christ on a white
horse. He is the real Christ
because He is called “Faithful and True”.
He is faithful to His Father and to His word.
What He says He will do, and would include all the promises that
were made to Abraham, way back in Genesis.
Remember, the book of Revelation is all about God judging the
nations of the world, and, judging Jesus
is also called True. There is
no falsehood about Jesus. He
stands for truth and that is why He is able to judge with pure justice. You
might think that Jesus riding a white horse is pure In
verse 11 we see the angel say, “With justice He makes war”.
When Jesus fights, we can be assured that He is just in His fight. The
term "just war" has been thrown around for centuries.
It is hard to say what wars are just and what wars aren't just.
Whatever the case, we can say that any war Jesus starts is just. The
military general that we see Jesus is here is a far cry from how people
view the meek and mild Jesus today. When
Jesus was on earth, to a degree, He was the meek and mild servant who gave
up His life on the cross. That's
no longer the case. We cannot
view Jesus as only the Jesus we see in the gospels.
We must understand Jesus to be the present day Jesus as seen here
in Revelation.
In
verse 12 we see Jesus has having many crowns.
When it comes to crowns in the New Testament, there are two types
of crowns. One crown is the
victor's crown that Paul speaks about.
That is, when we win the race Jesus has for us to run we’ll
receive a winner's crown. The
other crown is a crown of royalty. The
crowns that Jesus is wearing here might well be both of these crowns.
They are probably not the type of crown children think of in the
western world when they play with their toys.
These crowns speak of His power to win the last great war. Also
in verse 12 we see Jesus has a name on His head that only He knows what it
is. Why He is the only one who
knows this knew name is unknown to me.
Maybe we’ll never know His knew name, but, something tells me
that when it's all said and done we'll know that knew name. Although
we don’t know this new name, verse 13 tells us that “His name is the
Word of God”. So we may not
know the exact name on Jesus’ head, but it has something to do with the
Word of God. In
the last section we saw the saints dressed in white linen.
We see Jesus dressed the same way here but with one exception.
Jesus has blood stains on His clothes.
Some suggest that these stains are from the stains of blood that
Jesus shed on the cross. That
may be so but I see them as the stains of war.
Isaiah 63:1 asks, "Who is He who comes from
In verse 14 Jesus is seen with the armies of heaven
following Him. They too are
dressed in white clothes and riding white horses. There
is debate over just who this army is.
Some say it consists of angels only.
Some say it is the saints only.
Others say it is a combination of both.
I suggest that this army is the saints that return with Jesus as is
noted in other parts of Scripture. In
verse 15 Jesus is pictured with a double-edged sword in His mouth as He
often is portrayed. We saw
this back in the first chapter of Revelation.
With this sword He will strike the nations and defeat them in
battle. We need to realize
that this is not a long drawn out physical war that takes place here.
The sword represents the Word of the Lord.
With one word that Jesus utters, the nations will fall.
The Word that created all things will end this war before it
begins. So, although we call
this the battle of Armageddon, there is no real fighting.
There is no real war, only a word from the lips of Jesus.
The
Apostle Paul speaks of this very moment in 2 Thessalonians 2:8.
There Paul speaks to the fact that Jesus will overthrow the
anti-Christ with the breath of His mouth.
This section of 2 Thessalonians speaks of what we are reading here
in Revelation 19.
It's amazing, or maybe it shouldn't be amazing, that Paul and John
are saying the same thing, but of course, that's the Holy Spirit's
involvement in the text. It
would not surprise me that when Jesus actually utters these words of
victory that we might well see fire coming out of His mouth that resembles
a flaming sword.
Once
this battle is over, it says that Jesus will rule the nations with a
scepter of iron. Jesus
will rule the nations of the world here on the earth for a thousand years,
as we will see in Revelation 20.
His rule will be dominant. He
will rule with a scepter of iron.
This isn't a democracy. It's
a kingdom, and, Jesus is King of the Kingdom.
Kings decree. They
don't negotiate. What kings
say goes.
The fact that Jesus will rule with a scepter of iron,
and that He will do for a thousand years, tells me that the possibility
for sin is still with humanity during His rule.
Of course, the saints who return with Jesus will have their
perfected bodies. I do not
believe they will be capable of sin, but, those non-believers who survive
the tribulation, and there will be some, will still be human with the
ability to sin. Jesus
is seen in verse 15 as expressing the fury of the wrath of God.
God the Father's wrath is demonstrated through Jesus.
Remember, wrath is more than anger.
It's an explosion of anger that has been pent up.
In
verse 16 we see another name that is seen on Jesus.
This time it is on His robe and on His thigh.
The name is “King of Kings and Lord of Lords”.
There is no one greater than Jesus.
He has no competition and no real rivals. He
is sovereign and has final authority over all things, both spiritual and
physical. We’ve
seen the marriage feast of the Lamb mentioned earlier, and now in verses
17 and 18 we see the Great Supper of God. There’s
an angel who must be extremely bright because he can actually be seen
standing in the sun. He must
be brighter than the sun. This
angel announces the Great Supper of God is ready to commence.
Those who are invited to this supper are birds.
He calls the birds of the air to come and feast on the dead
carcasses of the armies of nations who have come to fight against Jesus.
Verse
19 shifts back just a bit. We
see the armies with the beast, meaning the anti-Christ, gather together to
fight Jesus. At this point it
appears to me that this army knows they are fighting Jesus.
This is a satanic led army. They
come with weapons of warfare and Jesus comes with a single word. At
this point Jesus captures the beast and the false prophet. In
verse 21 we see that these two were cast into the
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