Let me read to you from Revelation 14, 17 through 20, page 22. This comes from the majority text. Then another angel came out of the temple, the one in heaven, he too having a sharp sickle. And another angel came out from the altar, having authority over the fire, And he called out with a loud cry to the one having the sharp sickle saying, thrust in your sharp sickle and gather the grape clusters of the vine of the earth because her grapes are ripe. So the angel swung his sickle at the earth and gathered the vine of the earth and threw it into the great wine press of God's fury. The winepress was trampled outside the city and blood came out of the winepress up to the horses bridles for a thousand six hundred stadia Amen father we thank you for your word. We looked in the last section at the incredible victory of your gospel and And we're looking today at the incredible victory of your judgments. And I pray that we would glory in who you are, glory in the fact that you hate sin and you either redeem men from sin or you judge them in their sin. But I thank you, Father, that sin will one day be purged from this world. And we look forward to that time when even our bodies will be redeemed and we will be forever freed from every vestige of sin. Do bless the preaching of your word. Enable me to bring it faithfully and each one of us to worship you as we respond to it. In Jesus' name, Amen. Well this passage I just read is pretty scary and I will admit it is kind of gross. But it is inspired and is intended for our edification. And I want to briefly comment on the passage as a whole because it has definitely been used by atheists. If you go online, you will see atheists using passages like this to show how Christianity is so contradictory. They will say, you know, that Christianity says God is loving, kind, generous. gracious, patient, and yet here is a passage that shows the exact opposite. You see, the scripture is contradictory. Well, hopefully you'll recognize that there is no contradiction whatsoever. The Apostle John holds all of God's attributes together as a coherent whole. You can never look at one attribute without seeing it in relationship to all that God is. And we have a false doctrine of love if we do so. God's love is a holy love. God's love is a patient love. Well, the same is true of God's wrath. Wrath and patience go together. They imply each other. Have we seen patience in this chapter? I would say yes, absolutely yes. In fact, it is astounding at how slow God has been to wrath when you look at the way in which these enemies of Christ have been treating him. By the way, the concept of patience doesn't even make sense unless you take it in light of the attribute of God's wrath. So no contradiction. Has He shown love? Absolutely yes. He has been saving the very people who have been persecuting Him. In fact, the 144,000 that this chapter begins with are people who once were enemies of Christ and yet they have become trophies of His grace, His mercy, and His love. And we saw that during the entire time that the Jewish nation was persecuting and killing Christians, God was still saving them. God was still redeeming them to himself. And he continues to do so. Verses 14 through 16 show an ongoing harvest of souls from the land of Israel for an indefinite period of time after the war. And so for God to continue to save this rebellious people, over the next 50 years is an astounding tribute to his patience and his mercy and his love. Now here's the point. When Israel persisted in rejecting the offers of the good news, when they persisted in their fighting against Christ between the years 80, 70, and 132, God is perfectly just in dropping the hammer on them once again, and it's my conviction that verses 17 through 20 have nothing whatsoever to do with the war of 67 through 74. This is the Bar Kokhba Rebellion. This was 132 to 136, and we'll go through it. Hopefully you'll see, oh yeah, it perfectly matches. There is every detail fitting. But in any case, this chapter shows that mercy does not ever preclude God's right to judge. And God's judgments do not ever preclude God's right to save, even in the midst of judgment. There would be no mercy to us if God had not poured out His wrath upon His Son, Jesus Christ. And those who reject God's offers of forgiveness and mercy and love have only themselves to blame when they experience His wrath. Okay, so with that objection out of the way, let's take a look at this passage phrase by phrase. It really is an amazing prophecy. The first phrase highlights the fact that this nasty death harvest was a harvest ordered by the Father. The same Father who ordered the harvest of souls to be saved in the previous verses. Verse 17 begins, and another angel came out of the temple, the one in heaven, he too having a sharp sickle. So just as the previous angel had been taking a message from the throne, giving it to Christ, And the father, the temple was God's throne room. This angel is now bringing a message from that same temple throne room to order a harvest of death. Now the point is we can never presume upon God's love and his patience. No one could deny that God had been unbelievably patient in the 58 years after the war. In fact, the times were so good From the Jews' perspective of that era under the Bar Kokhba rule, he was the Prince of Israel, that many people thought God is surely for us, but we should not confuse God's patience with His approval. And in the same way, God has been unbelievably patient with America, but I guarantee you, He does not approve of America. And we need to really be convinced of this. America has cast God's laws out of the schools, out of the courts, basically out of the public arena. America has been a land that is filled with bloodshed of abortion and euthanasia and ungodly wars and other forms of murder. You look at pornography and sexual sins, it's just pervasive everywhere. You see it in the news, you know, people, being accused of various forms of ungodliness. It's filled with theft. For example, Government approved theft in the form of asset forfeiture loss, ungodly taxes, theft from orphans and widows in the form of inheritance tax. And yes, the inheritance tax, when a person dies, is a form of gross theft from orphans and widows. And God has really strong things to say about that. The point is, God's patience with America has nothing whatsoever to do with God's approval of America. We are ripe for judgment and all it would take is a word from his temple and similar carnage could happen to America as well. Now some people just question that. How in the world could any angel ever be sent by God to bring carnage in America? Well this phrase and there's many other phrases in the book of Revelation indicate, no, God God does indeed do this to all nations. Second, notice that this judgment was carried out by angels. The angel in verse 17 carries a sickle, and he is ready to use it. And then there's a second angel that has authority over fire. By the way, we've seen in the past various angels have their specialties. And he commands the first angel to begin the death toll. Just as angels were used to kill millions of people in the Old Testament, God was going to use angels to kill millions of Jews in this war, and actually of Gentiles as well. We'll look at that in a bit in this war of 132 to 136. Now how they do it, we're not told. But I think we need to read history in light of the invisible. That's what Revelation is doing. It's showing us a behind-the-scenes view of why things are happening on the earth. Because there's demons, there are angels, there are spiritual battles that go behind the human battles. Now when did this calamity happen? Most preterists claim that it happened during the war of AD 66 through 70 because they are many times fixated on that small window of time. For example, Chilton quotes Josephus who said, Galilee was all over filled with fire and blood. But the specific event that Josephus is talking about there happened long before Nero died. In other words, it happened long before chapter 13, verse 3. And so he's mixing up the order of historical events. He's mixing up the order of these chapters. Ralph Bass quotes numerous other historical situations in that war that on the surface might seem like they fit this prophecy, but they too are too early. Now certainly I agree with Bass that the Jordan River was just chock full of bodies. It was filled with blood from beginning to end much earlier in the war and the Sea of Galilee and other lakes were filled with body and with blood, but they're too early. In AD 70, there were so many bodies inside Jerusalem that they started stacking them up as high as the horse's bridles. And when they ran out of room on the roads to stack them up, they started flinging them outside of the body. So there was a lot of gross stuff that happened in that first war. But here's the problem. None of those references fit the historical sequence of chapters 13 through 14. And for me, exegesis has to trump secular history. And I'm not going to go through every word. And that proves a sequence in chapters 13 through 14, but just look at a couple of them here verse 8 of chapter 14 Says of Jerusalem and another a second angel followed saying it fell it fell Babylon the great she made all the nation's drink of the wine of the rage of her fornication so it uses the past tense to indicate that that the fall of Jerusalem had already happened earlier in A.D. 70, and this angel's rubbing it in, the unthinkable has happened. But there are also indications of ongoing sequence of time. If you take a look at verse 13, it uses the phrase, from now on. Okay, so that's a hint there's gonna be some progress of time. When we look at verses 14 through 16 last time, we saw that God willed the harvest of souls to be taken out of the land of Israel after AD 70. And of course, from history, we know that there were many, many Jews who were saved between those years, next 58 years, basically. Now it would be technically possible to see verses 14 through 16 as only occurring in the years 70 to 74. rather than the beginning of an ongoing harvest. But hopefully, when I preached on that section, you were convinced, okay, this is the harvest of the whole next generation of Jews. But even if you took verses 14 through 16 as only referring to 70 through 74 AD, and verses 17 through 20, we see hints, this section has to happen after the events of verses 14 through 16. So to me there's no way of avoiding a post AD 74 fulfillment. For example when he says, then another angel came, both the words then and another indicate that the angel came after the first angel had already finished his work, done his work. To say he also had a sharp sickle logically implies the first one had already come with a sickle, right? So you can't invert those two, which is what some people do. They have these verses occurring before verses 14 through 16. The words and, and, and so also hint at a sequence. But for me, the most obvious hint is the nature of the two harvests in this chapter. Verses 14 through 16 are the wheat harvest, verses 17 through 20 are the grape harvest, and in literal history they're separated by quite a bit of time. So Kendall Easley's commentary says in the world of the first century The grape harvest, otherwise called the vintage, was as distinct from the grain harvest as, say, Easter is from Thanksgiving. They occurred at two different times of years. The grain harvest was done by mid-June. Grapes were harvested in September and October. Thus, the judgment scene pictured in these verses must be distinctly later than the grain harvest. How much later? Then he says he doesn't know. because he's putting it off into the future. His exegesis is correct, but he's got the timing wrong. But if verses 17 through 20 follow sequentially after verses 14 through 16, and if verses 14 through 16 follow sequentially after verses 6 through 13, in other words, if they're sequenced all through the chapter, then it's absolutely obvious where this carnage of death has to occur. There's only one time in Jewish history that it could occur, and that was in the War of Bar Kokhba. So the historical flow of this chapter is this, 144,000 of verses 1 through 5 came out of hiding, and we showed this before, came out of hiding after The temple was destroyed after Jerusalem had fallen in 8070, and they begin this evangelism over the next years, and not only win many Jews to Christ, but they also win many Gentiles throughout the world to Christ. But the next generation sees the final judgment in Israel, in which virtually every Jew was scattered to the winds. From 136 AD and on, Jews were forbidden to enter the city of Jerusalem. It took centuries before they were allowed back in. And I've written in my notes here a couple of full preterist objections, two full preterist objections to my interpretation, and they're very easily dealt with. I'm not gonna bore you with them this morning, but I'll put them up on the web. But I want you to notice next the urgency of this commanded judgment. Verse 18 says, he called out with a loud cry. Now just as we saw that the loud cry of verse 15 showed the urgency of missions, this loud cry shows the urgency of judgment. Why would judgment have urgency? I mean, we can understand the urgency of missions. We don't want people going to hell. But why would judgment be elevated to an equal sense of urgency? Well, I believe it's because over and over again in the Old Testament, God prophesied that when Jesus came and established his kingdom, one of two things would always have to triumph. Either missions would triumph or judgment would triumph. The integrity of Christ's new covenant kingdom rises or falls on the advancement of either missions or judgments. Almost as if the angels realize there is no kingdom unless one or the other of these two things are successful. For example, Psalm 2 says that once Jesus ascends to the right hand of the Father, God guarantees either missions or judgment. The way he words it is nations either kiss the Son and enter into friendship with Jesus, or they are broken by his rod of iron. Those are the only two options, and God guarantees that those two will happen. Now, here is the transition. In the Old Testament, that was not the case. For example, Egypt went for many centuries in rebellion against God and didn't seem to suffer too much in the way of judgments. And in Acts 17, verse 30, God says, it's now going to change. He says, in the past, God winked at those things. He ignored, he overlooked those rebellions, but now he's no longer gonna overlook any rebellion of nations, but now commands all men to repent. So it's Christ's kingdom that necessitates such urgency. Now why do I emphasize such an obvious point? I emphasize it because most evangelicals just don't seem to even think about America being qualified for judgment. They just ignore that. They do not plan for judgment. In fact, their long-term plans always seem to assume that judgment is not going to happen. They base their plans for the future on what has happened in the past, and they're forgetting we live in a cause and effect universe where judgment is going to bring, I mean, not judgment, rebellion is going to bring certain effects in this universe. And apart from repentance, I don't see how judgment is avoidable. If you think America will continue indefinitely to experience God's patience, I think you're ignoring the urgency of this chapter. If Christ is king, missions is urgent. If Christ is king and people persist in rebelling against that kingship, judgment is urgent. Psalm 2 guarantees one or the other is going to happen. Either they kiss the sun or the nations will perish in His ire. Now you might object, well America's been in rebellion for a long time. We've not seen judgment in America. That's actually not the case. There's been quite a few judgments in America's history, followed by times of repentance, however small those repentances might be, you know, even as recently as the 1900s, you know. I think that the Great Depression was a kind of judgment. The presidents, tyrannical presidents we got was a kind of judgment from God. And it actually resulted in a kind of revival. And coming back, in fact, Congress produced a paper. You ought to read it sometime. It's phenomenal. It's either in the 40s or early 50s. when they Massive paper showing we are a Christian nation. We must return to God's law we It's a fabulous paper basically saying that Christ is the king of this nation. By the way, that was the time that they made the national pledge one nation under God, and that's when they put on our money in God we trust. So there have been judgments and repentance a number of times, and given the moral state of our nation today, I think we need to be preparing in some ways for judgment or start working like crazy to bring our nation to repentance, but we cannot ignore it. Now, of course, there's the timing issue that only God is aware of, and that timing issue can be seen in the word ripe. Or as the New King James translates it, fully ripe, translates Akhmadzo. Verse 18 says, thrust in your sharpsicle and gather the grape clusters of the vine of the earth because her grapes are ripe, or are fully ripe. It's sort of like, you know, when Moses wrote Deuteronomy, he told the Israelites, by the way, you can conquer these nations, but you cannot conquer these nations. Leave them alone because their cup of iniquity is not full. They were not ripe for judgment. So that brings up an interesting question. How do you tell if a nation is ripe for judgment? What makes them so? The only God can know when we are fully ripe for judgment, Leviticus 18 gives one fairly surefire way that you know that it is near. And that is when perverse sexual sins are widespread and are defended in society. When I went to Covenant College, Dr. James Hurley gave a series of lectures that was summarizing some of his doctoral research. It was just fascinating. And his thesis was that based on Leviticus 18, that the sexual decline of a nation is an infallible barometer by which you know it is about to be annihilated or at least hammered severely. And he went through nation after nation, empire after empire over the last 3,000 years and demonstrated this has been a consistent theme. Almost always the nation or empire degenerated into sexual perversity just before it was hammered. And so it was their sexual attitudes that showed their ripeness for judgment. So let me read from Leviticus 18 because it almost exclusively lists sexual sins as the immediate precursors to Canaan's bloody judgments. after listing voyeurism, which is equivalent to pornography. So voyeurism, incest, sexual abuse of women, pedophilia, sacrificing children to Moloch for sexual reasons, adultery, homosexuality, lesbianism, and bestiality. God then says this, do not defile yourselves with any of these things, for by all these the nations are defiled, which I am casting out before you. For the land is defiled, therefore I visit the punishment of its iniquity upon it, and the land vomits out its inhabitants. And he goes on to guarantee this is the way God works with nations. Anyway, you could summarize all of the sins that are listed in Leviticus 18 in two modern words, abortion, and sex. Those two words. Okay? This is what has made nations ripe for judgment. God says this is what made Israel ripe for judgment. I won't go into all of the rabbinic justification for gross sexual immorality that was rife, by the way, from the fall of Jerusalem all the way up to the Bar Kokhba rebellion, but you don't have to read very far in the unedited Sonsino edition of the Talmud to see. It is gross. It's stuff I cannot repeat here from the pulpit. It was there, but the Palestinian Talmud, which tended to be a lot more conservative of the two, much more conservative than the Babylonian one, It summarizes why this Bar Kokhba massacre happened. Over 1,000 villages were destroyed. It says, because of contention, because of witchcraft, because of fornication. These rabbis that lived in the second century, they said that fornication was just rife. It was everywhere, and witchcraft was rife. The sexual slide into the sewers that happened in Israel is a pretty sure indicator that a nation is teetering on the verge of destruction. And it wouldn't be right for me to move on without making some applications to America. Are we ripe for judgment in America? You be the judge. based on Leviticus 18. Every one of the perversions, without exception, every one of the perversions in Leviticus 18 is present in America. It's not just present, it is practiced and defended at the highest levels of government. As I mentioned earlier, pornography and various forms of sexual sin, rife not just in our social sphere out there, but in the church of Jesus Christ itself, premarital sex, it is rife in our culture as well as in the church. So is adultery, divorce, ungodly forms of birth control that lead to abortion. These forms of lawlessness are rife in culture, but they are unbelievably rife in the church of Jesus Christ as well. Homosexuality and lesbianism has started to be defended even in some evangelical pulpits. In fact, it is Christians who preach against such things who are targeted as the heretics who now need to be persecuted. Psalm 12 verse 8 says, the wicked prowl on every side when vileness is exalted among the sons of men. Has vileness been exalted in America? Absolutely. Yes, it has. The GOBT cause is not only protected in virtually every state, but it is exalted, it is glorified, it is promoted. They're getting more and more bold. I just read a couple of articles in mainstream media news. that was talking about these experts that are now trying to legalize a person marrying their grandmother and other forms of perversion. I can tell you the names of congressmen who are saying every orientation, polyamory, you name it, needs to be legalized. And so abortion as well continues to be a holocaust. So are we ripe for judgment? I think if we measure by the measuring stick of Leviticus 18, we may well be. And I would say we've got to learn to apply the scripture to our current events. Do not act as if judgment is completely avoidable for our future. I plead with you to Realize there is a high potential and God could do it in any number of ways He could do it overnight by taking down the electric grid and it would it might take years to recover from that International war failing dollar China's bubble blowing up There's any number of creative ways that the Lord could use to bring the similar carnage greater than America has ever experienced in the past So could God have mercy and continued patience? Yes, he can. But the point of this passage, we cannot presume upon it when we see that our nation is ripe for judgment. Now, I'll just briefly mention a point that I've harped on many times before. The term teis gais, that's the Greek word for the earth, that's the way Pickering translates it here, is a reference throughout this book to the land of Israel. It should be translated as the land. This is not a worldwide judgment, as many commentaries try to take it. It's for a very specific number of miles within a certain country, Israel. It's not universal. 1,600 stadia that it specifies. It's 184 miles. And likewise, every other time that the city is used in this book to describe a wicked city, it's referring to Jerusalem. Also, Israel was symbolized by the vine in the Bible. And even in Talmudic literature, I've been reading, wow, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages in the Talmud, and over and over again, that's just the common symbol. Israel was the vine. And so when verse 19 says, so the angel swung his sickle at the land and gathered the vine of the land and threw it into the great winepress of God's fury. Any first century readers who looked at that, they would say, okay, Israel's in trouble. That's basically a judgment that he's talking about. Now we've already mentioned that God had good reason to be furious with Israel. They had persisted in persecuting Christians all the way up to the Bar Kokhba rebellion, and actually Bar Kokhba himself, who was the prince of Israel, He forcibly, it was on pain of death if Christians did not renounce their Christian faith, renounce Jesus. So he was one of the greatest persecutors according to many of the early church fathers, including Justin Martyr. The Jewish nation had become more and more hardened in the rebellion. Perversity had repeatedly rejected God's offers of clemency. So all that was left for them was wrath and fury. They had no one but themselves to blame. Now I want you to notice that the blood flow takes place outside of Jerusalem, not inside the city. Now because so much of this book is related to the destruction of Jerusalem itself, he is making this point crystal clear. This is something new. Verse 20. The wine press was trampled outside the city. So both the trampling of the grapes and the blood that results doesn't happen in the city, it happens completely outside the city. And that fits the description of the Bar Kokhba rebellion perfectly. That messianic pretender did not possess Jerusalem. Rome did. All the killing happened outside Jerusalem and it was widespread over the entire land of Israel. And this is why it's amazed me that so many preterist commentaries look inside Jerusalem for a fulfillment. It's got to be outside. Now let me give you a brief introduction to that war. It's a war that's very well known to Jews even to this day. You can read it in just about any Jewish history. Very, very well known. Jews chafed under the restrictions that the Romans had brought upon the nation. A minor rebellion popped up in 110 AD under the leadership of Papus and Lulianus. Their headquarters was in Lod. And so the emperor of Rome, he just went to Lod, massacred every citizen there, hoping that that would pacify Israel. It did the exact opposite. It made them want to fight. They fought both Trajan and later Hadrian. Now at some point, Shimon bar Koziba claimed to be the promised Messiah of Numbers 24, verse 17. which says, a star will shoot forth from Jacob. Now, all by itself, that was a horrible blasphemy. He hated Christ. He said, no, I am the Messiah. And the rabbis, most of them, believed it. And so the crowds of the citizens gathered around him, and they were very enthusiastic. The chief rabbi, Akiva ben Joseph, in effect crowned him as Messiah, gave him the name Kokhba. So he was Kosiba, now he's Bar Kokhba, which means star, based on that prophecy. And the Talmud claims that he initially had an army of 200,000 men that was so dedicated to Bar Kokhba, their price of admission, which was an incredible honor to be a part of his army, the price of admission was to cut off one of their fingers. So that was the test of loyalty. You had an army of 200,000 people with one missing finger on each of them. His rebellion was initially very successful. It lasted for six years. He successfully destroyed at least one Roman legion, completely wiped them out, and so decimated other legions of Rome that Hadrian was forced to conscript boys to fill the ranks. There were not enough men to go around to fill the ranks of these legions. So again, what I'm pointing out, which many commentators miss, is that it's not just Israel that's being judged. Rome is being judged for the rebellion against Christ as well. God's covenant goes over the entire earth. All nations in rebellion to Christ will be judged. He's an equal opportunity judger, okay? Eventually, Bar Kokhba's army grew to 400,000 soldiers and presented an incredibly formidable force against the Romans. Hadrian was so hard-pressed. that he had to bring most of his legions and most of his auxiliary armies there and he accompanied them. This was going to be all out war. He was going to put down Israel once and for all time. He was determined to annihilate the resistance and he attempted to exterminate the Jews. But it was easier said than done. For somewhere between four to five years, Bar Kokhba had an almost unbroken series of victories. It was just phenomenal. In fact, his successful wars became so famous that people came from other nations who weren't even Jews and wanted to join his army. They thought he was probably the best possibility of overthrowing the shackles of Rome. He really did seem unbeatable. So keep that in mind when things go well in a given nation for a period of time. Anyway, reversals eventually started to happen and he had to retreat to Bitar. But even at Bitar he was so well fortified and supplied he could have won the war if he had not been betrayed. But he was betrayed. Bitar was overrun, massacres happened throughout Israel, rabbis were tortured publicly, reading the Torah became a crime, became a crime for any Jew to enter Jerusalem, became a crime actually for them to circumcise their children. This started an eight to 10 year holocaust of suspected Jews unmatched by anything in Jewish history, as just about any Jewish history book will tell you. It is incredible, we'll go through a little bit of that. Now this bloody harvest of souls took place entirely, as I mentioned, outside of Jerusalem. Verse 20, the wine press was trampled outside the city. During the whole war, Jews did not have access to Jerusalem. 100% of the massacres happened outside that city. For example, the fortress of Bitar saw hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women, and children slaughtered with the infuriated Romans bashing babies' brains out on rocks. And when the rocks were completely covered, they would go on to other rocks. It was horrific. That region of Bitar had 500 synagogues, each of which had a school that various places in Talmud say had no less than 500 students in them. So when he fled to Bitar, they were part of this massacre. There was a massacre of 250,000 school children, only one surviving. Many more adults were killed at the same fortress. Now, one historical record, just to give you a little bit of a picture, I won't go through all of the details, but to give you a little bit of a picture, one historical record says that the Emperor Hadrian had a vineyard in Israel that was 18 miles long by 18 miles wide. Now, 18 Roman miles is only 17, approximately 17 American miles, but so you got 17 by 17 by 17 by 17 and all around this vineyard he made a wall of bodies that stretched sideways as far as your arms could reach and the height of a man which if you look at archaeology the average height of of men in that day was around 5 foot. So you got a 5 foot wall stretching all the way around this vineyard 68 miles of bodies. That's just one, one of the fortresses, the fortress of Bitar. And by the way it was in a literal vineyard with literal, literal wine presses. It's very interesting in terms of the symbology. Hadrian would not allow anyone to take the bodies and bury them but Bitar was not the only place where Jews were massacred in a grisly Holocaust. There were other massacres of 49 more fortresses and according to one Roman historian at 985 more villages. The Jewish records say it was more villages than that but A lot of people say, OK, let's stick with that figure, 985. The killings continued outside of Israel for seven years. Ancient rabbinic writings claim that the Gentiles harvested their vineyards throughout the land of Israel. They stole all the vineyards from the Israelis. They didn't have to put manure on those vineyards. For the next seven years, they used the blood of the Jews who had been killed. And you get quite a few references to that. Almost everyone agrees that multiplied millions of Jews were killed during that 10-year period of time, though few think it was as high as what the Jewish authorities of the time say that it was. Though scholars think these Jewish histories are wildly exaggerated, I'm going to give them to you because I think they at least give you the significance of this event in the Jewish mind. The Palestinian Talmud in Gittin 57b claims that 80 million Jews were killed by the Romans. Now assuming he was calculating everybody from Vespasian to the time of Hadrian, I still doubt that there were even 80 million Jews in existence at the time, but that's what Rabbi Yohanan claims happened. He claims that 80,000 Jews, 80 million Jews were killed. Gittin 58a claims that only one child out of 250,000 at Bitar survived and that elsewhere Hadrian was just as merciless with the children. According to a recent research article in Britain, Hadrian went mad because of the loss of his homosexual lover, and his Holocaust illustrated his insanity. So the one thing that Jewish writings are consistent on is that the numbers killed in the first two centuries makes even the most inflated figures of the modern Holocaust pale by comparison. So even if you were to take the tribulation as only referring to Jews, I take the great wrath is against Israel, the great tribulation was against the saints, but even if you were to take it as the great tribulation against the Jews, there still has been no greater one since that time. Now verse 20 says that the killing was so extensive that the blood came out of the winepress up to the horse's bridles. Now, if the inspired text says it comes up to the horses' bridles, then that's what happened. That's the way I look at it. But most commentators believe it's an exaggeration. They say it has to be an exaggeration, just could not have functioned that way. Of course, they say that the historical records that say it happened exactly in that way, they had to be exaggerated as well. Others try to take the text seriously by saying that the horses were merely splattered with blood. up to their bridles, or that the bodies were stacked as high as the horse's bridles, or that rivers were colored by blood, and that the rivers were up to the horse's bridles. But I find it interesting that early Jewish sources claim that the blood was actually that deep. Now, almost nobody believes those Jewish sources, but these sources claim to quote rabbis who were there, claim to reflect real history. The Jerusalem Talmud says, The number of Jewish men, women, and children slain at Bitar was so enormous that the Romans went on killing until their horses were submerged in blood to their nostrils. Wow, that's almost word for word identical to what the Apostle John prophesied would happen. Midrash Rabbah 2 says, they slew the inhabitants until the horses waded in blood up to the nostrils. One place simply says the Romans went on killing Jews until a horse was sunk in blood up to its nose. Now that's a lot of blood. The Jerusalem Talmud goes on to say the blood flowed for miles to the Mediterranean. Another place says it stained the waters of the Mediterranean Ocean as far as Cyprus. Cyprus is almost 200 miles away. Now how that is possible, I don't know. Perhaps it was raining and the rain kept the blood in liquid form. Maybe there was blood rain like happened in the first war and that we documented has happened a number of times in history including modern history. But the records of that second century period claim that the blood itself was that deep. One modern Jewish author summarized the ancient testimonies this way. With virtually no survivors, rivers of Jewish blood flowed for miles to the sea, and the Romans were able to fertilize their fields for seven years using their victims' blood. Jewish bodies were not buried, but were used as fences for fields in a chilling premonition of Nazi practice. Bar Kokhba also died, either executed by the sages for making false messianic claims or during the final battle for Bitar. Yet another quote by another Jewish scholar, They slaughtered the men, women, and children until blood flowed from the doorways and sewers. Horses sank up until their nostrils, and the rivers of blood lifted up rocks weighing 40 seah and flowed into the sea where its stain was noticeable for a distance. Now the fact that they mention rocks being lifted by the floods indicates to me there must have been a flash flood that accompanied this blood flow. And it seems to be hinted at by Rabbi Eleazar the Great who said that the two streams near Bitar flowed in two directions and both streams were running with one part blood to two parts water. Okay, and that seems to contradict other rabbis who say it was pure blood or implied that it was pure blood. But we have scanty evidence. and they're not infallible anyway, right? But here's the point. For people to claim that there is no historical evidence for the fulfillment of these verses, I would say no. The only historical evidence that we have fulfills this to the T. Now, you might not believe the historical evidence, but the only historical evidence that we have says it's fulfilled to a T. Now, was it all human blood or is it possible God did a miracle of blood rain? I don't know. But there had to be enough blood in this fluid for God to call it blood. Maybe the Jordan and other rivers were so full of blood that this water was all bloody, like happened during the first war. And this is the way Alexander Zephyr interprets the evidence. He's very skeptical. He says, blood coagulates. There's no way that it could flow like that. It had to have just made the water red. So he says, when the Roman cavalry crossed the river of the sea on horseback during the assault, their horses waded up to their nostrils in the blood red water. Again, I'm not sure that we have to speculate on the exact mechanics of the blood flow. Blood coagulates pretty quickly. So God must have, in my estimation, provided something to keep it flowing, perhaps rain. But the point is, the identical, identical language that the Apostle John predicted would happen The rabbis of the second century said, did happen. And by the way, these rabbis hated Christianity, were trying to exterminate Christianity at the time. So they would hardly say, oh, you know what, the book of Revelation quotes us, why don't we say that that happened to us? No, that would be to vindicate, a Christian prophecy would be vindicating Christianity. I don't think they would have done that. So I think the evidence is extremely strong for a literal interpretation. And going to the last point there, people object and say, yeah, right, for 1,600 stadia? And my response is, hey, if God says it would happen for 1,600 stadia, it happened that way. I'm not sure it has to be up to the horse's bridles for the whole distance, had to be somewhere. But if it did have to be for the whole distance, here would be my measurements and some possible scenarios of mechanics of it. We only have hints from the ancient histories of the actual distances involved. We have a record of two bloodstreams flowing in different directions from Bitar, one of which went to the Mediterranean, one of which flowed to the Jordan Basin. I've looked at a map, I've done the measurements, and it'd be 30 miles one way, 19 miles for the other stream. Well, that still brings us 124 miles short of 1600 Stadia, which is 184 miles. There's other references that it was similar massacres over the entire land. So if every stream and river in Israel had the same thing happen to it that these two had happened to it, which seems very, very likely, that would add up to 184 miles. So there you go, exactly, literally fulfilled. Here's another possibility. I already mentioned one ancient rabbi who claimed that the blood stain could be seen in the ocean all the way to Cyprus. Now, if that is even remotely correct, Cyprus is about 190 miles away and would completely fulfill the prophecy. But personally, I think it's the rivers, the rivers and streams. Yet another possibility is that this prophecy is showing how many miles the bodies stacked that deep would go. Okay. There were certainly enough bodies stacked up around fields to constitute bloodied bodies up to the horses' bridles for 184 miles. We've already seen that the vineyard near Bitar had enough bodies stacked five feet high to constitute a wall 68 miles long. But it wasn't just one fortress. There were 50 fortresses, 1,000 villages that were massacred. And so when the other regions where the bodies were stacked or added in, and the massive numbers of deaths are accounted for. Oh, you have way more than 184 miles of stacked bodies possible. Now, I still favor the literal flowing of blood, but I'm open to that as a possible interpretation as well. Now, if you read in commentaries, probably 90% of the commentaries are gonna take a figurative perspective. They say, since 1600 Stadia is the length of Israel, All this means, symbolically, is that the whole of Israel was stained with blood. And that certainly did happen, but you know me, I tend to take the text at face value rather than treating it too hurriedly as a case of hyperbole. So this verse ends the central section of the book. Remember, it was like a chiasm, and the center of the book is really the thematic theme of that book. And what this central section shows is the victory of missions and the victory of Christ's judgment. It gives us a hint as to why this world will end up becoming a Christianized world at the end, but also why there are repeated judgments down through history. It's because one of the two must happen. Missions must go forth or judgment must go forth. It's a marvelous summary of the trajectory of the book. Now we've already made some applications of this passage, but let me end with five more. First, I hope this illustrates why we should not be too quick to toss verses under the bus if we don't at first understand them. I think there's this tendency to base what we think is possible on our experience, right? And then to dismiss passages as being hyperbole. Now hyperbole is a legitimate figure of speech, But I always try to see if there is a straightforward reading that is possible, and almost always there is. But even there, I think it's dangerous to interpret even what is possible based on our experience or based on science. After all, God is a God of miracles, right? Second, I hope you're beginning to see that my interpretation of the text of Revelation is more literal and straightforward than that of dispensationalists. Partial preterism does not have to explain away anything in the text. If the text says it'll happen soon, we say it happens soon. We don't try to say, well, in God's mind, 2,000 years later is soon. No, it's not. If the text distinguishes between unbelieving Jews and Gentiles, we distinguish between Jews and Gentiles. If the text speaks of swords, horses, and chariots, we don't try to reinterpret them as tanks and airplanes. If the text shows the beings coming up out of the abyss that look like demons, we treat them as demons, not as Cobra helicopters. I mean the point is We need to be fair and straightforward with the text. And even if you, as Bereans, disagree with some of the things that I'm teaching, which I expect you will probably do, nobody's infallible right in their teaching, I hope at least that this teaching is giving you more and more appreciation for eschatology and a confidence in the absolute inerrancy of the scripture. Third, it is my hope that this chapter has given you more of a sense of urgency for missions and the imperative and the dangers of judgment. We should be prepared for both. Fourth, while I've talked to people who reject the God of the Bible as being unloving and harsh, I hope you can see that the persecutors of the church in the second century deserved this judgment. They were annihilating the church. They deserved it. And the church of today, when they face similar persecution, should not at all be shy about asking God to bring judgment upon their enemies. Either convert them, Lord, or take them out. I think it's perfectly appropriate. It's consistent with God's nature. It's consistent with his word. God is who He is, and we need to submit to Him as He is, rather than trying to make Him conform to our preconceived ideas. We're the ones who need to change our minds. And I think our response needs to be, Lord, You are who You are, and even though I don't understand it, I know we deserve it. and thank you for your mercy. Be appreciative of the mercy you have rather than criticizing him for his actions. But certainly it's appropriate to pray the imprecatory Psalms against the persecutors of the church. Fifth, never forget that God's judgments presuppose his mercies. Praise God. I mean, this chapter shows both. It's not just victory of judgment, it's victory of missions. And often one will produce the other and vice versa. But in terms of God's mercies, Psalm 2 doesn't guarantee judgment irrespective of a nation's repentance or lack of repentance. If our nation will once again kiss the sun and declare its allegiance to Christ, I think destruction can be averted. Jeremiah 18 guarantees that the instant a nation repents of its rebellion, God will relent of the judgment pronounced upon it. So glory in the fact that our God of judgment is also a God of mercy and grace, that where sin abounds, grace abounds much more. God is sufficient to reverse things in America if the church will have faith. So on that note, let's pray. Father God, this is a tough passage. It's a grisly passage, and yet we recognize that it describes what men in rebellion against you deserve. In fact, all of us deserve your wrath. And I pray that we would put our faith in Jesus Christ and that across this nation there would be a flow of your spirit in bringing revival and reformation, that our nation would repent of its sins, that you would have mercy, that you would even, for the glory of your name and for the sake of your son's kingdom, that you would bring restitution from Satan's kingdom. And Satan has robbed this kingdom from Satan. This nation, Satan has robbed this nation from Christ and I pray that you would restore it to Christ and that it would be restored to a far higher and greater degree than it had ever been before. We pray this in Jesus name, Amen.