The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show to His servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending His angel to His servant John, who bore witness to the Word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that He saw. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.

Now we have been announcing that we were going to start this series this morning on the book of Revelation, because it is a book of perennial interest, and in our time especially. But let me begin with my challenge and my goal. My challenge and my goal. My challenge is that, as most of you know, in fact we’ve been here 31 years, way back when we were in the other little trailer-like building, I did a series on Revelation. I haven’t done one since then. If you’ve sat in this church, you’ve heard me refer to it and make a point here or there, but we’ve never done a series in the book of Revelation. The challenge is that if you know anything about the book, you probably got it from somebody else, a TV preacher or some other ministry that may or may not be reputable, and therefore some of what you hear me say in the course of this journey may be something you’ve never heard before. So I want to repeat my injunction that I often say: if you hear something you don’t agree with, please do not leave the room in your mind. Don’t start rifling through your Bible to prove me wrong. Listen to what I’m saying. Because if you leave the room like that, you won’t hear what I’m saying, and it won’t benefit you or me. Okay? That’s the first challenge for me.

The second one is my goal. My goal is to avoid speculation by arranging our journey in each message in three parts. Each message may not have all three parts, but try to do three parts in each message. The first act, I’m calling them, is Christ revealed. How does the book of Revelation reveal Christ? Secondly, the Old Testament connections to the book of Revelation. Many of us are not aware of how much the book of Revelation comes from the Old Testament. Don’t know the Old Testament? You won’t be able to understand the book of Revelation. Ergo, as difficult as it is, we need to read our Old Testament part of the Bible as well. And then the third thing we will try to deal with each Sunday is the truth applied.

Now, we will be taking a break on the second Sunday of March because I have a five-week series for Easter. I’m building up to Easter and I have a five-week series that we will be doing there. So we’ll take a break at that point and then we will come back to Revelation. Today, we must lay groundwork for our journey. So today it won’t be these three acts because we have to lay the groundwork. And here’s what we want to do. The goal is to walk through Revelation with a focus on three things, the first of which is how is Christ revealed in the book of Revelation.

Now, there is disagreement among scholars and commentators on the intention of the phrase, “the revelation of Jesus Christ” in verse 1. Because of the Greek, the Greek can—this is a technical term, I don’t expect you to understand it—it can be a subjective genitive or an objective genitive. And the question then, is it a revelation from Jesus or a revelation about Jesus? And this is the connection that we have to deal with. Now, someone asked the other day or sometime, why do we need to talk about the Greek? Because the Bible was written in Greek. And if you really want to make sure what we believe is what they believe, then you have to look at it in the language that they read it in the first time they read it. And it’s very important for us.

I am going to be working from the perspective of Joel Beakey, that it is a revelation about Jesus and not merely a revelation from Him. And I hope to show you, as we go, that this distinction can help prevent speculation and endless predictions that we will give you some examples of today. Now, Jason did a tremendous job in the work that I assigned him about, talking about the historic church and the Puritans and all those people. But you may not know Joel Beakey. And Jason didn’t speak of Joel Beakey because he’s a modern person. Joel Beakey is the president of the Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is the director of Reformation Heritage Books. He is a prolific author. And these are examples, two of his books. This is volume one and volume two, volume one of *Reformed Systematic Theology*. He’s the co-author of this. Scott Ritchie has the third volume. There’s actually two more volumes I don’t have. As you can see, I’ve read them completely and tabbed them and highlighted and tabbed and everything. In fact, I spoke to Dr. Beakey at a conference Scott and I went to and asked him about the series we did some years ago on the two natures of Christ and asked what book could be really good. And, of course, he said, well, I’ve got a book that will really speak to that. And this was the other year, not recently, not this fall when we talked about that. So he’s a very knowledgeable man in his ministry and you can see the evidence of it.

So I share his perspective that he has at the beginning of his commentary on Revelation that the book of Revelation is a revelation about Jesus, not merely something from Him. Here’s what he says: “The Bible was not written to satisfy the hunger of the human mind for knowledge of future events. Many Christians use the book of Revelation as a kind of horoscope to predict the future. The Bible is a revelation of Jesus Christ. The book of Revelation, therefore, is to be understood rationally, spiritually, and practically, not superstitiously or speculatively.”

Now, what is the superstitious part? Of course, we can cite 666, the mark of the beast. We were talking about it the other Wednesday night. I have, for those of you who know of or know about R.C. Sproul, his son and daughter-in-law are one of my Facebook friends, and she posted one time, she posted that she had gotten a bank card, and on the CVV, the security code was 666, and she said, “I’m sending it back. I’m not keeping this card.” You can’t accidentally take the mark of the beast. Using a credit card with 666 on it is not going to damn you to hell. You haven’t sold your soul to the devil by that, children. That’s a superstition that has been just twisted out of all proportion in this with anyone talking about the book of Revelation.

Now, the idea of Revelation as some sort of mystery that has to be unraveled, we’ve got to find the clues, that idea is deeply ingrained in American culture. And most of the American church is on the dispensational side, which approaches the book of Revelation this way: it’s a code. It’s a secret. You’ve got to figure it out, or you won’t be faithful to God in His Word. A leader in this flawed approach, though he is now deceased, was Hal Lindsey, the author of *The Late Great Planet Earth*. In a different book, written about 2000, he says this about the book of Revelation. He says, “Now listen, it’s very important. The Spirit of God gave me a special insight.” Now that’s a red flag right away. “The Spirit of God gave me a special insight into how John described what he experienced, but also how this whole phenomena encoded the prophecies so that they could be fully understood only when their fulfillment drew near. They could be understood only when their fulfillment drew near.”

Now you say, Pastor, what’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with that perspective? It violates the promise of verse 3. Listen to verse 3: “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and who keep.” Now, “keep” there does not mean you remember everything. How many of you in our church have said to me, “Pastor, I just can’t retain. I read the Bible, but I can’t retain anything that it says.” That’s not what it means. “Keep” means you do what the Bible says. “If you love me, keep my commandments. Do what I say. Apply the truth.” And so here in the Revelation, we’re told to apply the book of Revelation. But how can you apply a book that cannot be understood until some great time in the future? This is where we get into the problem of predictions and drawing predictions from the book of Revelation. This is what happens when we view the book as a revelation from Jesus about future events rather than a revelation of or about Jesus set against the backdrop of possible future events.

Many people just make predictions all the time, and they are not seeing Jesus in the book of Revelation. Now, you cannot keep or apply things that you do not understand. This is the challenge of pastors and teachers. How do I say these things in a way that makes it relevant to your day-to-day life? And this is something we’ve shared with you. Jason has shared. I’ve shared it. You need to pray for us, your speakers, who can, we can be able to do that. But if you look at the Bible, if you look at the book of Revelation specifically as some kind of mystical viewpoint, mystical puzzle, we’ve got to figure it out. You’re missing completely what it is meant to do. It is meant to reveal the glory and the wonder of our Savior Jesus Christ.

Now, listen. Hal Lindsey goes on in his book to describe John as the first time traveler. It wasn’t merely that he saw a vision 2,000 years ago, but God brought him forward in time, and he saw things in this time that could only be described in the most bizarre language imaginable. For example, *Revelation 9*, verse 1 through 10: “The fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star falling from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. He opened the shaft, and smoke like the smoke of a great furnace rose, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft. Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth. In appearance, the locusts were like horses prepared for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold. Their faces were like human faces, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lion’s teeth. They had breastplates like iron, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle.”

Now, Hal Lindsey and others say that the noise of their wings is actually referring to attack helicopters, and Apache helicopters, and Apache gunships, and if you’ve ever heard the helicopters or the ospreys, and they got these blades, and you put a hundred or a thousand of them in the air, and you have this thunder, and this is what Hal Lindsey said. This was what that represented. What’s wrong with that? That it meant nothing to the people who originally read it. You do know we’ve only had helicopters for about 120 years since we conquered flight. They could not have read that. They would not have read it and thought something like that. If I’m going to benefit from it in the first century, this cannot be what it means 21 centuries later. This is the kind of predictions that people try to do with the book of Revelation, and in the process, they just muddy the water. It is not meant to be a book of predictions.

This is from one of my… someone in the Facebook universe. For those of you who can’t see it, it’s like *Independence Day* where these aliens are coming down and the person… Jesus verifies the coming alien invasion in *Revelation 9*. The scriptures I’ve just used here, they use them to say there’s going to be this alien invasion or these armies are going to rise up. And children, I know I’m passionate. I know that I’m arrogant. And I believe if everybody listened to me, the world would be a better place. I understand that I got that problem in my life. Nevertheless, I tell you that that is not how we should approach the book of Revelation because we’re supposed to glean something from it that we can apply to our lives today rather than a lot of crazy, mindless speculation.

Such attempts at dealing with these visions in modern terms obviously appeals to the fallen human nature. And therefore, we might be disinclined to come to Revelation looking for Jesus. But this needs to be understood. You will not benefit spiritually from that kind of speculation. You will benefit spiritually from seeing Christ and growing in your knowledge of who He is and what He has done. And by the way, any study of the book of Revelation should result in a deeper appreciation for our Lord Jesus Christ and therefore should inspire greater worship and yearning for service. And I have shared this with you before. There are so many people they can quote chapter and verse. They can tell you about this stuff here but they can’t share the gospel with their neighbor. They don’t have a prayer life. They don’t read their Bible. They don’t give to the work of the kingdom. But they know all the speculations. That is not what the book of Revelation is meant to do in this time, children.

Predictions drawn from or based upon this book, the book of Revelation, are notoriously unreliable because of the constantly changing human experience. 2017, young lady named Donna Dyke was attending our church. Some of you may remember them. They moved to Georgia. She still watches the podcast sometimes or the Facebook video. She buys all my books whenever a new one comes out. And so she came to me before they moved away when this book came out. She said, “Pastor, I saw this book, and the name of the book was *Mystery Babylon*, *Unlocking the Bible’s Greatest Prophetic Mystery*. That title says it all, doesn’t it? I’m coming to the Bible as though it’s some kind of code book to be unlocked.” And she said, “Well, could you check this out for me?” I, of course, bought the Kindle version. I have it on my computer. I did some refreshing of my mind and memory this week. One of the people who endorsed the book says this: “Richardson’s new volume is brilliantly researched, scripturally solid, and fluently written. It is quite evident that *Mystery Babylon*, the great, the mother of harlots from *Revelation 17* and *18*, may no longer be a mystery. The book is must reading for everyone with a passion for prophetic truth and an interest in the last days. It is a very, it’s a book full of information and it’s got a lot of appealing concepts in it that I wouldn’t deny and there’s a lot of geopolitical truth to it.”

Here’s what the man said. And this is against the backdrop of ISIS, those of you who remember ISIS and their craziness in Syria and so forth. The author said that the fourth kingdom in the book of Daniel, which I don’t have time to give you all that, there was Greece and the Medo-Persians and the Babylonians, the Medo-Persians, the Greeks, and then Rome. Almost everyone agrees that the fourth kingdom was Rome. Oh no, he says. The fourth kingdom in Daniel is not Rome. It’s an Islamic caliphate that will be established in the Middle East with Mecca becoming the new financial center of the planet. 2017 was when the book was written. 2016, Mecca is not the capital of the financial realms of the earth and there is no Islamic caliphate. There may be people that want it, but it isn’t there now. My point is, here’s another example of another person looking at geopolitical events and making predictions from the book of Revelation that have not happened and will not happen because the book isn’t meant to be interpreted that way. It is not a book that we just go to predictions. It is a book that is revealing Jesus.

By the way, go back to verse 3 again. If that was the meaning of *Revelation 17* and *18*, Islam wasn’t even a religion until 700 years after the birth of the church. So for the first seven centuries, you’re saying that passage was meaningless to Christian people because it was talking about an Islamic caliphate 2,000 years in the future rather than the political systems of the world those people occupied there. I cannot benefit from reading how do I apply even that concept that’s going to be an Islamic caliphate. How do I apply that in my life today? This is the point of *Revelation*. Not to give us these predictions, but to show us Christ. Because Christ never changes, what we find in the book of Revelation concerning Him will be true at all times. Instead of a Christian faith that vacillates with each news cycle, *Revelation* should turn our hearts away from wild, perennially, disappointing speculation.

Now you’re right, I could be jaded. I’ve been a Christian for 47 years, almost half a century, and I have heard the predictions again and again and again and again. I’m not talking about the prediction that Christ is coming. And we’ll come back to that to the end. I’m talking about all these things that are supposed to prove that He’s coming. You know why we’re so drawn to that? Because we don’t have any confidence in His Word. He said, “I’m coming again.” That’s all we need to know. We don’t need other further proof all the time by pointing to these geopolitical events. Do you believe it? Then that’s all you need. What did Jesus say to Thomas? And I know it has implications beyond this statement, but He said, “Blessed are you who believe and have not seen.” If you must always be tuning in to the latest predictions, buying the latest book, following the latest end-time guru, I’m afraid you really don’t believe in your heart what your Lord and Savior said in His Word. And we need to ask ourselves that. Honestly.

I believe, and I can’t prove this, but I believe there are a lot of Christian people in America that are burnt out because they’re riding this wave. There’s a new story. This proves it. They found it. Blah, blah, blah. Jesus is coming. And He doesn’t come. And they’re dismayed again until the next prediction brings them up on the mountaintop and they fall off again. That is not the purpose of the book of Revelation.

So our approach will be this idea that the book of Revelation is a revelation of Jesus and not from Him. Ah, but what do we do, Pastor? What do we do with the people who believe it is a revelation from Him? How do we approach our brothers and sisters in Christ? And why do they hold that viewpoint? Because, verse number one says, “a revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave Him to show His servants.” This is where they get the idea that it is from Jesus because God says He gave it to give to His people. And that is from, not of. What do we do with that? Well, the first thing we want to do is note many commentators and I believe they’re right in this, do not see it as an either/or but a both/and. It is a revelation from Christ that is about Christ. We don’t have to have this distinction. The great or the noted Australian commentator, Leon Morris, in his commentary on Revelation, a viewpoint shared by someone else you will not know, Bruce Metzger. Leon Morris says this revelation is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which could mean either that the revelation was made by Jesus Christ or that it was made about Him or that it belongs to Him. In one way or another, all three are true. It is from Him and it is about Him and the focus should be about Him. We don’t have to sacrifice in other words one for the other. We have both. It is a revelation from God about our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ.

John Gill, who died in 1771, affirms this both/and view, saying revelation treats much of Christ’s person, offices, and grace and of Christ’s mystical. You say, Pastor, aren’t there predictions in the book of Revelation? Yes, they are, and we will note some at the end of the message today, but notice the goal of the predictions is to reveal Christ, not to establish men as the masters of prophecy, and that is exactly how many of these prognosticators present themselves. You’ve got to listen to me because I’m telling you the truth about these wild predictions and it comes again and again and again to discourage people.

Matthew Henry, the 17th century Puritan commentator, in speaking of Revelation says it is the revelation of Jesus Christ. This is true of the whole Bible, for all revelation comes through Christ and centers on Christ. It isn’t a book that’s just full of a lot of wild images that lead to this kind of craziness. It is a book where we find Christ revealed in a fuller and complete sense and consistent with the rest of the Bible. Matthew Henry then goes on to quote *Hebrews 1* 1-3: “Long ago God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, who is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature.”

Now here’s the implication I want us to see this morning, children, and as we go forward: if the Bible is about Christ, then when we come to Revelation, that shouldn’t stop. We shouldn’t get to Revelation and say, “Okay, now it’s about all these crazy things.” No, it’s still about Jesus, and that’s what we ought to be focusing on. He doesn’t change.

Jesus Himself, as many of you know, repeatedly emphasizes that the Word is a revelation about Him. A revelation about Him. He says in *John 5:39*: “You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life, and it is they that bear witness about me.” You’re looking for the wrong things. He says. Listen to *Luke 24:27*, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, He interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning Himself. *Luke 24:44-45*: “Then He said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was with you, that everything about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then He opened their minds to understand the scriptures, to understand what about the scriptures, to understand how they all point to Him and convey Him and illustrate Him and proclaim Him, not open my mind to see all kinds of secret things, as Dr. Lindsay said earlier, but open their minds to see Jesus in the words of scripture.”

Listen to *Hebrews 10:7*: “Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come to do Your will, O God, as it is written of me in the scroll of the book.’” If all the Bible serves to reveal Christ, we should expect that to continue into the book of Revelation. I want to know Jesus better, Pastor. Open your Bible. Open your Bible. I haven’t asked this question. I’m not going to ask it literally. I mean, I’m not going to ask for a show of hands, but how many of us here who say we love God have never read the Bible from front to back one time in your spiritual journey. Not once. And I say that because there’s people say, “Open up your heart, open up your mind to the Spirit, He’ll enrich you.” God has given us a book, and the book is intended to teach us about Him. This is what we must do.

In *John’s* gospel we are told that the purpose of the Holy Spirit coming, who is Himself the spirit of all revelation, even that which we find in the book of Revelation, is to reveal and glorify Christ. *John 16:12-15*: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the father has is mine, therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” And in that text, you see the very same principles. God took a revelation, gave it to His son, to give to His church. The spirit takes what God says about the son and reveals it to His people, primarily through the word.

Now, though very much else could be said, this will be our focus. How *Revelation* reveals Christ, the first act, and I hope to be able to bring it out in each week, but we will not get there for a few weeks because we got to lay the groundwork. Okay. In *Revelation*, Christ is revealed in His divine sovereignty and His immutable attributes, but He is also revealed in ways that are intended to give us peace and assurance in our particular historical moment. That won’t happen if you just limit it to this futuristic predictive catalog.

For example, eight times in the book of *Revelation* we read, “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying.” That is at the end of each of the seven letters of *Revelation*, and each letter begins with a revelation or a reference to who Christ is. And I could flip over there quickly to the angel of the church in Ephesus: “Write the words of Him who holds the seven stars in His right hand who walks among the seven golden lampstands. The words of the first and the last who died and came to life. The words of Him who has the sharp two-edged sword.” In other words, each letter begins with a statement about Christ and then at the end of the letter says, “Hear what the Spirit is saying.” By implication, if I can slow down and bring it out because five of those letters end like this: “He who overcomes, I will give.” What is the secret to overcoming? Recognizing who the person is who starts speaking at the beginning of the letter and says, “This is who I am.” And what’s the implication? If we want to overcome, it results from knowing Christ, not from prophetic precision regarding world events.

I like Justin Peters. I don’t agree with everything Justin Peters says, but I like Justin Peters, and he was pointing out all these people they got all these prophecies they’re always making these predictions, not one of them, not one of them predicted *COVID*. They were blindsided by a disease that crippled the globe for a period of time. Not one of these anointed prophets of God, not one of them saw that coming, and yet we keep running to them whenever they predict another world event that’s supposed to be life-changing. You see, when we look at the book of *Revelation* in regards to our personal historical moment, what you find in *Revelation* Jesus is our example—a victor, a witness, a sufferer, a warrior, an overcomer, etc. Thus, we can summarize at this point that we have ample commentary from and biblical support for a revelation of or about Jesus. We aren’t supposed to just go to it for these predictions. This proves that shows this. No, we look for Christ.

Now, here’s an important point about the predictions, however, that accurate predictions of future events reveal Him as the Lord of history who speaks a reliable word. And once more, you see this in the gospels where Jesus is doing and saying things to reveal who He is. He says in *John 13*: “I am not speaking of all of you. I know whom I have chosen, but the scripture will be fulfilled. He who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.” Talking about Judas betraying Jesus and he says, “I am telling you this now. This is at the dinner before Judas has betrayed him. I’m telling you this now so that when it does take place, you may believe that I am He. You will know who I am because I’m making a prediction that’s going to come true. An accurate prediction reveals something of the predictor. If it happens as the predictor said, and you will not find that in the modern church community and the madness that exists in some of these people. These concepts undergird the premise that a prediction reveals something about the predictor if it’s accurate and it comes to pass.

Now let me read this passage. Let me read this passage. *Deuteronomy 18:21-22*: “How may we know that the word the Lord has not spoken here’s the answer. When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.” Now, doggone it, I—I—I—I—I—I—I know I’m a bad person. I’m a horrible. I really am. So I apologize in advance for this statement, but again, we are not consistent in the Christian church because these people make predictions about the coming of Christ, it doesn’t happen, and we keep tuning in. And what this scripture says is that person should lose all their credibility in the Christian community because they made a prediction was not true—not an informed guess, not an informed guess, an actual this is what the Lord is saying and it doesn’t come to pass. Now we’re not as bad as this and this has been some time ago, but I want to use it as an illustration for those of you who remember Jim Baker around 2015. Jim Baker had a man on his show who predicted that the rapture was going to happen in September of that year. Are you here this morning? That means the rapture didn’t happen in September of 2015. You know what he did? He bought the guy back on his program to explain why it didn’t happen in September of 2015, and while there, the guy predicts what happened in May in March of 2016. Are you here this morning? Then it didn’t happen, did it? He doesn’t say that person is unreliable. He brings him right back on the show. Now why is that wrong? Well, you all know the answer. Jesus said, “You cannot know the day or the hour.” End of story. See, we don’t—we don’t connect the dots, children. This person is saying when they make that kind of prediction, they’re saying I know more about it than Jesus does. Keep tuning into those programs, buying their books, sharing their videos. We need to recognize that yes, God makes predictions. Yes, there are accurate predictions that can be made, and they will come to pass if they’re really from God. That is not what the book of *Revelation* is supposed to be—a prediction factor. It is a revelation of Jesus Christ.

Now let us look. This recognition is necessary to keep us from slipping off into speculative predictions in our journey. So let us pause. If we close, if we come to a close here this morning, close to it, close to it, we’re close to the close. Okay, we need to make—we need to note the difference between informed biblical predictions and speculative stuff where people are in my view just trying to make a name for themselves. These speculative predictions, predictions I hope you don’t think I’m being too harsh this morning, but we can go down to my office after a while and I can pull all the shelves off the book that were best known writers and this person said what did I say? I told you I was a terrible person didn’t I? I can pull all the books off the shelves where they made these predictions when I saw Saddam Hussein was in power here, this was going to happen, when this person was in that was going to happen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Please don’t judge me because I’m critical of these false prophets, but that’s not what the book of *Revelation* is supposed to do. It’s not supposed to give us an endless catalog of predictions to build our hopes upon. It is to reveal the one who we build our hope upon, Jesus Christ. Amen.

These speculative predictions run the risk of distorting what we know of Christ. I’ve already hinted at it, but here’s let me just talk to you. Let me just read it. And since I’ve already said it, endless predictions of Christ’s imminent return run the risk of trivializing what Jesus said on the subject, thus making His words seem untrustworthy. I’ve never understood and I will never understand the difficulty of *Matthew 24:36*: “No man knows the day or the hour, not even me.” And yet every year almost, now almost every year, somebody’s got a prediction of when Jesus is coming. And when we insist, children, it’s important when we insist that we can know what He said cannot be known, we imply that His word is unreliable, and I don’t think that’s the message we want to send to the world, is it?

Now, pastor, don’t you know about all the signs of *Matthew 24*? I do know about all those signs, and I have to remind you that Jesus in *Matthew 24* says, “Here’s all these signs, and then He gets to verse 36 and says, you cannot know when it’s going to happen. There’s a problem there. How could we not know what’s going to happen if we have all these signs? And the answer is, these signs are about something different than His return. That’s the only way you can reconcile that contradiction. But let us see then, let us see some sound balanced biblical predictions, and we’ll go through these five, and then I have five we can’t do, and we’ll be done for the day.

Sound balanced biblical predictions include Christ’s return. He is coming. *John* chapter 14: “I’m going away to prepare a place for you. If I wasn’t going to do it, I wouldn’t tell you that I was going to do it. He is coming. He’s coming, children. He is coming, but we do not know when. All we can say is He’s coming.” I appreciate Jacob’s comments today, and we touched on this a couple weeks ago, Wednesday nights. “Jesus should come, church is suffering.” Well, the church has been suffering for 2,000 years. If He was going to come to end the suffering of the church, He would have come back in the days of the Romans when they were killing Christians in the arena. We need to question ourselves: do I want Him to come so that He can be glorified in all the earth, or just because I want my problems to be over? I don’t want to go to the grave. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to suffer. Well, I don’t. I share that concern with you, but that’s not the reason we should want Him to come. We should want Him to come because we are so passionate about Him and His work in our lives and what He has done to rescue us that we can’t bear to be apart from Him. Another moment that’s the reason we want Him to come. He’s coming. We can make that prediction, but we cannot predict when.

I’m going to say something here I’ve said before and I’ve said it sometimes and I’m sure people don’t like it, but if Jesus said you can’t know when I’m coming, that I can’t be wrong about this, but He might not come for another hundred years. There’s almost eight billion people on this planet, and only a fraction of them have ever heard the gospel. There’s work to do, children. There’s work to do. Secondly, the lack of world peace till He comes. We looked at this in our last Christmas message. There is no peace says my God to the wicked as long as they’re pornographers, sex trafficking, human trafficking, drug abuse, crime lords, gangs, etc., etc., etc. There will be no peace on planet earth until the prince of peace comes. There will be no peace. That doesn’t mean we don’t work for social cohesion in our communities and it doesn’t mean we don’t try to get along with people. It means we do not expect the cessation of all the problems in the world. It will not happen until Jesus comes.

Thirdly, the persistence of human sin. Evil men and imposters will wax worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. Somebody told us if we tell everybody we’re basically good, the world would be better. God’s word says we’re not basically good, and we’re constantly going in the wrong direction because of the corruption of our hearts. Here’s here’s the fourth one. Here’s something we can predict: the global expanse of His church. What did Jesus say? “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” The social situation that we live in in America might change, but the church will never disappear because it is His church.

And fourthly, rather because we know the church is going to expand and because Jesus in *John 15* said if they hated me, they’re going to hate you. I read a little book this week, very good little book by Randy Alcorn. I mean 88 pages; it was that tall and that wide. *Grace and Truth: The Grace and Truth Paradox*. And he said and it was I can’t it was a good book, but he pointed out that they’re going to be people no matter how gracious, loving, caring, passionate, giving we are they’re not going to like us because we stand for Christ.

Now quickly, here’s five. You can’t know quit, quit, quit buying into it. You can’t know the timing of the rapture. The rapture. No, you can’t know the timing of the rapture. That needs to become a centerpiece of our Christian faith again. You cannot know the timing of the rapture. You cannot know the identity of the antichrist. Now, children, I know that I’m from another planet and I think differently and I assume everybody can understand things the way I do and it’s an interference and a hindrance to my ministry sometime. I grant that, but if you cannot know when Christ is coming, you cannot know who the antichrist is because if we knew who the antichrist is and that is a human being who’s going to die, then we would be able to say that Christ is going to come within that person’s lifetime. Everybody gets up in the air, the antichrist, this the mark of the beast, this proves that, proves that, proves. If you don’t know when Christ is coming, you cannot know when the antichrist is coming if he’s supposed to come to power before Christ returns because as soon as he comes to power we would have a hint that it’s going to happen soon, wouldn’t we? We cannot know the nature of the millennium. We did a series on Wednesday nights about pre-millennial, post-millennial, a-millennial, and the different perspectives on that. No use predicting it or quoting it or talking about it in some authoritative sense this is what’s going to happen because nobody’s going to know until it happens. We must quit the speculation over geopolitical events.

I know the issue of Israel in the Middle East is a complex issue but every time something happens in the Middle East with Israel everybody starts running to the phones and getting on their Facebook pages and posting how Jesus is coming and that’s been going on for 80 years. Now every little every little seismic tremor in the Middle East Jesus is coming and if I can just go ahead and ruin the day for everybody including myself Jesus said He’s going to come when you least expect it not when you’re really expecting it when you least expect it to happen and we’re measuring it by what happens in the Middle East and finally speculation over so-called environmental signs and I got I got I got a few more minutes be patient with me I thought I was going to run over and I didn’t everybody says hallelujah I heard somebody say it I’m just kidding around people okay well it’s here somewhere about signs in the heavens there’ll be signs in the heavens okay there it is well that’s not it so the other year four or five years ago Sarah Toussaint came in one day and asked me about it some guy Steve I can’t remember can’t pronounce his last name and there was some kind of astronomical event where the star Vega I think was going to pass through the constellation Virgo and the star was going to pass through the womb area of the constellation Virgo and somehow this was a fulfillment of *Revelation* chapter 12 about the woman giving birth to the man child and I saw the guy on his video say now we can’t predict things but we could see the coming of Christ very soon and we got to stop doing that children stop burning up ink and air time and Facebook time following the predictions of people let us come to this book and say and I ask you to pray this with me through this series oh God show us Jesus in the book of *Revelation* amen almighty God our king and father we bless you.