This is the ONLY book of the Bible Jesus came down to supervise as the conclusion of God’s Revelation. Moses went up to God to get the Pentateuch; Jesus came down to Earth on Patmos to show John what to write.

WHY STUDY REVELATION:

1. To GET TO KNOW JESUS better than ever before in your life.

2. To UNDERSTAND GOD’S PLANS for the world around you, and see God shaping the course of history all around you.

3. To LIVE CONFIDENTLY because you know where you came from, why you are here, and where you are headed.

PENTATEUCH: serpent in Garden crushed by Virgin born Messiah; Shiloh the Ruler from Judah; Pharaoh’s magicians with demonic powers; God’s plagues He can call out on Earth; a Star from Jacob; and judgments on disobedient Israel.

Job: Satan in Cosmic War with power to affect weather, disease, nations, and accuse before God’s Throne.

HISTORICAL BOOKS: the power of idols; the scene of Satan and his army before God’s Throne.

THE PSALMS: we see a Psalm 2 Christ ruling the Earth with a rod of iron but that never shows up in the Gospels; we also see an end of days Psalm 83 coalition attacking Israel that never did in the Bible times.

THE GOSPELS: we see Jesus saying He is coming on the clouds, that there will be global plagues, death, disasters, and then every eye will see Him; judging the nations; sitting on David’s Throne; coming for His own to take them to a place prepared. But none of those ever happened.

THE EPISTLES: we see the Earth dissolving in 2 Peter 3; the Lord coming just for His saints in 1 Th 4; a return with flaming fire in wrath 2 Th 1; and rescue of His own in 1 Thessalonians 4.

The Book Not From This Planet

We’re looking at Revelation as a part of the Bible, which I entitled The Book That’s Not From This Planet. The scriptures are unique in the fact that God Himself came down on Mount Sinai to launch the first five books of the Bible. He actually came down and told Moses what to write. We get Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy basically launched from that beginning by God. Then we come over here to the book of Revelation and Jesus Himself came to John on Patmos so He could write the conclusion to the Bible.

So basically, the Bible is bookmarked by:

God coming down,

launching it,

Jesus coming down and finishing the Bible.

It’s like no other book in the world.

This 20-lesson course on the final book of the Bible has:

404 verses in Revelation that we will study.

There are over 800 quotations to all the rest of the Bible, which we’ll see in just a moment are fascinating because it connects all of these pieces into one beautiful finale.

There is no new doctrine by the way, contained in the book of Revelation.

 A lot of people say, Oh, that’s a dangerous book, all those strange things that are in there. No, everything in Revelation has already been given in the Bible. It’s just put together like a movie in the book of Revelation, but every piece of Revelation you’ll find somewhere else in the Bible.

This is the only book of the Bible Jesus came down to supervise Himself as the conclusion, Moses went up… Jesus came down.

Why we study Revelation

Well, why would we study Revelation? Three reasons.

Number one, to get to know Jesus Christ better than ever before. The book is called the Revelation of Jesus Christ. It’s not the Revelation of John. Some people say, well, I’m studying the Revelation of John. It’s not at all about John. It’s the Revelation of Jesus Christ.

You can get to know Him better through this book. There are more attributes, more descriptions of the character of Jesus Christ of exactly what He’s doing today than anywhere else in the Bible, it’s the most amazing way to get to know Jesus better.

Secondly, after getting to know Jesus better, the book of the Revelation specifically in the first verse says that it was written for us to know God’s plans. We should know God’s plans for the world around us, and then we can start seeing God shaping the course of history, all around us.

Now, every day I take a break, I pull out my phone and I read the headlines. I look at the news, but I look at the news through not only the lenses of my glasses, but through the lens of scripture. As I look through what the scripture says at the news that I read, I all of a sudden, see God unfolding His plans for this world.

Finally, the third reason, number one, get to know Jesus. Number two, understand God’s plans. Number three, if we understand Revelation, we can begin to live confidently. Why?

Because Revelation explains where we came from.

Revelation explains why we’re here and

Revelation beautifully illustrates where we’re going our destiny.

To live confidently. It’s because we know where we came from, why we’re here and where we’re headed. And that’s what God teaches us for this book.

In the Pentateuch, the first part that God came down to explain to Moses, we find some descriptions of future events:

that Jesus would be the seed of the woman, that’s a prophecy of the Virgin birth

that there is a death angel.

Did you know God had one angel He kept in an abyss it’s called, kind of a prison, when He lets him out that one angel in one evening from sunset and before sunrise in one evening, he went through the entire land of Egypt. He entered every home.  Within the home he identified who the first-born male child was in the home and killed him in his sleep. Then he stopped at the stable, outside the home and killed the firstborn of the animals. In one night in every home, except the Jewish homes that’s called Passover. The Pentateuch reveals to us prophecies about things we can hardly comprehend with our minds.

Also, the Diaspora, that’s a big theological word for the fact that God was going to cause the nation of Israel to be punished because they rejected His rule over them. That’s of course, in Leviticus and in the book of Deuteronomy. Then in the book of Job, we find out that Satan has powers that most of us don’t even realize.

He has power over weather,

he can send tornadoes,

he can call down fire from Heaven. We see that in Revelation. At the end of the Bible, Satan’s prophet can call down fire whenever he wants onto the Earth to overwhelm the world into thinking that he is God.

Also, Satan has power over the nations and in the book of Job, he causes a tribal group living out in the desert to arm themselves and come in and attack Job’s entire farm on all of his herdsmen, all of his ranchers and kill them. That was totally incited by Satan.

Then in the historic books, we find things such as a death angel, again, that killed 70,000 Jews in one quick sweeping motion. We find that there is another angel that killed 185,000 Syrian troops. And every time we see these events, we don’t know how to piece them together until we get to Revelation when Jesus comes and explains that this is all part of Satan, cosmic war against God’s plan, and God’s people.

Continuing, in the book of Psalms, there are three Psalms:

Psalm 2. Jesus is ruling the whole world with a rod of iron. By the way, He doesn’t do that in the Gospels. He doesn’t do that in the Epistles. He never does that in the historic or prophetic or any of these books. When is that? It’s in the book of Revelation.

Psalm 83 talks about a coalition of nations that attack Israel,

Psalm 102 describes what we would call the historic event, the Holocaust.

The prophets.

Ezekiel 36 to 39 says that that a coalition of Russia and Islamic nations are just going to attack Israel in the future.

Daniel nine through 12 tells us that there’s going to be a United revived returned, Roman empire. Most likely one that is just like the historic one, one that is on both sides of the Mediterranean.

A side note. We’ll cover this in chapter 13, but did you know that. Three quarters of the ancient Roman empire. The land area today is Islamic. It’s all Muslim. Fascinating to think that the revived Roman empire very much might involve the Islamic world.

Then we have Isaiah 13, which talks about the coming Babylon. The destruction of Babylon chapter 14 tells the origin of Satan, which exactly is, is in Revelation at the end of the Bible. In chapter 24, it’s called the little apocalypse it exactly parallels Matthew 24 and it’s in Isaiah 24.  Zechariah 12 to 14, the, final destruction of Jerusalem, by the antichrist.

Then in the Gospels, we have prophecies a part of these 800 prophetic scenes that are scattered across the 1,189 chapters of the Bible. Matthew 24, Matthew 25, Mark 13, Luke 21. All of those. Describe the same event. What we would call the tribulation in chapter six, through 18 of the book of Revelation.

In the Epistles

1 Corinthians 3 talks about the judgment of believers.

1 Corinthians 15 talks about the rapture, the taking out of the world of believers.

In 2 Corinthians 5, it’s the judgment seat of our lives, where we get our rewards.

1 Thessalonians 4 the rescue of the church, from the Earth.

2 Thessalonians 1 is the second coming of Christ, when it says He comes in flaming fire, taking vengeance on those that have rejected Him.

And then of course, 2 Peter 3, where Peter describes the end of the world. Literally He said the whole universe dissolves in is re-made, new by God.

Then the book of Jude, the earliest of all the prophecies, Jude, tells us what Enoch in Genesis chapter 5 preached Enoch, the seventh generation, the seventh man from Adam taught that the Lord would come with 10 thousands of His saints. The second coming of Jesus Christ to take control at the height to the tribulation Revelation 19 says… All His saints are with Him. Jude tells us that Enoch in Genesis, prophesied that 10,000 sets myriads of His saints would come with Him.

Well, all of those individual pieces, those 800 quotes are combined. All the Pentateuch Job, the historic books, the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Epistles, all of them are combined into one continuous movie. What we call that is the Revelation of Jesus Christ. All of these pieces are fit together in a chronological, very visual, unfolding scene, almost like a movie script. So, what we can say is that Revelation connects, completes, and it applies all of the Bible.

Revelation is the most well-known book. I don’t think there’s a person that’s not heard of Revelation, that mysterious apocalyptic book. It’s unique because it combines the rest of the Bible. It’s also the most neglected. Unfortunately, during the reformation, the key reforming teachers of the reformation, Calvin and Luther both shied away from the book of Revelation. They talked about it, but they didn’t fully embrace it. Therefore, today it’s very neglected in many churches, but it’s the most vital book of the Bible because it’s the book that reveals Jesus Christ.

Now, listen, we could summarize Revelation by saying this, God designed the Bible, so it ends with a visit back to Earth by Jesus Christ. Jesus comes to visit His church, two generations after He ascended back into Heaven. God lets us see Jesus. He lets us see Him as He is in His risen glory. Remember Revelation says:

His face is shining like the sun,

His eyes are like fire and His hair is white, kind of like the ancient of days that we see in Daniel.

God lets us see Jesus as the almighty King of the universe.

Just one last note, when we look back on church history, the time from the resurrection of Christ to the present those early days in church history, the first three centuries, actually 300 years after the cross. We have a lot of the sermons of those pastors, a lot of written down records of what the early church pastors taught from the Bible. There have been those who’ve given their lives to actually cataloging what books of the Bible, the early church preached about.

They preach from the Epistles a lot,

they love the Gospels,

the Psalms were popular,

they covered the prophets and the historic events and the book of Job,

and of course the Pentateuch.

But there’s only one book of the 66 books in the Bible that you could exactly get every single verse from those sermons, because they’re actually read and quoted and talked about. One book. The only book that’s totally reproducible from the early church sermons is the book of Revelation. That has concluded for many church historians to think Revelation was the most popular book taught in the church for the first three centuries of the church. Revelation is one of the least popular books taught in churches today.

The book of the Revelation, the message of it, is vital for us… for this reason. God tells us how to live for Him in a dangerous world.

Remember the early church during what is recorded in the book of Revelation was going through the darkest hour of the church. The church was:

being hunted down,

systematically imprisoned,

martyred.

They were actually public enemy number one of the Roman empire. As you see in this chart, here’s the chronology of what is going on in the book of Revelation. I think that most of us, if we can get a picture in our mind of what a book of the Bible is about, it’ll kind of stick with us and every time we read it, we’ll kind of be able to fit it into what’s going on.

Here’s the cross of Jesus Christ. Jesus stays around for 40 days. Then He ascends into Heaven.

We have the first generation, the church from about AD 30, about AD 60 in that time period, we have all of Paul’s missionary journeys. We have the, the writing of the Gospels and the Epistles and

 we have basically to AD 90, all Peter Paul and all the rest of the apostles are martyred.

There’s one left, John. Here’s John… one, two generations. First-generation, second generation after the cross. Here’s the apostle John captured by Rome in exile, on the Island of Patmos

Jesus Christ who ascended in AD 30 comes down. Jesus comes down to visit. First, He visits all the churches, seven churches, and then He comes with His report to John and reports to Him.

That’s the chronology of the book of Revelation.

The book of Revelation is the final book:

written after the Gospel and the Epistles;

after two generations of Christians live out everything Jesus said;

after everything the apostles said;

after all of the church planting; and

all the training of Peter, Paul, and the other apostles;

Jesus comes back to check how they did. Jesus looked at the health of His church. That’s what Revelation chapter 1, 2, and 3 is all about.

Now looking at the book of the Revelation affirms for us, the incredible sermon that Paul preached. Do you remember when Paul was going on his missionary journeys, that most often he started by speaking to the Jewish proselytes and the Jewish synagogue attenders. In other words, Jews. Paul would go to synagogues. That was his normal, a starting place. So, Paul would teach there; but when he gets to Athens, he finds none in an almost completely pagan city. In Acts 17, he alters the way that he presents the gospel, and he does a public debate. Actually, it’s more of a dialogue. He’s going back and forth with them and explaining to them the gospel.

There Paul’s three-part outline of the Bible is in Acts 17:24-31. This is what he says, starting in verse 24.

He said, first of all, I want you to know there’s a creator and He made everything. He made you and the whole universe around you. And that creator came down to Earth and became a human and was killed by His creatures, but He didn’t stay in the grave.

He Rose. And the power of the gospel is a resurrection savior. But He said He offers salvation,

but He’s coming back to judge the world to see if they acknowledge Him as creator, accept Him as Redeemer or they’ll face Him as judge.

That’s Paul’s three-part sermon creator, Redeemer, judge, look on your slide.

That’s an outline of the whole Bible. You could see that the entire Bible is subsumed by these three.

Genesis 1 and 2 is the creator.

Genesis 3 all the way to Revelation 5 is the unfolding drama of redemption. Every sacrifice in the old Testament, every type or prophecy of Christ, and then Jesus Himself coming in the Gospels and then explained, preached, and presented in the Epistles.

Finally, in Revelation 5 surrounding the throne or the redeem singing about redemption. But look what happens in Revelation six, we call it the great tribulation. That’s the judge returning.

That’s an outline of the Bible. The creator Genesis 1 and 2, the Redeemer Genesis 3 to Revelation 5. The judge returned.

That teaches us something.

The creator: knowing Him means I was designed by Him, everything about me. Psalm 139 says He’s the one that wove me together in my mother’s womb. I was designed by Him. That’s my origin. That’s how I got here. Did you know everybody wonders? In the back of their mind, how did I get here? Where did I come from? Origins are a big, big pursuit, especially of the intellectual types that are trying to understand and why we’re even here. That leads to our purpose. If we got here by God, what’s our purpose in life? What is the reason that I’m here?

Well, the Bible says that our Redeemer bought us. 1 Corinthians 6, you’re bought at a price. Therefore, glorify God in your body and your spirit, which are His.

Redemption means my purpose in life.

It’s a purpose, redemption driven life, that I know I was redeemed and that’s what dominates my choices.

I want to please the one who bought me, who owns me, who died for me,

But the judge means we’re answerable to Him. That’s our destiny. He’s the one that determines our destiny.

So, Revelation explains life’s purpose that the only true and reliable answer to our origin, purpose, and destiny is God.

Jesus is how we got here.

Jesus is why we have any reason to live.

Jesus holds the key to where we’re going.

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