Show Notes
Revelation 6:1-11
Pastor Christopher Chelpka
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Our Heavenly Father, we do give all praise and honor and glory to you, for you are not only gracious and merciful, coming to those who are lowly, protecting those who are oppressed, but you are also mighty. Justice is in your hands.
[00:00:21] Vengeance belongs to you, and you will make sure that in every single way justice is served.
[00:00:31] Lord, we thank you for your powerful might and ability in being able not only to set right the wrongs and bring justice to unrighteousness and to evildoers, but Lord also that you exercise your great power and strength in saving people, in rescuing them and delivering them out of not only the bondage of other men, but the bondage of our own hearts.
[00:01:07] Lord, if it were not for you, we would still be in chains, submitting to sin and the passions of our flesh.
[00:01:18] But Lord, you are a giver of life and a bringer of light to the world.
[00:01:27] And we stand now in the light of your word and ask that by the power of your spirit you would continue to illumine the dark places that you would bring to life on that which is dead, that you would heal that which is hurting and wounded today. In our own hearts and the individual souls that are here. And also, Lord, throughout the world and all the places your gospel is preached, we pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:02:04] Let's remain standing and turn to God's word in Revelation chapter 6.
[00:02:26] So I will There are seven seals. I'll talk about this more in a moment.
[00:02:32] I'll be reading 1 through 11, which is seals 1 through 5.
[00:02:38] And the next time we'll focus on the sixth seal and then the seventh after that.
[00:02:45] So I'll give you some more context in a moment. Let's just hear God's word now.
[00:02:51] Pay attention to it, its details, and let us hear with hearts of faith.
[00:03:00] Revelation 6 Now I watched when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures say with a voice like thunder, come.
[00:03:11] And I looked and behold a white horse.
[00:03:14] And its rider had a bow, and a crown was given to him, and he came out conquering and to conquer.
[00:03:23] When he opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, come.
[00:03:28] And out came another horse, bright red.
[00:03:31] Its rider was permitted to take peace from the earth, so that people would slay one another. And he was given a great sword, and he opened or when he opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, come.
[00:03:47] And I looked and behold a black horse, and its rider had a pair of scales in his hand.
[00:03:54] And I heard what seemed to be a voice in the midst of the four living creatures, saying, a quart of wheat for a denarius and three quarts of barley for a denarius, and do not harm the oil and wine.
[00:04:08] And when he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the four living creature of the fourth living creature say, come.
[00:04:15] And I looked, and behold a pale horse. And its rider's name was Death. And Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth to kill with sword and with famine and. And with pestilence, and by wild beasts of the earth.
[00:04:32] And when he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne.
[00:04:42] They cried out with a loud voice, o sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?
[00:04:55] Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been.
[00:05:09] You may be seated.
[00:05:35] This scene in heaven, this vision that John is receiving, a revelation of Jesus Christ is something that we are participating in right now.
[00:05:49] But in what way, in what way are we participating in it?
[00:05:55] There are some ways in which we are not.
[00:05:58] We are not having a collective vision right now in the way that John is.
[00:06:05] There are other ways, we could say, but there is a way in which we are participating with those things and in. In which the Lord is working here and now in this world.
[00:06:18] Let me read to you a little bit from Hebrews chapter 12.
[00:06:24] In verse 22, the writer says, you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering and. And to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven. And to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect. And to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant. And to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.
[00:06:56] That's not just something that's future.
[00:06:59] The author of Hebrews says, you have come to that.
[00:07:03] We have come to it in various ways. We've come to it in. In a covenantal sense. This is one of the ways in which Hebrews, the author of Hebrews means it. We no longer belong to the old covenant, but we belong to the new covenant. We are citizens of heaven. The Scriptures say we belong and have a right to this kingdom of God, to Heavenly Jerusalem.
[00:07:26] We are pilgrims, resident aliens, wanderers right now. But we have a homeland, we have a place that we are waiting for, that we are going to. And indeed that some have already gone to, in a way, Hebrews says, to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and the spirits of the righteous made perfect.
[00:07:54] Those same saints that are described there as those that have died and now are resting on with the Lord, are also pictured for us in the fifth seal, where the martyrs cry out to the Lord, how long until all these things are resolved?
[00:08:12] We also belong to these things, not just in a legal sense and a covenantal sense, but there's a spiritual unity that we have with them.
[00:08:21] Because there isn't one. Or, I'm sorry, there aren't two. Two churches, one in heaven and one on earth. But we are united in the same Lord.
[00:08:33] Two different ways in which the saints are living. But we are together, united by the same Spirit, one body with Him.
[00:08:44] Just as you might be in one part of Tucson later today, and I might be in another, but we're still united in the Lord. The same is true with those who are who have died and gone to be with him in paradise. We're still united to them. How? Not by geography or physical location, but by the Holy Spirit, who unites us together in Christ as part of his body.
[00:09:11] Which is amazing. It's just an amazing thing to think about. Right when we join our. When we sing, there is a way in which we are joining our voices with those in heaven.
[00:09:24] We have come to this Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and not just to a place, but to God himself. He is present with us by His Word and Spirit. And he is described in Hebrews 12 as the living God and as the one who is judge of all these attributes of the Lord, the Almighty One, the judge of all, the ruler of the world, the ruler of heaven and the protector of his saints are all prominent themes that are coming out in Revelation 6.
[00:10:10] So hold that in your head.
[00:10:12] And now I'm going to give you a little bit of context for what's where we are in Revelation 6.
[00:10:19] So Revelation begins with a vision of Christ and a picture of the church in the world. Revelation 2 and 3. The letters to the churches, the things that are contemporaneous to John, the way that the church is and in many ways continues to be throughout the time until Jesus returns. That's the beginning of revelation.
[00:10:43] At the end of Revelation, we have this great picture of the church, but not as a Church suffering and struggling with apostasy and making mistakes and tolerating things that shouldn't, and wolves in sheep's clothing and all this stuff that we're very familiar with, with life in this world as the church.
[00:11:05] But the church at the end of Revelation is this glorious bride of Christ, this holy city with the Lord God shining as the light of that place. Splendid, beautiful, we could say lots of wonderful things. That's at the end.
[00:11:22] So, as one commentator put it, how do we get from A to B? Well, that's my paraphrasing of what he said. But how do we get to A to B? It's a good question. How do you get from the beginning of Revelation to the end of Revelation? Or more experientially, how do we in history get from a church? Sometimes we say in theology, the Church militant to the Church Triumphant, to the Church under the cross, to the Church under glory.
[00:11:51] What happens?
[00:11:53] What is God doing?
[00:11:55] And that's the question that the rest of Revelation until the end is going to answer.
[00:12:02] It's going to describe this in between time, between the Lord's first coming and the Lord's second coming.
[00:12:09] And it will happen in a series of five cycles. And this today is the beginning of the first cycle.
[00:12:18] You want to think of these cycles as like replays.
[00:12:23] This is an analogy. I think that one of my professors at Westminster came up with like a sports replay.
[00:12:30] If you watch a game on tv, I like basketball, you pick your sport and a moment happens, right? And then they replay it. With modern day cameras, they do an interesting thing, right? They can do it from multiple angles. So you see the replay from this side and you see it from this side, you might see it from top down.
[00:12:53] They can kind of get the same action happening in different ways.
[00:12:58] And if you know how television sports work, you're not confused, right? You're not thinking, wait, how did this thing happen several times in a row, right?
[00:13:11] How did he score all of those points? And yet the score is still low, right? No, there was one point, let's say one point scored, or basketball, two or three, right? There's one goal made, but.
[00:13:26] And so the point only goes up by that much. But we see the replay over and over, right?
[00:13:32] Exact same thing is happening in Revelation.
[00:13:36] If you don't believe that, then what you end up is with lots and lots of comings of Jesus throughout Revelation and lots and lots of times where the world seems to end over and over and over and over and over again. Five times. At least that's what's happening. If you read Revelation as a sequential this happened and then this happened, and then this happened. You have the end of the world multiple times.
[00:14:04] You have Jesus returning multiple times. You have the church glorified multiple times. And it's very confusing because how could that happen?
[00:14:14] Well, that's not what's happening.
[00:14:16] Instead, we have these replays, or we could call it recapitulation, if you use, like a literary or a musical term, and where you have an idea that comes back again, comes back again, comes back again, but not just on repeat, but from different angles. And those different angles tell us different things. They teach us different things, they show us different things. So it's not just, okay, here we go again, but we come to new understandings of what happened, of what's going on, of who God is at the center. And then all of these things in Revelation are so beautifully, amazingly arranged that they refer to one another and do all kinds of interesting things.
[00:15:03] If you haven't. Or I'll just make a quick recommendation if you'd like to read more on this.
[00:15:09] If you happen to have an ESV Study Bible, there's a really, really good introduction that goes through different views and ways of understanding Revelation. The Reformation Study Bible also has a very good introduction, which I would totally recommend. They're very helpful to read and even reread a few times to get oriented. But I will do my best as we go along to continue kind of showing you these things from the Scripture.
[00:15:43] Okay? With that said, so now you have kind of the big sense of how Revelation is working, right? We have an introduction. We have the letters to the seven churches. We have these five cycles, and then a conclusion.
[00:15:57] Each of those cycles also has a pattern. There's an introduction, a vision, and then sometimes. And then sometimes not sometimes there's an interlude. We can call it included in that vision. And we've seen that already here. We're seeing that in this first cycle.
[00:16:17] The introduction is what we covered last week.
[00:16:20] Each of these cycles begins with a vision of heaven, right? It's before. Before we are told about these. The horsemen or the breaking of the seals, or the trumpets or the bulls. There is sometimes shorter, sometimes longer. We are reset in the heavenly places.
[00:16:39] It might be a vision of Christ, it might be the vision of the angels. There's some sense in which we are reminded who is in charge, who deserves worship, who is declaring these things.
[00:16:54] The revelation, the Book of Revelation begins with these words, the revelation of Jesus Christ.
[00:17:05] One of the things I want you to notice as we Work through this book is how we keep seeing Jesus over and over and over.
[00:17:14] If you don't know the book very well and you've just heard a few things, you might think, well, Jesus probably just shows up at the end when he comes again.
[00:17:22] But that's not what we're seeing. Isn't it? We've seen him right there in the beginning of chapter one, this amazing vision John has as he is called to write these things down. We saw him at the beginning of each of those letters and then we see him here in chapter six and seven as he, Jesus, opens these scrolls.
[00:17:46] So now we're kind of narrowing in, we're focusing in on where we're at. And remember that in chapter four and five, as we were introduced to the Almighty and to the one who sits on the right hand, remember that all of heaven, that there was this desperation rather that John had when there was this scroll that was presented, a scroll with seven seals on, with writing on the back and on the front that couldn't be opened.
[00:18:12] And why couldn't it be opened? Because there was no one worthy. Until of course, behold, Jesus was announced. The Lamb that was slain, who is worthy by the shedding of his blood and his resurrection to open these seals.
[00:18:28] Now, as he opens these seals, it's not just we're super curious what's inside, though we are.
[00:18:35] But it's also God's work being done in the world.
[00:18:41] It's not just information, but it's also action.
[00:18:46] There is power in the one who has the authority to open the seals. And we see that as these seals are opened, as the, as the revelation and the work of God in these in between times is revealed.
[00:19:03] We don't just hear about things that are in the future, although we do, but we also see the action of God here and now.
[00:19:14] So what happens? Chapter six, verse one. I watched when the Lamb opened one of the seven seals and I heard one of the four living creatures say with a voice like thunder, come. And I looked and behold, white horse.
[00:19:32] Now as each seal is opened, another horse is introduced. A horse and its rider. And these are obviously symbolic, right? They are meant to represent the things that they do. They match the colors and the actions.
[00:19:50] This white horse with its rider is a conquering rider, the general on the white horse, which is still things people do today, right? This, this image of conquering, this image of glory, this image of power, that is the image giving here this rider has a crown and he conquered.
[00:20:13] He comes out conquering. And to conquer the second horse, the Second seal. Jesus the Lamb opens the second seal in verse three.
[00:20:26] He hears the living creature. We hear the living creature say, come. And then a bright red horse, and this is a horse that is red because of blood.
[00:20:35] This horse is given by God to take peace from the earth so that the people should slay one another.
[00:20:43] And he, the rider was given a great sword.
[00:20:49] Remember that these are not things that God is experiencing.
[00:20:54] He's not like, oh, wow, look at these things that are happening.
[00:20:58] These are things that are written in the scroll. These are things that are according to his word, that are being enacted by his power and by his ruling and reigning. By the ruling and reigning sun, the mighty One, the glorious Lamb of God.
[00:21:15] These riders are being, are not just arriving, but they are being sent.
[00:21:21] They are being called, come, right? There is a command given by this great one of these creatures around the throne, these messengers of the Lord, these ministers of the Lord, who speak the word of the Lord. As the seal is opened, the angel does its ministry calls Come. And then the action happens.
[00:21:42] A rider appears, this one, the second one red, who takes peace from the earth.
[00:21:48] The third one is a black horse. And this one represents economic and social difficulties, high prices, inflation, injustice of various kinds. He holds a scale in his hands. But the, and.
[00:22:05] But this. But the scales used to measure out things and make sure things are fair, right? If you ever go to the gas station, it says, if you see a problem or think there's a problem with this pump, report the problem to the. I'm going to mess it up. But I think it's like the Department of Weights and Measures. Have you ever seen that? You're like, why are you looking at the gas pump that closely?
[00:22:26] It's on there. Look at it, right?
[00:22:29] There's a fairness that's expected in our weights and measures.
[00:22:34] There's a fairness that's expected in prices and these kinds of things in economics. And, and we all know that doesn't often happen.
[00:22:43] Things are often very hard economically. Things are often unfair.
[00:22:48] There's theft and all kinds of problems at the macro level and the micro level. This is represented by this third horse as this third seal is broken.
[00:23:03] And then finally the fourth seal, the final of these four horses working through these angels, these four angels around the throne.
[00:23:12] Rep. Each of them representing sort of the wholeness of creation. The wholeness of these earthly judgments are coming out as we have the fourth seal broken.
[00:23:25] And this rider's name was Death.
[00:23:28] And fittingly, the horse was pale.
[00:23:33] That color of death, that sickly greenish palish Color that comes on people and Hades follows him. Right? So as this rider named Death, the place of the dead is following him, and they were given authority. Again, notice the power of God there.
[00:23:57] This rider is not just doing something that God is trying to stop. He is actually given authority to do this work by God over a fourth of the earth, which is to say not all of it.
[00:24:10] To kill with sword and with famine, with pestilence, and by wild beasts of the earth.
[00:24:19] This is a picture of the world now and ever since the Lord has come in some ways, ever since the curse first fell on upon mankind.
[00:24:34] Listen to God's word in Romans.
[00:24:38] This is Romans chapter 8.
[00:24:44] This is a description of the same thing, but using a metaphor instead of a vision to describe. Although the vision has metaphoric elements.
[00:25:00] So Paul says in verse 20 of chapter 8.
[00:25:04] For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children.
[00:25:26] God.
[00:25:28] Creation was subjected to futility.
[00:25:31] Who subjected it? God subjected it, but he did it for a reason.
[00:25:39] The eventual glorification of creation to match the glorification of his children.
[00:25:47] Paul goes on and describes in verse 22. We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in in the pains of childbirth until now.
[00:25:57] And not only creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we await eagerly for the adoption of sons, the redemption of our bodies.
[00:26:08] For in this hope we were saved. Now this hope that is seen is not hope.
[00:26:14] Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes in what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it.
[00:26:21] Impatience.
[00:26:23] We are in a waiting time.
[00:26:26] We are in a watching time. We are in a praying time, a patience time. We are not in a glorified time.
[00:26:37] The Spirit of God is at work, as we'll see when we get to the fifth seal. The Spirit of God is at work in us. The Spirit of God is work after us, after we die.
[00:26:48] But things are hard.
[00:26:50] The creation is groaning. The world is groaning. Humanity is groaning. Paul describes it as the pains of childbirth.
[00:27:00] This image of the pains of childbirth, of course, describes the great, great difficulty and convulsing and challenges and hurt and sorrow that comes with childbirth.
[00:27:14] This is what we experience in this world.
[00:27:17] But it also describes a destination, an endpoint. Things are moving in a direction to something amazing, something wonderful.
[00:27:31] In fact, it's so wonderful that Paul says in verse 18 right before what I read, he says, I consider that the sufferings of this present time are. Are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.
[00:27:47] What a strong statement about things like war, pestilence, famine, economic problems, empire expansion.
[00:28:02] Just a big.
[00:28:03] It's not even worth comparing.
[00:28:06] As weighty and as terrible and as difficult and as groaning and as longing as it is, it doesn't even compare to the glory that is to be revealed.
[00:28:23] These four horsemen of the Apocalypse, what are they?
[00:28:30] They are the work of God's judgment on the world here and now.
[00:28:37] A work of judgment that is not the final judgment. It's like a fourth judgment.
[00:28:43] It's not the final judgment, but it's the work of God in doing things that is meant to do something in us, bring us to repentance, to make us feel the fragility of our lives, the fragility of our systems, the fragility of our economies, of our empires, of all of this. And go.
[00:29:06] Who am I, O Lord, to fight against you?
[00:29:09] And you're promising me the glory of heaven.
[00:29:14] Amen.
[00:29:15] I'll take it.
[00:29:18] God is at work in judgment even now.
[00:29:23] It's not the final judgment, but they're like preliminary judgments, like.
[00:29:29] Like the moments that happen. The time that happens before childbirth happens. This convulsing, this movement that's happening, that it's meant to bring us to repentance.
[00:29:47] If we look at the beginning of Romans, Romans, chapter one, in verse 18, it says, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven, which we've heard about in chapter 1 and 4, 3 and 4, 4, 4 and 5. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.
[00:30:11] I'm going to read it again. The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.
[00:30:20] Paul describes their unrighteousness. But I want you to notice that the actions of God in verse 24, when it says God gave them up to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, or in verse 26, God gave them up to dishonorable passions, verse 28, God gave them up to a debased mind.
[00:30:50] The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. God's work on the world, in war and in famine and in judgment. These are not just because God's petty and these sort of things. He's doing it for all of his holy will and to exercise and show his power to show his and to move things toward this end. What Romans 1 is talking about is those same things, but on kind of an individual level, as individual people rebelling against God, refusing to worship him, doubling down in their sins. He gives them up to the dishonoring of their bodies, to dishonorable passions, to a debased mind. And guess what people do who have dishonorable passions and a debased mind?
[00:31:39] They war against each other, they kill one another. They.
[00:31:44] They create situations of economic challenges and disparities and unfairnesses, theft and all the rest.
[00:31:55] God, in one way, in part of his judgment, he gives people up and he allows the work that is described in chapter six to be done.
[00:32:11] It's a desperate situation. And if that's all that there was, we would be without hope.
[00:32:18] We should throw our hands up in despair and say to the dust we will return. And that's that.
[00:32:25] But that's not all there is as this work of God's judgment in the world, which will culminate in the sixth seal on the great day of judgment.
[00:32:37] As that's happening, there's something simultaneously happening.
[00:32:42] In Romans 8, it's talked about the work. One aspect of it is talked about the work of the Spirit of God in us.
[00:32:49] In Revelation 6, we read this. When he opened the fifth seal. I saw under the altar the souls who had been slain for the word of God and the witness they had borne, by the way, just like Jesus fall. People following in his example, people not clinging to the things of this world, but pointing their fingers to the Lord and saying, I'm following him.
[00:33:17] These are not saints that are in hell.
[00:33:22] These are not saints who are lost forever.
[00:33:25] These are her saints who are under the altar under the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
[00:33:34] A picture of the temple is given here, and here they are in heaven. Here they are protected, but they cry out in a worshipful, prayerful longing. O sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?
[00:34:04] When we think that there's no problems in us and we're basically just trying to live our lives, and then God's super mean, it's easy to judge him, right? If that's how we think about life, if that's our worldview.
[00:34:18] But if we remember that God is the perfect rule of righteousness and that we owe him all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, when we see disobedience, rebellion, darkness, evil, injustice, murder, adultery, theft, blasphemy. When we see these things in ourselves and in the world around us, and we see them in accord with the God who is sovereign and holy, and true, these things aren't just, oh, it's not a big deal. They're a problem, a massive problem that needs to be solved.
[00:35:03] And this is where the joy of the justice of God comes in, the joy of the vengeance of God. Because when you read about things in the newspaper, you go, who's going to do something about this when you're sued unfairly, when you're let go unfairly, when somebody's hurting you and they shouldn't be, when you confess the name of Christ, the best thing anybody could possibly do, and you die as a result of it, it's extremely wrong.
[00:35:32] It's evil.
[00:35:34] And with all the fan. With all the war and the powers and the empires that are in this world, it can be easy to think nothing can be done if you're forgetting about who God is.
[00:35:46] But if you remember who God is, who exercises vengeance, who is perfectly just and perfectly good, you can be like the saints in heaven and say, how long, O Lord, until you set all things right?
[00:36:01] How long, O Lord, until you avenge the blood of those whom you love?
[00:36:09] The picture of Psalm 2 and the people taking counsel together, the rulers plotting against the Lord and his anointed. How long will God let that go on?
[00:36:19] Well, he doesn't tell us exactly how long.
[00:36:23] It's kind of like childbirth. You don't really know when. Could come early, could come late, you don't know it will come in. His perfect timing.
[00:36:34] And here's how he answers that question to the saints in heaven. Here's how he answers that question to our hearts.
[00:36:43] He gives them a white robe and he tells them to rest a little longer until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves have been.
[00:37:05] You are wanting me to wait for more of Christians to die?
[00:37:13] That is a really hard pill to swallow. If you think this life is all about glory, if you think this life is not about taking up our cross and following him, that this life is not about denying all things and counting it as loss for the sake of knowing Christ. If you think this life is the thing you're really after and you're storing up treasures in heaven, then the death of the saints doesn't make sense. And it'll never make sense.
[00:37:46] But if you see that God is exercising his power in this world and spreading the gospel through. Through the suffering of his people, even the suffering of us. And if you see the glory that is to be revealed, you'll say, with Paul, the sufferings of this present time are not even worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed.
[00:38:10] The death of the saints.
[00:38:12] Praise be to God, because He will use it to advance his kingdom. And those saints are are in paradise. And those saints are given a white robe and a name and a white stone and a crown. And those saints are praising God. And those saints are protected. And those saints will one day be fully avenged.
[00:38:38] Justice will happen.
[00:38:40] God will set all things right.
[00:38:46] The waiting and the patience and the forbearance of God, Paul says at the beginning of Romans, is not meant to show us that God doesn't care, that God doesn't care about evil, that God doesn't care about violence, that God doesn't care about injustice and gross, terrible things that happen.
[00:39:04] His patience and forbearance is meant to lead us to repentance.
[00:39:11] He is doing this not just to judge the world, but to bring in his people.
[00:39:23] And that's the other way we can describe this. And that revelation describes this.
[00:39:28] The moment the last saint is brought in that last soul, it's over.
[00:39:38] There's no more waiting. There's nothing more to wait for. Our job is to witness. Our job is to be here and to be used by God to call in his people all in his perfect timing.
[00:39:53] Well, the glorification of all of these things will happen in the seventh seal when it's opened. And between those two is the sixth, when these convulsings and labor pains lead into the great sixth seal being open in the judgment of the world, which we'll come to next time.
[00:40:15] For now, what I want you to see from the word of God is Number One, the sovereignty of God, his authority, his power, his summoning, his actions. The things and the sufferings and the groanings that we experience in this world are not accidentally happening.
[00:40:37] God is not wringing his hands and wondering, what will I do?
[00:40:42] How will I fix things?
[00:40:44] They are. It is happening perfectly according to his plan.
[00:40:50] Even the suffering that we experience, even the martyrdom that we experience as Christians, big or small, in this life, is according to his plan. And he's using it to prove the power of his gospel, to show that he is the Glorious One and that salvation comes to the world not by the strength and power of man, but by the power of God, the Sovereign One, the Almighty One.
[00:41:21] This leads us to worship how long, O Lord, holy One, faithful and true, to express our prayers and our thoughts and our longings in that way.
[00:41:33] And it leads us not only to worship, but to faith and to trust as we put our lives in the hands of God and say, I'm going to be fine.
[00:41:47] The death that I experience in this life, it is the entrance into the next life.
[00:41:57] This life is short.
[00:41:59] This life is tiny.
[00:42:02] This life is moving towards the final victory of the Lord.
[00:42:09] And this is important that we see these things as we see God's, not only his sovereign hand in all of it, but his good hand, his hand of justice, his hand of grace, his hand of protection, his hand which answers prayers of people who are crying out to him for his faithfulness, for his protection and for his justice.
[00:42:33] Because we have seen who God is in this chapter, in the previous chapters, and over the course of our lives as Christians. And if you're not a Christian yet, just look around at the world God has made, at the things you've heard this morning in the Gospel.
[00:42:52] The work of the Lord through this Lamb that was slain, is powerful.
[00:42:58] We should worship him, we should trust him. And we should know that the sufferings of this present life are not even worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed. Because the Glorious One and who he is.
[00:43:13] Let's pray.
[00:43:15] Our Heavenly Father, we ask that you would strengthen us in our faith, that you would help us to not lose heart when our world is constantly being turned upside down. And we would recognize that even the evil plans of men are you are using for the salvation of your people.
[00:43:39] Lord, though it is hard for us to wait, it is so hard for us to be patient. We ask that you would not only help us to be patient, but to rest, to rest a little longer, to rest in the knowledge of your faithfulness, rest in the knowledge of your goodness, rest in the knowledge of your love and your care for us, Help us also, Lord, to rest in the knowledge that we who were dirty and unclean, we who did not deserve to belong in your presence or in your family, help us to rest in the knowledge of the righteousness that we have in Christ, the purity that we have in him, the holiness that we have in him, the fellowship and communion we have with you as you do your work in the Lord in the world.
[00:44:36] O Lord, we ask that you would help us to worship you, to rest and to be patient, and to witness to those who have not yet heard the glorious gospel of God which leads, which has led us to repentance and will lead in the full number of your people.
[00:45:01] Lord, thank you for enduring the judgment that we deserved.
[00:45:06] For all of the wrath of God having been poured out on Christ.
[00:45:11] We know that we are protected by his blood, covered by his name.
[00:45:20] Lord, strengthen our heart in all of these things and help us to see our times and our life as they truly are.
[00:45:27] Not according to the lies of Satan or the empty promises of this world or the fears of our hearts, but according to your word, according to who you are and what you've said.
[00:45:40] We pray this in Jesus name, amen.
