God Unmasks Beastly Injustice

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. After this, I looked and behold a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands and crying out with a loud voice, Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb. And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the poor living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, Amen. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Amen. Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, Who are these? clothed in white robes? And from where have they come? I said to him, Sir, you know. And he said to me, These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. Therefore, they are before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple. And he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence. They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore. The sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat. For the lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. This is the word of God. We have one graduate here this morning. Dale, I think, is graduating. There's two more ceremonies today, five total. Gosh, I don't know, 20, I'd say about 2,400 students graduating this spring at FGCU. So a pretty big class. And it was fun. It was long, wasn't it? A lot of sitting there. Yeah, but it was fun. It's good to have you here today. We are in our fourth week of this series called Hope That Outlasts Empires. And today, I know it's kind of crazy. We're sort of summarizing chapters 6 through 11 in this book. Five chapters. Well, not really covering it. We're looking at one section of it because I think that's most important. This happens to be the section called the seven seals, and then there are seven trumpets. And later on in the book, there's also another section called the seven bowls. These three cycles of seven, and man, most preachers are going to focus on all the disasters that they talk about, the four horsemen of the apocalypse to this disaster wormwood, whatever, you know, they're just going to get into it. And probably they'll decode each section of this part of the book of Revelation with something out of the headlines of the news today. Now, what's fascinating is like Kyle and Jaden and Dale and others have been in this class, and they found out that, man, it's been decoded that way since the 400s, and every generation thinks they figured it out, and everybody has been wrong up to this point. Right? So I don't think that's really the emphasis that we should have on this text. I don't think that's the purpose of Revelation in the first place. Okay? Actually, what you see is a deeper thing that's going on. There are actually 7 cycles through this book that keep moving a little forward and a little more progressively all the way to the end of the book, and they cover more or less the same time period between Christ Jesus as he came first at Bethlehem and through his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, and then his second coming. Okay? And for instance, Rob Dalrymple puts it this way, Revelation tends not only to recapitulate... Isn't that a big word? Yeah, you learned something new already. Repeat, but repeat in a way that rhymes more than just totally just duplicating. But that in doing so, a generally pattern is to develop and expand previous themes, oftentimes making explicit what was previously only implicit. We can see this in these seven seals, seven trumpets, and even seven bowls. Why I say that is, at the end of the cycle, we get the same type of saying. Okay? The same type of saying. First of all, at the end of the seven seals judgment, this is the phrase. I think I have them all up there at once. There were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. But then at the end of the seven bowls, there were flashes of lightning, rumbles, peals of thunder, an earthquake, and heavy hail. And then the final one, and there were flashes of lightning, rumbles, peals of thunder, and a great earthquake, such as, you see how it intensifies a little more each time, but it's repeating the same thing at the same time. And all of these, by the way, are repeating what was already stated, of all places, in Exodus 19 at Mount Sinai. When God comes down on Mount Sinai to covenant with his people, he's just rescued them from Egypt. And this is what he says, that the text says, On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud and ...