This is a prophecy review. Now we have taught 24 Sundays on prophecy previously. Then Christmas came along and we got off the prophecy subject and so it's been all of part of December and all of January and all of February and here we are in the middle of March. And I really want to get you to Revelations chapter 12, because without understanding the 12th chapter, the whole continuity of the book of Revelation gets lost. So we need to do that. But I thought, you know, before I do that, we probably should do a review because it was so long ago. And there may well be people that were not here during those 24 Sundays. And so my attempt today is going to give a review, OK? All right, Heavenly Father, thank you now for your word once again, and help the preacher. Give us an anointing that makes preaching easy, that breaks the oaks of bondage, sets us free, and gives understanding to the people. And I pray this in the holy name of my Savior, Jesus. Amen. Amen. Now, we have dealt with so much of the signs of the end time. We began with a diagram that looks like this. This is not in your notes, but you all have pages and pages on this. And this is a timeline of history. And what happened is that in the Old Testament, we had four specific prophets that were major, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, who predicted by the power of God events that would happen, first of all, in their lifetime, second of all, at the time of the cross, and thirdly, at what we call the end time, whenever that is. And there were other prophets, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Agai, Malachi. And those are called the minor prophets. I don't know why it's because their books are so small or what it is, but they also predicted things to come. And in fact, you may wonder why is Bible prophecy important? And there's a whole lot of reasons. Let me mention two. One is that it could very well be that the prophets gave us and God gave us instructions about the day in which we live. And so why would that be important? So you know and I know how to conduct ourselves in these times which we will face. And then along came Jesus, Peter, Paul, and John in the New Testament, and they also gave us prophecies. And they're prophecies related to the 70 AD destruction of the temple, and they're prophecies also related to this whole era of history here, and also to this, what we call in time, And one of the primary principles of prophecy is what we learn from Jesus in the 24th chapter of Matthew. And we learn that prophecies from him have both a specific immediate fulfillment or a historical fulfillment, and then later on, a final fulfillment, and this is called the law of double reference. And this is a critical, I didn't believe the law of double reference for years, but we spent a whole section one Sunday on verifying from the scripture this law. So prophecies that we got relate to this continuum of history, but they also relate to, quote, the end time. And they will be fulfilled, the same prophecies, in a very compact time. So, what we want to do is, I want to kind of bring you up to date as fast as I can, the signs of where we are. We learned the seven seals. And they are, remember the four riders, the four horses? The white horse, which we understood to be Constantine. The introduction of false Christianity. Christianity was pure until 380 And then Constantine legalized it. And he's the first one to introduce the cross and the flag and took us off track. And all the stories you read about in history books about the Crusades and those, quote, holy wars were not holy. They were not done by genuine Christians. They were done by this whole false Christianity. And by the way, dear friends, today, that's the big issue of our day. That's the big issue today. A counterfeit Christian can look like it, do the things Christians do, and not have Jesus. So, a big introduction. Then came the Red Horse, which was militant Islam. And we covered that in detail, the red horse, and we went through the scriptures that gave the symbols and the prophecies that have now, that became the symbols of Islam. And then we had the black horse, the famine and disease, and we chased these things through history. And by the way, speaking of Islam, we understand that the desolation, the abomination of desolations, remember that? The temple, the holy temple in Jerusalem was demolished, destroyed, and then they built the Mosque of Omar on top of it, and that is in fact the abomination of the desolation. They put an abomination, a worship of a false god, on top of the temple mount. And so many interesting details about that we covered. And then the fifth seal was the cry of the martyrs and the sixth one is notated in the Bible as destruction from above and destruction of above from above the wars never happened from the skies until the second world or the first world war and so the sixth seal is the events of the I got the first world war there it should be it should be it should be the first world war Now, when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven by the space of half an hour. And that's interesting, because let me take you here now, because there are two time tools in the Bible. I have appointed thee, God says, each day for a year. And so in prophetic calculations, this information needs to be brought into understanding. And secondly, be not ignorant of this. One day is what the Lord has a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day. And this is another time tool that we use in denoting the meaning of prophecy. So watch this now. When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. Now if you take that time, if one day in fact does equal 1,000 years, then half an hour is 148th of a day. So 148th of 1,000 years is 20.8 years. And so we covered this fact that from the Sixth Seal, which was the First World War, to the Second World War, was in fact 20.8 years. If indeed World War I was a historical fulfillment of the sixth seal, and then we have the silence, and then the seventh seal. And so here, all you have to do is a calculation. World War I ended November 11th, 18, and World War II started here, and so we have the seventh seal. And the angel took the censer, filled it with fire of the altar, and cast it into the earth, and there were voices. And this is part of what happened. And the seven angels which had seven trumpets prepared themselves. Now, what you need to catch is that the seventh seal consists of seven trumpets, okay? And so, and the seven, these are announcement by angels of what's going to happen. And so they prepared themselves. And let me just skip through here and get to this seven trumpets. The sixth, the seventh seal rather, is seven trumpets. Later on you'll learn that in the seven trumpets there are seven thunders and there are seven vials. And so the seven keeps occurring and the meaning of them is very important. So we want to go to the seven trumpets. And the first trumpet the angel announced was the striking of the earth's vegetation. And this has happened since World War I, and millions of square miles have been lost. I just put a little outline here of the causes. Anthropogenic pollution, anthro simply means man-made pollution, has one of the causes. Another cause is the ozone depletion. Another cause is, and of this, we have got skin cancers and cataracts, which we never had before. and suppressed immune system and damaged plant life as a result of this. The striking of the vegetation is also due to the increased ultraviolet radiation worldwide. Once fertile lands become deserts, and I don't know how to say it, desertification of all over the world, South America and Africa and all parts of the Orient. And so this first trumpet is the angel announcing that something was gonna happen to our plant life. The deforestation is a result of it. And of course, the real problem of all of this is something that is basically new to the world, and that is increased hunger because of the destruction to the vegetation. And this has happened in some of our lifetimes. The second trumpet is a voicing of the seas that were struck. First one was the striking of vegetation, and then the seas were struck. And I haven't got time to take you through the specific Scriptures on all of these, but this is an angelic announcement of the pollution of the seas, and that in fact they've become filled with toxic wastes and garbage has been dumped into them, acid rain and anoxic water, which is water that hasn't got the oxygen in it that it once had, and we have agricultural runoff problems, and basically the death of sea life. This is the second trumpet saying, this is going to happen. And so what we're doing now is we're following the historic prophecies And we had the seven seals, and now we're transitioning into the seven trumpets. And this is the first two of the seven trumpets. And the third one was that the fresh waters would be struck. And again, I'm hesitant. I don't like teaching like this. I like to give you the details, but I did that weeks ago. So I'm just going to give you the quick outline. It is to do with the sickening of the fresh waters in the world. And right now, this is an actual report that over 1 billion people in the earth do not have safe drinking water. Did you know that? Over a billion people right now. 14,000 people die each day and 11,000 of them are children. under five because of the waters that they have to drink. In fact, tomorrow is National and International World Water Day. Most of us don't get much promotion about it, don't hear much about it, but what we've got here is a major Issue in the world predicted again. It's a new thing didn't happen in decades and centuries before but in contemporary life in angels announced that the waters in fact are One child out of every 15 seconds dies from water-related diseases. One half of the world's hospital beds are occupied by patients suffering from water-related diseases. Now, in America, we don't see as much of that, but if you travel to other continents of the world, that's where, in the main, it's happening. And so, wells are empty. In fact, you know one of our church projects has been in Wangadongi? Wangadongi. I'll learn that. Where we kind of took a whole town under our wings in Kenya. And we built a church there, and we built an AIDS clinic, and we bought all the uniforms for children to go to school. We pay the school teachers to teach them. We pay the pastor's salary there. One of the big projects that we've undertaken is water. So off the church building, the roof off the building, we have these big reservoirs that we purchased and they've been placed there. So when it rains, all the water is collected. And recently, we have spent money on piping fresh water into that town and supply the whole town's good water. But this is in fact the condition. in many parts of the world. The fourth trumpet is an announcement of a striking of the atmosphere and of the air. And so air pollution has become predominant. It never existed a century before now, and now we have the air being contaminated. We can now only see one-third of the stars. If you had been alive 80 years ago, you would have seen three times as many stars at night as you can see now. We have filled the atmosphere with black carbon, noxious gases, and contaminated the air. And this was predicted by the angels. And in fact, 50,000 deaths in the United States each year are contributed to the pollutions of the air. And what's interesting, we haven't got time to go into this, but this happens to be China, where we have over 400 underground fires, where coal mines underground are burning. And they have been burning for over 10 years, 400 of them. And there's a whole string of them right across a part of China. non-stop, continually sending into the air all these noxious gases. Now, here's where I want to spend some time, because now we're getting up. We've got past the Second World War, or thereabouts. The fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven onto the earth. And to him, now watch this, the star that fell from heaven is a person. Wanna guess his name? The star that fell from heaven is a person. And he was given the key to the bottomless pit. What we mean by that is utter depravity. And I wanna suggest to you that the world had never seen it until the enemy, the devil himself empowered a man named Hitler. And this was indeed what happened as a result of Satan's work. And so where do we get that from? He opened the bottomless pit and there arose smoke out of the pit as a smoke of a great furnace. sun in the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit. And so we have the ovens of Auschwitz and four million people burned in the ovens. And the depravity of that era has never been equaled in all previous human history. And there came out of the smoke, this is at the same time, upon the earth, locusts. Now remember that when you study Bible prophecy, John is writing 2,000 years ago about today, about things he saw today. There was no word airplane, there was no, I mean, he called a lot of them horses, and sometimes they were called locusts. How else would you describe to your contemporaries what you saw? You could only describe it in terms known to you during the day. And so here we understand that these locusts, and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. So these airplanes were used in war and they had power. And it was commanded them that they should not hurt the grass. Neither green things, but neither the tree, but only these men which have not the seal of God in their foreheads. A certain group of people was singled out and of course, you know who it was. It was the Jews, the greatest hinders of the German Marxist supremacy and they were considered an inferior race without the seal of God. They even went so far as to declare these people were not human. but God did not approve of them even being in existence. And so here we have in prophecy this attack, and this is why I go to the Hitler era here, is because those men don't have the seal of God on their foreheads. And so they became the target of all the animosity. And of course, you know some of the story. They were denied civil rights. There was a boycott of all the Jewish shops. Jews not admitted signs were everywhere. And they quit using Jewish doctors, lawyers, and teachers. And then they put a ban on buying Jewish goods and products. And then they had Kristallnacht, and one night, 7,500 Jewish shops were destroyed, 400 synagogues destroyed, 20,000 were sent to concentration camps, and 1.6 million were sent to work camps all in one day, one night, crystal night. And so, They were whipped and they were kicked with boots. Their teeth smashed out and they were bulldozed live into pits. They experimented with cruel medical experiments on them. They maimed and raped them, dropped them onto sharp objects. And in those days, men shall seek death. and shall not find it, and shall desire to die, and thus shall flee from them. And only about 25,000 of those Jewish people were able to commit suicide. Now remember, these prophecies have a historic fulfillment as well as a future fulfillment. And what we're doing here is we're covering the historic fulfillment of these prophecies. Now going back to the locusts, the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle. And on their heads were, as it were, crowns of gold. And their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women. It's interesting that the word comet means head of hair. And they had hair as the hair of a woman, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were, of iron. Obviously, you can tell now that when he's talking about locusts, he wasn't talking about little animal things. These were out of iron, so here he's describing in 2,000-year-old terms what is happening currently. And the sound of their wings, or their props, he didn't know the difference, or it could have been a helicopter prop, was as a sound of chariots, of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like on the scorpions, and there were stings in their tails. And so John saw tail gunners shooting out of airplanes. John saw what he described as locusts out of iron who had the ability to kill. And they had a king over them. which was the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but the Greek tongue, Apollyon. And then the scripture says, one woe is past, and behold, there come two woes after. So what we have here now is we have the seven seals, and the seventh seal contains seven trumpets, and buried within the seven trumpets are the three woes, and this was one of them. The second and the third are yet to come. And so, so the sixth trumpet, and this is where we start to really catch up to date, and the sixth angel sounded, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar, which was before the Lord, saying to the sixth angel, which had the trumpet, Now watch this. Loose the four angels which are bound in the great river Euphrates. Now this word angels is kind of an interesting word because it means leader, often used in the Bible to refer to a pastor who is leading a church. But these leaders of the Euphrates, are going to get a signal and approval, or at least there's going to be announcement that this sixth seal, or rather the sixth trumpet, is loosening the leaders that are around the Euphrates River. Now, if you look at the map, I think I put a map in here somewhere, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and probably the fourth one is Turkey. And that is where the troubled spot of the world is right now. And you're going to see in a moment that I happen to believe that we are just, where are we in the prophetic timeline? We are just in front of the sixth seal, or rather the sixth trumpet, which is going to be the third world war. And Euphrates was the original boundary of Israel. Euphrates was connected to Babylon. And we're going to see later on when we get to other chapters in Revelation, how Babylon plays into this. And it was the eastern border of the Roman Empire, and it divides the east from the west. And so here we have the prediction that the sixth trumpet is going to do with the unleashing of these four leaders on the world. And it is so bad that these leaders who were loosed, they were prepared for an hour, a day, and a month, and a year to slay the third part of men. In other words, one third of the world's population will die in that war. This is not Armageddon. Armageddon is yet to come. But these four leaders, according to this six trumpet, six announcement by the angel, these four leaders are now unrestrained. And so we have this preparations for World War III. The result will be one third of mankind. And what's interesting is there will be 200 million involved. Now watch this. The number of the army of the horsemen were 200,000,000. I heard the number of them. Now it's not clear whether these 200 million are people or machines or military equipment or all of the above or the populations that are going to precipitate this attack. So I saw the horses in the vision and then that sat on them. Now remember these horses That's the only term he's got. He's talking about military machinery here. And they had breastplates of fire and brimstone. And the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions. And look at this, out of the mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone. Whoops. Out of their mouth. So here we are with a prediction about these Horses quote in John's day the term was horses, but applying to military equipment today that out out of their breastplates out of the body of this machinery is going to come fire and Out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone And by these three was the third part of men killed by the fire of by the smoke and by the brimstone which issued out of their mouths. For their power is in their mouth and in their tails, the front of the airplane, the back of the airplane. For their tails were like unto serpents, and they had heads, and with them, these serpents mounted on board, they do hurt. And so, we have aircraft, this happens to be unmanned aircraft, I'm trying to think of who I was talking to lately, whose son is in the military and he's stationed out west and he's flying airplanes in Afghanistan right now, from out west. of Steve DeWitt's son. Thank you. And here are the scorpions. Here's the fire coming out of the mouth and out of the tails. And I have, if you recall, I had to give you a whole bunch of details about these. These include helicopters. Not next Sunday, but the next prophecy teaching after that, I'm going to actually show you pictures of new military equipment just released. And soldiers can now carry launchable eyes. Some of them are the size of bees. and they can launch them and that little bead-like robot has camera and it can fly anywhere the soldier wants it to and send video picture back so the soldier can scout out the territory before he walks into it. I told you before about augmented reality. We know what virtual reality is, but the greatest new invention and it's due to be released in 2012. is augmented reality. And what that is, is soldiers will be able to see because there'll be satellite vision and they will be hooked up to the satellite and they will be able to see who's coming out the other side of the building. Augmented reality that will be used commercially. You'll be driving down the street, you look at the regular buildings, but reality will be augmented. When you wear these glasses, you will see big neon signs in front of the buildings that aren't really there, but you'll see them there because they'll be placed there into your vision by augmented reality. And in fact, the newest technology is, because one of the problems they had, and they have functional equipment like this now, and I think I showed you pictures of it before, When a person looks to the right, he doesn't always turn his head. So the glasses didn't work as good. So now, based on the technology that's being used in the F-86, they now have a part in the glasses that actually paints the picture on the iris of your eye. It follows your eye and paints the picture over there on the iris of your eye when you just turn your eyes. And so, for example, a doctor doing a brain surgery, he will now have augmented reality. He's looking at the brain, he's got your head wide open, but all the MRIs and information are superimposed over the brain. So he's seeing there, they aren't really there, but he sees them there. It's going to work in the tourist industry. You can go to a battlefield, and now you can see the battlefield in augmented reality. You'll actually see people all around you, life-size, fighting chariots. The whole thing will be recreated. You'll see it, but it isn't really there. It's called augmented reality. And next week or the week after, when I get to the second from here, I'm gonna cover Revelation 12. I'm actually gonna bring you photos of all of this technology and let you see how it works. And it's pretty amazing. Helicopters are being flown this way and millions of micro robots will occur and be part of this battle. Now, there's an interlude before the seventh trumpet, and it's called the seven thunders. I can't tell you anything about the seven thunders because God doesn't want any of us to know about them. And here's the text. And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, look at what John says, I was about to write. And I heard a voice from heaven saying to me, seal up these things which the seven thunders uttered and don't write them. So this is a mystery section here where we are not given in advance the events or the causes or what the thunders are, but it would appear that they are international announcements. We don't know what they are. The Bible doesn't tell us what they are sealed up. Don't tell them what you saw or heard when you heard the seven thunders and don't write them down. And then we have the seventh trumpet. Now, in the days of the voices of the seventh angel, when he shall begin to sound, watch this now. because this is really critical. I'm going to pull this together hopefully in a diagram in a moment. The mystery of God will be finished at the seventh trumpet. as he had declared to his servants of prophets. In other words, this completing of the mystery of God has been declared by the prophets that I showed you, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, and the New Testament prophets as well. And so when the seventh trumpet sounds, then shall the mystery of God be finished. So let's learn a couple things about the seventh trumpet. It's the last trumpet. There are only seven trumpets. Seventh trumpet is the last trumpet. The seventh trumpet is the third of the three woes. The second woe, remember the first woe was Germany in the Second World War. The second woe is the sixth trumpet, which hasn't happened yet, but out of the Euphrates, out of that part of the world, it's gonna come the next biggest war in the whole world. And then the third woe will be the seventh trumpet. And at this time, the mystery of God is finished. And I'm gonna show you in just a moment what the mystery of God is as clearly as I know it. The mystery of God is also good news. We're looking forward to this, and you'll see why in a moment. Here it is. The mystery of God is the resurrection and the rapture of the true church. And I want to show you this in the Bible so you don't think I'm making it up. You wouldn't think that anyhow, would you? But you need to test the words of every preacher to make sure he's telling you what the book says. So the mystery of God, this is the seventh trumpet. So here's the mystery explained because the best interpreter of scripture is the scripture. Behold, I tell you a mystery. Here's the mystery. We shall not all die. Word sleep is used there, but we shall all be changed. Now watch this in a moment. In the twinkling of an eye, now this is really critical, watch it, at the last trump, got it? For the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised incorruptible and we shall be changed. Are you ready for that? It's coming, it's the seventh trumpet. This is the time when the rapture and the resurrected dead shall be raised. The dead unto damnation and the just unto reward. Now watch here. Let's go on to another scripture. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout. with the voice of the archangel and with the trump of God and the dead in Christ shall rise first then we which are alive that are left shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Now notice the Lord is coming at this seventh trumpet with the trumpet And with a shout of the angel, the archangel, and the dead are going to raise, and we which are alive remain shall be caught up in the clouds of sky. And now here's a good point. Now comfort one another with these words. This is a good thing. We're going to be leaving here, folks. And I can hardly wait to tell you. In fact, on Wednesday night, we're going to cover Psalm 27, which will give you a lot of understanding of how the Lord intends between now and then to protect and keep you. We'll do that on Wednesday night. So the mystery of God is complete. And then the time of God's wrath begins. What is happening in the world, including the sixth trumpet, where it's based around Iraq, Iran, and Syria, that is not God's wrath. That's just a war. Got it? It's simply a war. The time of God's wrath doesn't occur until later. So what I want to do in a moment is to show you a diagram that I think will help pull us together. The second woe is past and the third woe cometh quickly. So in other words, this is a critical verse because what this means is between the sixth trumpet and the seventh trumpet is not much time. It's a short period of time. And the seventh angel sounded, and there followed great voices in heaven. Now look at this, because this is a time when the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever. So let me see if I can just pull this together quickly. Notice that these are the trumpets. I think they're in your picture. I think you got them in your notes. And here we are here, and this sixth trumpet, which is the eruption out of the leadership from the Euphrates, which is Iraq, Iran, Syria, and probably Turkey, and these four leaders will instigate this event that we just covered at this time. And then notice that there's a short time between the sixth trumpet and the seventh trumpet according to the scriptures. It's going to be a short period of time. Now, what we want to study and what's coming is we want to study this zone here from where we are to the end of this and these brackets in here I put to indicate this tribulation period. Now watch with me here because I want to zoom in a little tighter on this period because what's going to happen is very pertinent to you and I. In fact we're going to see how the financial collapse of nations is predicted in the Bible And it is going to precipitate. It could very well be one of the seven thunders, an announcement about world banking. And we're going to see where it comes from in scripture and what the future holds. And we're really close. If you're on this historic timeline, I'm of the opinion that, from according to scriptures, that we are just before the Sixth Trumpet. And remember, the Sixth Trumpet is the Euphrates deal. It is the Iraq-Iran issue. And Israel's gonna play a big part in it. Now, here is where it's gonna be a little tough for you, but if you were here, you'll recall it. Remember that prophecy has a historic fulfillment as well as a future fulfillment, the law of double reference. What I've been taking you through now has been the historic fulfillment of these Bible prophecies. Now, during this period of time, these seven seals are going to be repeated all over again in a very compact, short time span. So you can go back and and read them. And you could because while we have the the historic ongoing fulfillment of prophecy and historically, there's another timeline and all these things are going to happen in a compact period of time. The six seals are going to happen there. And this is where this is where the law of double reference happens. This is where the prophecies about the future and the historic prophecies merge in time. And so the six trumpets will also occur here just before the seventh trumpet. And remember, the time between here and here is short. Don't forget that, it's a short period of time. And then what happens after that? And so what we're gonna study is the fact that then there are the seven vials. You've got seven seals, seven trumpets, and now you have seven thunders, and then you have the seven vials. And these vials are the outpouring of the wrath of God on the earth in this zone right here, after the sounding of the seventh trumpet. So these seven vials are a duration of time, and they actually are consummated by this battle of Armageddon. This is the big war. This is the war in which Christ will participate. This is the war to end all wars. And so everything you've heard about Armageddon is going to occur at this point in time. And so what we want to do in our study of prophecy is we want to zoom in from where we are right here and understand the details of what is leading up here, how it's going to affect America, and what's going to happen here before we leave here. And that will be. what we're going to study. And so the 12th chapter of Revelation has got to be understood in order to continue with 13 through 21. And so what we want to do then is next Sunday is I'm going to go straight to Revelation chapter 12 and show you as best I can how that fits in. Without understanding the 12th chapter, you lose the continuity in the book of Revelation. So, we're gonna do that. That's what we'll do next Sunday. Amen.