“When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. Then I saw the seven angels who stand before God, and the seven trumpets were given to them. And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints, on the golden altar before the throne. And the smoke of the incense with the prayers of the saints rose up before God from the hand of the angel. Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. And the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to blow them.”

The Most Difficult Part of Revelation

Now, as we’ve been going through the book of Revelation, and again we’ll take a break in December to focus on Christmas — I have tried to say to you many times the complexity and the heaviness of this book — I know that we can grow weary of speaking of judgment, judgment, judgment. That is what the book of Revelation is about, until you get to chapter 21 and 22, where we see a glimpse of the new heavens and the new earth. All the rest of it is about judgment.

Let me remind you: we do have this fold-out, ‘Four Views of the End Times.’ Scott got five copies this week, and they’re on the back table. If you’d like to get one, it might help you clarify some thoughts about this very complex subject.

But today — and today, by the way, might prove to be a bit tedious, simply because I’m trying to explain a perspective here and trying to answer the questions — again, we’ve said that the Bible says, all Scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for instruction. If that’s true, then we should be looking to the book of Revelation to find some instruction, as difficult as that is. So today I just give you that warning: we’re coming to the most difficult part of the book of Revelation — and unfortunately, when I get done, I will not be able to give you any practical applications the way I’ve been trying to. I’m not going to have time, because it’s a very involved message.

We come to the most difficult part of the book of Revelation, probably for two reasons. First, because this is where the symbolism really becomes difficult to interpret — what is symbolic, what is literal, how do we interpret the symbolism, and so forth, and especially when you get into the seven trumpets, which we will come back to next week, and the complexity there. It’s very difficult, for that fact. The second difficulty, we will come back to in a moment.

Sequential or Concurrent?

To begin with, then, this morning I want to come back to the subject that I left off with, or mentioned last week — about how we interpret Revelation, and how some commentators see it as sequential. Especially the dispensational community sees it as A, B, C, D, all the way down the line: you come through the seals, and then you come to the trumpets, and then you come to the bowls.

There is the other view, which is concurrent. Which means you see the seals, and at the end of the seals you go back to the beginning, and you see the trumpets. It’s covering the same period of time from different perspectives.

Now, an illustration I would use to explain it to you: about ten years ago they made a remake of the movie Dunkirk, and the movie was made based on a statement that Winston Churchill made at the beginning of World War II, where he said they would fight the Nazis on the land, in the air, and on the sea. And when they made this Dunkirk movie, you kept seeing the same scene, and it kept coming to the same scene, but from a different perspective. So one time you saw the soldiers on the ship, and a German bomber came along and bombed the ship and it blew up and killed everybody. And then five minutes later you would see that same plane coming to bomb this ship, and you’re thinking, “why are we seeing this again?” — it’s just because they were showing you what it looked like from the ground, what it looked like from the air, and what it looked like from the sea. But they were happening at the same time.

Now this is the concurrent view about Revelation: that you’re going back to see the same period of time, but from a different perspective, with different things highlighted. For example, the seals were seen from the perspective of trials endured by God’s people — there’s a constant reference to the people of God in the seven seals. Whereas in the trumpets there’s a focus on the earth, on unbelieving humans being judged by God. Same time period, perhaps under the concurrent view, but you’re seeing a different group of people and different things happening. Then you come to the bowls, which narrow the focus a little further, and you see mainly judgments upon the Antichrist in his kingdom. For example, the first bowl — or vial, depending on your version of the Bible — specifically says this was poured on the beast, the Antichrist’s kingdom. And the fifth bowl specifically says that. And this suggests that the other bowls, even though they don’t make mention of the Antichrist’s kingdom, they’re inclusive within those other two. So it’s the same period of time, but you’re seeing it from a different perspective.

Now, you see this again — not only from that aspect, but when you come to these Scriptures through Revelation, you keep coming back to this summary statement. So in the sixth seal, everything was destroyed — the earth, the rocks and the mountains were moved, and the sky rolled away, and the stars were darkened, and so forth, and it sounds like the end; “his day of wrath has come.” When you go through the book of Revelation, you see this phrase again and again.

Sarah said I went too fast last week, and so I’m going to try to slow down today. But it is admittedly very involved and complex.

“The seventh angel blew his trumpet, and there were voices in heaven saying, ‘The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.’ And the twenty-four elders who sit on their thrones before God fell on their faces and worshiped God, saying, ‘We give thanks to you, O Lord God Almighty, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign. The nations raged, but your wrath came, and the time for the dead to be judged, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and saints and those who fear your name, both small and great.’”

That’s the seventh trumpet. The seventh seal has this summary statement; the seventh trumpet has this summary statement. And then the bowl — the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice came out of the temple from the throne, saying, “It is done.” And there were flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, and a great earthquake such as there had never been since man was on the earth. So great was that earthquake. And you keep seeing these summary statements that have a lot of overlap. For example, the sixth seal talked about a great earthquake, about mountains and islands being removed, about the sun and the moon being darkened, and about God’s wrath having come. You go to the seventh trumpet, and you hear about rewards for the righteous and wrath for the wicked, and the sun and the moon again are darkened. And then you come to the bowls and vials, and you have a great earthquake, and the mountains and islands are removed. There’s this repetitious language in each of these summary statements, and this is what makes some commentators believe that we should view it as concurrent and not as sequential. It’s not just A all the way until the letter Z — it is: you go, and then you come back. And I will show you more of this in a moment.

Silence in Heaven for Half an Hour

Now then, we come to the question. Having explained — however inadequately — the concurrent versus the sequential, we come to this verse: chapter 8, “there was silence in heaven.” Now, are we supposed to make anything of that, or are we just — “he opened the seventh seal, and there was silence in heaven”? Does that mean everybody suddenly became quiet, or does it have another symbolic application that has importance? Well, let’s talk about that for a little bit, trying to unpack this.

First, notice it says there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. Very specific, isn’t it? “Half an hour.” Well, in the Bible the word ‘hour’ often has a connotation of urgency, and therefore a half an hour would mean even more urgency. It’s very important, as God’s judgment is being poured out, that we get our hearts right with God, and that people should run to him for cover and for deliverance. And this is probably a literary device to describe that kind of urgency. For example, John 5:25 says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, an hour is coming and now is, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” And then Revelation 18: “they stand far off in fear of her torment, and say, ‘Alas, alas, great city, you mighty city, Babylon! For in a single hour your judgment has come.’” And that same phrase is found again in verse 17 and verse 19. So there’s this sense of an hour representing urgency, quickness — and then a half an hour would represent even more urgency in regard to being right with God.

Greg Beale’s Three Possibilities

Then we come to the question of the silence itself. Now, Greg Beale speaks of three reasons — I’m going to show you those in a moment — but I want you to know why I mentioned Greg Beale. So, I’ve told you, I’ve been using ten commentaries on the book of Revelation. This is Greg Beale’s. He’s just one voice — you can argue that I accept it — but it has 1,159 fine-print pages on the book of Revelation. It is comprehensive, it is exhaustive, and exhausting. Okay? He’s got every comment you could possibly hope for. And the reason I point that out is because when he’s talking about the silence, there are a lot of others that just pass over it, don’t even mention it. But he would try to draw out three things the silence may represent.

He says, first, it could be a silence as an indication that God has heard the saints’ prayers, or is listening to them. The next thing you see in the text is his prayers coming up to God — and the implication is God has given special attention to the prayers of his saints at that time.

The second is a revelatory announcement from God — very much like we’d say, “could we have your attention, please?” — and everybody grows silent so they can hear what’s going to be said, or the prayer that’s going to be offered.

The third one is the idea of silence in relation to the liturgy of the temple — the Old Testament temple, when they conducted these sacrifices and so forth, when they had temple worship. This was the liturgy, the form or structure that they followed. We have a liturgy; every church has a liturgy. They start with prayer, or — as we did this morning — we start with communion. We have prayer, we have singing, we have preaching, we come back and have singing. That’s the liturgy, that’s the form of our service, and every church has a slightly different one.

So of these three possibilities, number one and three are most likely to be the reason for this silence in heaven. Number one — because almost all commentators affirm that the judgments you see happening in chapter 8, with the trumpets, are the response to God’s people in chapter 5, where they’re under the altar and they’re saying, “O God, when are you going to judge and avenge us on the earth?” And this is a continuation of that prayer — and God is answering the prayers now. And that’s what it could symbolize.

The other one is number three, and the reason for that is because the temple liturgy follows the book of Revelation very interestingly. For example, the first thing that happened when they went to the temple to do a sacrifice and worship: they trimmed the lamps. And what is the first thing we saw in Revelation, chapter 1 through 3? Christ is trimming the lamps — the lampstands. The churches were the lampstands, and he’s trimming them by challenging their errors, encouraging what they’re doing right, calling them to endure, and he’s brightening them up. The second thing was the slaying of the sacrificial lamb, and in Revelation 5:6 we saw the Lamb that was slain. And then there’s the pouring out the blood at the base of the altar, which we talked about with the fifth seal — the souls under the altar and this was the blood being poured at the base of the altar. And then the offering of incense and prayer was the next step, and this is what you see in our text this morning: the offering of prayer and incense. So there is this belief that the silence is somehow related to the worship — a symbol of the worship that occurred in the tabernacle.

Now, in keeping then with the concurrent judgments — the idea that the judgments are concurrent — the silence of chapter 8, verse 1 represents the conclusion of the first glimpse of this period of time that we would want to call — you know, depending on dispensation — let’s say the seven-year period, but a bigger period of time than that. It’s concluded now. And as he concludes the judgment, there’s silence, in preparation for the next thing that happens, which is the creation of a new heaven and new earth. So you have this period of judgment, and you come to the end of it, and the silence represents the end of God’s judgments prior to the recreation of the earth. And then we go back to the beginning again and look at the whole same time period from a different perspective. And Greg Beale says the trumpet series inaugurates a recounting of events that precede the final day of judgment pictured in the sixth seal.

The Sixth Seal, and the Fourth Trumpet

In other words — let me read the sixth seal again to you. “When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake, and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth, as figs fall from a fig tree when swung by a great wind. The sky vanished away like a scroll being rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place.” And then he goes into the kings, and everybody running from this thing. The picture is one of cataclysmic destruction, with the darkening of the sky, the sky rolling up — it symbolizes the end. And then the judgments — the trumpets show us the same period, back to the beginning.

We can also think of this in other ways. For example, when he opened the sixth seal: “the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, the stars of the sky fell to the earth.” We mentioned that — that’s symbolic. In Genesis, God made the sun to rule the day and the moon to rule the night. If they go dark, there is no rule anymore; it’s chaotic, like the world was at the very beginning. And this is symbolic, not of the actual moon actually turning black, or the sun turning black, or the moon turning to blood, but of the symbolism of them losing their authority to rule, and the result is chaos and pandemonium — and it’s what we see in our culture and our world today.

But notice, what he says — “the moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth.” Now listen to the fourth trumpet: “The fourth angel blew his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, and a third of the moon, and of the stars, so that a third of their light might be darkened, and a third of the day might be kept from shining.” In a sequential viewpoint, the trumpets are supposed to be worse than the seals; the bowls are supposed to be worse than the trumpets. And yet here we have the fourth trumpet, which is not having as bad a devastating effect on the sun and moon as it did in the sixth seal. This suggests that they are concurrent. Sequentially, as we read the book of Revelation, they’re sequential — but chronologically, the fourth trumpet comes over here, before the sixth seal, and you’re seeing the same period of time from a different point of view.

I told you it was a challenging one, didn’t I? I mentioned that. And it is true that it gets worse — and this leads us to our next consideration.

More Severe With Each Wave

The second thing that makes today’s message difficult: the judgments are more severe. In the seals, one-fourth of everything was killed and destroyed. In the trumpets, it’s one-third of everything. And under the bowls, everything is destroyed. That’s what the second consideration is. For example, in Revelation 8:9, “a third of the living creatures in the sea died and a third of the ships were destroyed” under the trumpets. And then: “the second angel poured out his bowl into the sea and it became like the blood of a corpse and every living thing died that was in the sea.” So it’s getting worse in that sense — it goes from one-fourth, to one-third, and then to everything. The degree of destruction escalates with each act.

A God Who Cannot Be Defined Down

And this is where the challenge comes in in our culture today. That degree of destruction is unpalatable. Nobody wants to talk about God’s judgment. We all want to talk about His blessing, His goodness, but nobody wants to talk about His judgment. It is viewed as thoroughly incompatible with the God of love. “This cannot be what that book means, because God is love. He would never judge people and cause these kinds of problems.”

But we have to be careful, because we want to be consistent Christians. We cannot be consistent and affirm Noah’s flood, which killed everybody, and then come to a future that says, “Oh, He would never do that. Something happened, something changed with God.” We cannot take that position. God does not change, and therefore His hatred of sin cannot be changed.

The reason what’s happened is we’ve lost our sense of sin. We no longer think there’s anything wrong, or that anything can offend God — He’ll understand. And this is not the testimony. God does not change, and therefore we cannot negate the severity of this judgment by quoting “God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked,” or “God is not willing that any should perish.” Both of those are biblical texts. But read the next verse, because the very next verse says: though He has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, the wicked will die; and though He is not willing that any should perish, they will perish if they do not repent. This is what we must be aware of. All of Scripture, Old and New Testament, has a view towards God’s judgment of sin and the elimination of sin from His creation — not a redefining of sin, because you’d have to redefine God to do that.

Soundbite Christianity

To help illustrate this, I want to tell you about what I’m critical of: soundbite Christianity. Soundbite Christianity is the tendency to quote a verse without concern for the larger context of Scripture. It takes a verse, lifts it out of its context, and gives it a meaning it was never intended to have. We have to not do that.

A few years ago we did a series on context, and we used Jeremiah 29:11: “I know the plans I have for you, to give you a future and a hope.” And people will jump on that and use it as a basis for a new car, a new job, a new boyfriend, a new girlfriend — “so whatever else, God has a good plan for me.” And we don’t read it in its context. In its context, God is talking to people He has taken into captivity for their sins, and He is telling them they’re going to be in that place for another seventy years. I’m sorry, I don’t see how that is a good plan. Look at the history of the Jewish people — you haven’t seen these great things unfurl in their lives yet. It’s a verse we’ve taken out of its proper context.

This week I saw another report — I think thirty Christians were killed in Nigeria this week. Go to those people and tell them, “God’s got a great plan for your life, everything’s going to be all right,” while they’ve lost a father, a husband. It’s not that that verse isn’t true. But it has a proper contextual setting that is true in and of itself, and when you lift it out of that, you can get off track.

“Be Still, and Know That I Am God”

Here’s another one that most of you know — many of you have used. And I’m not telling you not to use it; I’m trying to make a point about the verse. That is Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.” Many Christians have used that and continue to use it, and I am not telling you not to use it. We lean on it when things are going crazy. We say, “I just need to sit down a moment and center myself, and take inventory of where I am. I need to be still and reflect and meditate upon the Lord.” Amen. Do that. But you cannot do it by disconnecting it from its larger context.

In its larger context, it mirrors and affirms what we see happening in Revelation. Let me read the whole psalm to you — it’s eleven verses, and I want you to pick up the echoes of the book of Revelation in your own mind:

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved. God will help her when morning dawns. The nations rage, the kingdoms totter. He utters His voice, the earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress. Come, behold the works of the Lord, how He has brought desolations on the earth. He makes war cease to the end of the earth; He breaks the bow and shatters the spear, He burns the chariots with fire. Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations; I will be exalted in the earth. The God of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress.”

The Echoes of Revelation

Notice the correlation with the book of Revelation, if you didn’t already pick it up. First, the purpose we’ve said of Revelation is to encourage Christians in their sufferings, and in these troubled days. And the psalm says: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble; we will not fear. God will help her when morning dawns.”

Second: “Though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling.” What is a mountain trembling? It’s an earthquake — and we read again and again about a great earthquake in the book of Revelation. And Luke 21 talks about the waves of the sea roaring and going back and forth in turmoil. These are apocalyptic imagery from the book of Psalms.

Third, it echoes the concept of heaven in this text: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved. God will help her when morning dawns.” And in Revelation 22: “the angel showed me the river of the water of life, flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb, through the middle of the city. The throne of God will be there, and of the lamb will be in it, and His servants will worship Him. They will see His face.” There you have the echoes of Revelation again in Psalm 46.

And fourth, verses six, eight, nine, and ten echo apocalyptic and prophetic references from the Old Testament that we see in the book of Revelation.

And that’s the key takeaway: contextually, Psalm 46 is a word of encouragement. But it is a word of encouragement to God’s people as judgment falls all around them in the end days. “The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our fortress.” We can be still and know the Lord is God — in this moment, especially. And by the way, when He says, “I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth” — that phrase is almost always used in the Old Testament for God judging sin and pouring out His wrath upon people. Now that makes it possible, I hope, to see this silence in heaven as the consummation of God’s judgment.

Silence Before the Judge

And I have a lot of Scriptures here. In our series we’ve said the three purposes are our three acts of Revelation: the first act is to see Christ glorified, Christ magnified, exalted; the second act is the Old Testament explored; and the third act is the truth applied. And admittedly we haven’t done a very good job with that, because the book is so complex — at least that’s my excuse. But let’s go exploring. Let’s explore the Old Testament and see how often the phrase “silence” is connected to God’s judgment.

We begin with Psalm 76: “You are to be feared from the heavens; You utter judgment; the earth feared and was still.” Notice that there’s judgment, and the consequence: the earth is still. And then He asks this question, “Who can stand before you when once your anger is roused?” And in Revelation 6:17 we saw that, didn’t we — “the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?” It’s the same question in reverse, and the result is silence. God’s judgment, the consummation of His judgment, brings silence.

Note this from Isaiah 47: “Come down and sit in the dust, O virgin daughter of Babylon; sit on the ground without a throne, O daughter of the Chaldeans. For you shall no more be called tender and delicate. Sit in silence, and go into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans, for you shall no more be called the mistress of kingdoms.” The darkness goes right side by side with the silence, with the judgment of God upon Babylon — which has echoes in the book of Revelation, as you know.

Listen to this passage from Amos: “Then the Lord said to me, the end has come upon my people Israel; I will no longer pass by them. The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day, declares the Lord of hosts. So many dead bodies — they are thrown everywhere!” — and there’s the word silence. And there’s no way you could mistake the connection of that to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D.

Listen to 1 Samuel chapter 2, verse 9: “He will guard the feet of the faithful ones, but the wicked shall be cut off in darkness.” The King James says they will be silent in darkness — because “cut off” meant to be cut off from the people: lose your voice, lose your influence. You’re in silence as a consequence of God’s judgment.

Lamentations 2:10: after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, “the elders of the daughter of Zion sit on the ground in silence.”

Now, in the midst of that heaviness, I will give you another example of God’s mercy — but also a passage that we take out of its proper context. All of us here today know the song, or many of us perhaps — not everyone. “Great Is Thy Faithfulness, morning by morning, new mercies I see.” But I wonder how many of us here today could tell you where that song comes from. Where does that Scripture come from? Here’s the fullness of it: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.” And it’s an echo of the paradox here. This is a great paradox, because that verse comes out of the book of Lamentations — which is the prophet Jeremiah lamenting the destruction of Jerusalem for their sins — in the third chapter, verse 22 and 23. There’s destruction. God has judged sin. And yet, there’s hope. If we run to Him before it’s too late. Amen.

Listen to Habakkuk: “The Lord is in His holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before Him.” Zechariah 2:13: “Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord; for He has roused Himself from His holy dwelling.” And notice what we saw about “roused” a moment ago — He’s roused Himself up to express His wrath. And this is the concept: be silent, because God has judged, or is about to judge.

Now listen to this passage from Zephaniah — how many of you didn’t know there was a book in the Bible called Zephaniah, unless you’ve memorized the books of the Bible? Zephaniah chapter 1, verse 7: “Be silent before the Lord God; for the day of the Lord is near. The Lord has prepared a sacrifice and consecrated His gifts.” Now that last part has a double-edged application. There’s a sense in which the Lord has prepared the sacrifice of Christ, through which He invites all those who put their faith in Christ to the marriage supper of the Lamb — that we will see later. That’s the positive side. The negative side is that God is going to have a sacrifice of judgment upon the peoples who are in rebellion against Him.

The Sacrifice of God

So I’ll say it here before I forget, because I’ve got to share these and we’re almost done. When you come to these pictures of destruction — especially the ones I’m going to read next — we would naturally want to balk against this idea of that kind of destructiveness, physical destruction. But listen: what is the metaphor? What is the symbolism? The symbolism of this carnage illustrates the carnage of the soul in hell, forever, without God. It might not represent literal death and destruction on the earth, but it does convey that kind of horror to the soul that is lost without God.

So let me read these passages about this sacrifice that God has invited: “Son of man, thus says the Lord God: speak to the birds of every sort, and to all beasts of the field, assemble and come; gather from all around to the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you — a great sacrificial feast on the mountains of Israel. You shall eat flesh and drink blood!” Well, that’s a good Halloween image, isn’t it? “Oh, that’s Old Testament pastor!”

Well then, let’s read Revelation 19: “I saw an angel standing in the sun, and with a loud voice he called to all the birds that fly overhead: ‘Come, gather for the great supper of God — to eat the flesh of kings, of captains, the flesh of mighty men, of horses and their riders, the flesh of all men, both free and slave, both small and great.'” I’m not trying to impress you with the graphicness here, and I’m not saying those passages are to be taken absolutely literally. It is the Bible using the language people could understand, that this judgment of God ends in such destruction that the bodies are laying everywhere, and because you cannot possibly bury them, nature takes its course, and the birds, the scavengers, come from the sky to eat them up.

What a horrible image it is. What are we supposed to learn? This is what sin does to the human soul and the human person — it destroys it, it corrupts it. A battle of that scope — and by the way, the book of Ezekiel, after this great battle that it describes, which is called Armageddon, and we’ll come back to later in the book of Revelation — after that, it says it takes six months to bury all the dead. The Bible is using this kind of graphic, overwhelming language to warn about how sin destroys, and begging us not to be indifferent to sin in our lives or in the lives of others — and to be serious about it.

The Consummation

These sayings, these judgment images, are all connected to silence. The seventh seal is a mark of God having consummated His judgment completely. And then we see the same judgment in different images again, for effect, within the concurrent viewpoint. The seventh seal is seen as the consummation of God’s judgment, involving the destruction of the world — which is portrayed in this passage from 2 Peter chapter 3;

and by the way, this is directly after the verse, “God is not willing that any should perish”: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, that same kind of revelational language, isn’t it? And the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done in it will be exposed. Since all these things are thus to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God? For because of such, the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved.” Do you remember Psalm 46? “The earth melts at His word. The nations rage.” The heavenly bodies will melt as they burn.

And then Revelation 21, again: “According to His promise, we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.” God is judging sin. This is what we see in Revelation. He’s judging sin, He’s using all these metaphorical images to convey the horror of it — and the hope is not the right word. With the intent that those who have been called to salvation will respond to that warning and flee to Him. You know we touched on this the other week: everybody else hardens their heart to God; becomes worse in their sin, not better.

Then why is He doing this? That those who have been called by His name from eternity past will come to salvation — because it will have the effect on them that it does not have on those who are truly lost.

What a mouthful. And we’ll stop now — everybody take a deep breath. What a challenging book. And this is why your pastor is delayed for years taking up the mantle of trying to plow this field. I hope you’ll be here next week, and we will plow some more. Father God, thank you for your