You can either follow along in your Bibles or page 19, reading the first three verses from the majority text of Revelation chapter 1. The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his slaves, things that must occur shortly. And he signified it, sending it by his angel to his slave John, who gave witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ. The things that he saw, both things that are and those that must happen after these. Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy and keep the things that are written in it because the time is near. Father we thank you for these words that were written long ago and for the certainty of the fulfillment of those promises that happened in the first century and all of the lessons that we can learn from this of your sovereignty over all of the the fact that your word holds even nations accountable to your lordship. And we pray that as we continue to dig into some of the foundational principles that you have laid in these first few verses, that it would help us in understanding the rest of the book. Do bless this time, we pray in Christ's name. Amen. You may be seated. Well, we've been going through John's preface to this book to understand what kind of a book it is and how we should approach this book so that we can have the maximum benefit from it. And you can kind of think of these 30 principles that we'll be going through as rules of interpretation, or you can simply think of them as the presuppositions that were in John's mind as he wrote this book. But I struggled and struggled with this book over the past 30 years. And it was only as I began understanding these principles that the book opened up in a brand new way to me. And I'm going to give you just a bit of review of where we've been so far. The first two words, the revelation. Revelation means an unveiling. This book unveils what could not be otherwise seen. And there are huge implications of that word. should do away with all skepticism that we might have about whether we can understand this book or not. We can. He has unveiled it for us. Second, it is an unveiling of Jesus Christ and His kingdom. So we are seeing things about His glorious heavenly kingdom we might not otherwise notice, but it's about what He is doing in history more than it is about what the beast is doing or any other creature in that book. Third, it is an inspired book revealing God's very words. This isn't something that John came up with. It says here, these words are words which God gave him to show to his slaves. Fourth, we saw that this is not intended to be a communication to the academics in our midst, you know, only people who have esoteric interests, you know, and weird scriptures. No, this was intended for all of his slaves, for you, for me. This was to be accessible to all. And the word slaves, by the way, has a number of other implications, such as his lordship, his lordship overall. Fifth, the word show completely rules out the idea that this is a mystery book akin to Gnostic literature, the way some commentaries take it. He's not hiding a thing. He's showing this to everyone, to all of his slaves. Sixth, this book deals with history. It's not just about ideas. There are some approaches to this book like idealism that say, you know, there aren't any historical periods where these things are going to be actually fulfilled. This is just general ideas. that you might apply in any given age, but he says here that he's revealing things that must occur shortly. That's history. And then the word must indicates what kind of history. It's providential history. You might think History is controlled by, you know, some secret groups, the Illuminati, or it's controlled by Satan or something else. But this makes it very clear, history is controlled by God. And these are the things that show his lordship over all of history. The eighth point can be seen in the word shortly. That word shows that the bulk of this book actually deals with events that either happened or started to happen within weeks or at least within months of this book having been written. And that's reiterated again in verse 3 where he says, for the time is near. Not 2,000 years later, like a bunch of commentaries have it, near. And then the ninth principle can be seen in the word signified. And we saw that the Greek word there deals with to communicate by means of symbols. And so it's a book that is chock full of symbols. And so we spent the entire time last week looking at the biblical rules of prophetic literature, which is symbolic literature. How do you interpret these symbols? And we saw that both literal and symbolic are held together in this book in a very neat way. And we won't repeat what we looked at last week. Now that brings us up to principle number 10 in your outlines. Principle 10 is that we must see the role of angels as being critically important in world history. Now I found it very interesting as I was reading through the commentaries, a lot of my commentaries did not utter a single word about the word angel. They just completely skipped over that. And most of the commentaries didn't say a whole lot about that. And I suppose that some evangelicals, certainly a lot of lay people, think it's odd to be inserting an idea about an angel when you're talking about the giving of God's revelation of inspiration. But verse 1 says, he sent and communicated it or signified it by his angel to his slave John. There was an angel that was involved in the giving of this message. So the angel is sent by Jesus, the angel communicates. So the order that's given in verses 1 through 2 is that the father has a revelation that he gives to Jesus, Jesus gives this revelation to an angel, the angel gives that revelation to John, and then John communicates that revelation to the church. And there is one person that's not mentioned in verses 1 through 2, but he is mentioned in verses 4 and 10, and that is the role of the Holy Spirit. Verse 10 says, I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day. What does that mean? Well, the Holy Spirit indwelt his prophets to enable them to infallibly receive the communication from God and be able to infallibly communicate that revelation to others. He's not doing this on his own. It says he is in the Spirit. And so 2 Peter 1, verse 21 says, prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. Okay, so inspiration of the Holy Spirit enables those prophets to receive revelation infallibly, to communicate that revelation without error. But for this point, I'm not dealing so much with the role of the Holy Spirit as I am with the role of angels. There are a lot of evangelicals out there that if you read any of their books dealing with revelation, angels don't factor in at all. And they think that that is a bit odd here. But let me show you how angels were involved over and over again in the giving of the Bible to us. Concerning the Law of Moses on Mount Sinai, Galatians 3 verse 19 says the law was appointed through angels by the hand of a mediator. And it wasn't just that angels happened to be present. Hebrews 2 says that the law given on Mount Sinai, it says, for if the word spoken through angels proved steadfast and every transgression and disobedience received a just reward. So he's talking about the case law of the Old Testament. And he said that case law was spoken through angels. Very interesting language. And by the way, Meredith Klein's book that I had mentioned before, Images of the Spirit, he points out that that glory cloud in the wilderness that Moses interacted with, with God in, as a friend face to face, that was a theophany of God, but he also points out that it was filled with millions of angels, many times when their wings were stirring, making incredible sounds, sounds that we're going to be hearing repeated, in the book of Revelation. Anyway, Deuteronomy 33 verse 2 says that there were tens of thousands of angels who were helping with the giving of the law to Moses. How it happened, we're not told. But somehow they are involved. Acts 7 verse 53 says that the law was, quote, received by the direction of angels. Now the same was true of other prophecies. An angel was somehow involved in Daniel's great prophecies of the four beasts in Daniel chapter 7, as well as in the vision of the ram and the goat in chapter 8, and the vision of the 70 weeks in chapter 9, and the glorious vision of chapters 10 through 11. Angels are mentioned in connection with the prophecies in Zechariah and Ezekiel. and it makes sense really because the word angel literally means messenger. So there are invisible messengers of heaven that serve God's purposes, then there are human messengers on the earth that serve God's purposes, and the same word angolos is used of both of them and this inter change between the heavenly angels and the earthly angels, the messengers, is intertwined in ways that I think many modern people have forgotten about, or at least downplay a great deal. We're not used to thinking of angels as being much involved in anything, but as John Kelvin pointed out, angels are involved in all of God's providences. It was actually Moorcraft who clued me into some of John Calvin's comments on this, but you see this all throughout the Bible. Psalm 78 verse 49 tells us that the ten plagues that came upon Egypt You thought it was just God, boom, speaking. No, it says in that verse that it was angels who were bringing all of those 10 plagues upon the land of Egypt. And you certainly see the importance of angels and all kinds of things in the book of Revelation. For example, in chapter 8, you see angels somehow involved in taking our prayers to heaven and somehow involved in bringing God's answers to our prayers to earth. Well, if that's in any way true, we ought to know a little bit about these angelic beings. What are they doing? What are they like? In that same chapter, angels were involved in destroying trees and grass and ruining water. Chapter 16 shows an angel who has the power to give diseases to people. What's with that? Revelation 7 verse 1 shows angels involved in the wind. It says, After these things I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, on the sea, or on any tree." And we think, really? Angels can hold back the wind? Surely that's got to be metaphorical. And since we saw that this book is written with symbols, We at least need to have in the back of our mind, yeah, it's possible that this could be metaphorical, but when you start reading what the Bible says about the activities of angels, you realize, no, this is not. There are metaphors, there are symbols that are involved, and yet they are very involved in providences. In fact, John Frame points out that they are involved in the tiniest parts of God's providences. Now, I'm not sure I would go as far as John Frame, who says he sometimes wonders when he sees the leaves rustling in the wind if the angels are doing that. You know, maybe, maybe not, but it's clear when you look at the various hints throughout the scripture, they're involved in our day-to-day lives much more than most Christians think. In Revelation chapter 8 and verse 5, it shows an angel bringing lightning strikes to the earth and earthquakes. Another angel brings hail and fire mingled with blood. Another angel turns water into blood. And yet another angel darkens the sun for one-third of the day. And by the way, I have already mentioned that those things literally happened in the first century. You read the Jewish historians, you read the Roman historians of that day. and they talk about the sound of the trumpet in the sky and they're all recording the same thing and they saw all of these chariots and they saw at one stage the sun turning dark and then on another day they saw the moon turning Blood red and they saw fire and and and blood falling out of the sky so thick that it made the ground just greasy there are all kinds of weird things that happened in the first century, but they're recorded and so These these angels are involved in not only the strange Providences, but also the ordinary Providences that men experience but there are a lot of commentaries out there who think that this is just too far-fetched so they say well the angels must be just symbols of something and they're doing things symbolically. But if you do that with Revelation you're going to need to do it with Exodus since all 10 plagues were said to be brought by God's angels. Now was there symbols involved in the Exodus 10 plagues? Absolutely yes. Those 10 plagues are taking on the ten gods of Egypt, showing God's sovereignty over them, His victory over them, but at the same time they were literal plagues dealing with literal people and literal demons and angels were involved in those plagues. So symbolic, yes. Literal, we saw last week. Those two can go together. So You'd have to explain away Exodus. If we explain away the angels in Revelation as metaphors, then we'll need to explain away Job. That describes angels bringing lightning strikes and tornadoes. Okay, you cannot properly interpret the book of Revelation if you do not take into consideration trillions of demons, which are fallen angels, and twice as many good angels that are out there. The book of Revelation is an unveiling that shows us Jesus, but it also unveils and opens up the invisible realm of the heavenly kingdom of Christ and its impact, its impact upon the earth. And that heavenly kingdom involves an innumerable number of angels. By the time we get through the book of Revelation, I think you're going to have a whole new appreciation for the role of angels, not just in history out there, but in your own life. Uh, the moment the unveiling happens in verse one, We see a father, son, we see an angel, and it shouldn't surprise us, they are everywhere. We can thank them for having given us the gift of the Bible, they're somehow involved. Luke 15, 10 says that they rejoice when a sinner is converted. Psalm 91, verse 11 says they protect believers, and there are a bunch of other scriptures that say that. Matthew 18, 10 says every covenant child has at least an angel assigned to that child to protect that child. Which means we shouldn't be surprised when the Bible a number of times says that there are angels in our midst. There are angels here right this morning and they notice how you worship. They notice the expressions on your faces and no doubt these angels are astonished that you could approach the throne of God so casually. You know, when God unveils His throne in Revelation chapter 4, and you see the fiery stream coming from that throne. It's one of the most awesome descriptions of God and His throne. All the people fall on their knees. They cast aside any of their own agendas, and they fall down with awe at God's presence. And so there are angels in our midst who are before God's throne and they look at you and they wonder, what are these people thinking when they worship? They witness what is going on all around us. Luke 16 verse 22 says that an angel will carry your soul to heaven when you die. They are so involved in our lives that it really is astonishing that we are more afraid of the enemies out there than we are of the good, the elect angels. John Frame, Professor of Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary said, 1 Corinthians 11, verse 10. Paul feels no need to explain this phrase. He assumes the Corinthians will understand what he means. Modern Christians, including myself, have lost the vivid consciousness of angelic beings that New Testament believers took for granted. Part of the problem is that modern people have lost touch with the supernatural and preternatural. They've become skeptical of any world or any beings beyond those of our senses. Christians at least believe in God, but they have absorbed enough of the anti-supernaturalism of their culture that belief in angels seems foreign to them. The doctrine of angels rebukes the smallness and impersonalism of our cosmology. Modern worldviews typically claim to have discovered a much larger universe than was known to the ancients and the medievals. But they have a much smaller view of the universe of persons, having abandoned belief in God and in angels. According to scripture, however, vast numbers of angels inhabit the world. So we need to develop a larger perspective. And then he goes on to talk about Elisha's servant, being absolutely terrified of these armies that had surrounded their city, and God opened his eyes, he unveiled the spiritual realm, so to speak, where he could see all of the myriad numbers of good angels that were surrounding him, and all of a sudden he realized why Elisha was not the least bit worried. Elijah had earlier said, do not be afraid for those who are with us are more than those who are with them. Well, that's the perspective that the book of Revelation gives to us. OK, it starts with an angel who intersects with a man. There is angelic activity than all the rest throughout the rest of this book. And by unveiling this unseen world, God removes fear from the Christians by showing us that there are more with us than there are with the world. It's a very encouraging thought. So while the mention of an angel is primarily to tell us something about how we got the book of Revelation, it is our first introduction to the invisible world that is around us that the rest of the book opens up much more fully. But there's a third thing that this word angel clues us into. John's experience of an angel communicating this revelation is identical to the way God did it in Ezekiel Daniel and Zechariah. So any Hebrew in the first century who would have read this book would have immediately thought, you know, this is just like what happened to Ezekiel, Daniel and to Zechariah. And it would have been one of the first of many clues in this book that he's going to be relying very heavily. He's going to be doing the same kinds of things and actually drawing a lot of the imagery from those prophets. G.K. Beal and D.A. Carson's massive book, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, not only shows that Revelation has approximately 1,000 allusions to the Old Testament, it shows the enormous influence of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Zechariah. Now, even though Isaiah has the most quotes, is quoted the most times in the book of Revelation, the most number of verses that are covered in Revelation are allusions to Daniel. And then the next closest would be very closely followed by Ezekiel, the Psalms, and then the imagery of Zachariah. So that's why I spent an entire point on one word, on the word angels. It's a presupposition that he just casually lays down here of what's going to be going on in the rest of this book. Now that brings us to the 11th principle that John was actively involved in the writing And therefore, we must consider his authorial intentions. This principle may not actually be intuitively obvious to you. In fact, it may seem like it's a contradiction of what I said earlier, that 100% of this book comes directly from God. Every word of this book comes from God. And so the question comes, If prophecy is God speaking through John, what is John's intentions have anything to do with it? Well, we're going to see it has a lot to do with it. Let's read verses 1 through 2 again. The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his slaves, things that must occur shortly. And he signified it, sending it by his angel to his slave John, who gave witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, the things that he saw, both things that are and those that must happen after these." Notice that John is not a passive recipient. He is a recipient, but he is not passive. Verse 2 says of John, who gave witness to the word of God, which is the Old Testament And to the testimony of Jesus Christ, that's Christ's words in the Gospels, the things that he saw, that's his immediate visions, both things that are and those that must happen after these. He gave witness to previous revelation just as all prophets before him had done. That's one of the roles of a prophet. Now many commentators take all three phrases as a reference to, as synonyms for the book of Revelation. And you could take the Greek that way. The Greek is ambiguous. You could take it two different ways. But when you begin to understand that this is a very Hebraic book using Hebraic style grammar, than the Hebraic use of the word an and the role of John as prophet. I've come to a totally different conclusion, and there are commentaries who agree with me on this, but that this is, and we'll look more at it next week, but what's going on with that is that prophets always brought attention to previous revelation that people were ignoring. Typically, they brought covenant lawsuits against churches or against nations. And they did so for those nations of those churches violating God's law. Well, John later calls himself a prophet. He calls himself a witness. Those are very active courtroom kinds of terms. And the point is, he's a very active participant on God's behalf. He's coming into agreement with God the Father, God the Son, with this angel. And in doing so, bringing a covenant lawsuit. And I'll talk about that more next time. But let's consider the two halves of inspiration. It's very important we understand what inspiration is. In fact, for the first part, why don't you turn with me to 2 Peter 2. This is one of many verses that indicate that man's will did not originate Scripture, only God's will did. Look at verses 19 through 21, 2 Peter 1, 19 through 21. And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of any private interpretation, For prophecy never came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit." So John didn't wake up one day and say, you know, it'd be really cool to write some scripture. Let's see, what should I write about? That would indicate that the prophecy originated with his mind and with his will. But Revelation 1 verse 1 has already told us that this revelation started with God the Father, was given to Jesus, Jesus gave it to the angel, and then, only then, was it given to John. It did not originate in any part with John, and then John gives it to the church. And verses 3, 4, and 10 make clear that the spirit of prophecy inside of him enabled him to receive it infallibly, to communicate it infallibly. So 2 Peter says that no prophecy ever came by the will of man, but holy men of God spoke as they were moved by the Holy Spirit. So John was an instrument in God's hand. That's the divine side of the Word of God. So why speak of John's authorial intention? when we interpret this book? And the answer is we must look at John's intentions because there is a human side to all of Scripture. We should not think of inspiration as a mechanical venture where God's, you know, kind of moving the pen of John, kind of bypassing John's mind, sort of a robotic or a dictation kind of a theory of inspiration. Not at all. John is very actively involved His personality, his vocabulary, his experiences, his unique styles of writing are used by the Spirit to communicate his words. Now think of it this way. If you had a musical piece that you wanted to play, you could play that musical piece using a trumpet, a violin, an oboe, a flute, there's any number of instruments that you could use. And even though each of those instruments would give a different feel, give a different flavor for what is being communicated, you would be playing the exact same notes on each one of those instruments, right? Well, in the same way, God prepared special instruments to be receptors of prophecy. In fact, you know, there's a number of these prophets like Jeremiah and And the Apostle Paul, they were said to have been set aside before they were in the womb, sanctified in the womb. God was preparing them even before Paul was a believer. He was preparing all of his experiences, his vocabulary, all of these things to be the perfect instrument on which the notes of prophecy would be played through. So then God selected which instrument would be perfectly suited to give the kind of flavor and vocabulary and the idioms and the kind of things that he wanted each book to be noted for. So every book of the Bible has a different human element to it, even though the notes are precisely the notes and only the notes that God plays through them. So the very verses that are quoted in the Bible by one author to say God said something, the same author in another sentence might say David said something. So which is true? Is it God who said it or is it David who said it? Well, it's both. For example, Mark 12 verse 36 says, for David himself said by the Holy Spirit, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand till I make your enemies your footstool. David himself said by the Holy Spirit, they are both true. So it's always appropriate to quote any portion of scripture and say, God said, but it's also appropriate to say, as the scripture itself does hundreds of times, Moses said. Mark 7, verse 10. Acts 3, verse 22. Or Isaiah said, John 1, 23. John 12, 38. See, Moses and Isaiah were very conscious when they spoke, and they themselves spoke using their emotions, their words, and their thought processes, and yet it is the very God, the very Word of God that is speaking through them. And this is going to be very important when we start considering authorial intention. As we go through the book of Revelation, we're going to be asking now, What was it John, in that context, was intending to say to that particular audience? Very, very important. And people struggle with understanding how the divine and the human can both be present without there being any error in Scripture. And you're kind of getting, you can see, a little discourse on how the inspiration of the Holy Spirit works, right? If you want a fabulous book, by the way, I've got a stack of one, two, three, four, five, or six books on the back very, very well written on how the inspiration of the Holy Spirit works. It's written by Dr. Robert Fugate, The Bible, God's Word to You. And there are copies going to be there only for this Sunday. So you'll want to pick those up. make them available. I think it's one of the best books written on the whole subject of inspiration. But while I'm trying to give this in less than a thousand pages, I want to be as crystal clear as I can possibly be on what is involved here. And word pictures can sometimes be helpful and that's why I gave you the word picture of the same exact notes being played through different instruments. But here's another word picture. Think of the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ. You all know that doctrine. The person of God the Son took to himself a human nature at conception. He did not take to himself a human person. He was a person already, and Jesus is not two persons. The person of God the Son took to himself a human nature, and the divine and the human natures are so tightly connected that what can be said of one nature can be said of the person as a whole. So the scripture says Jesus got tired even though his divine nature did not. The scripture says Jesus was omnipresent even though his human nature was not and is not today. His human nature can only be in one place at the same time. Acts 20 verse 28 says that God purchased us with his own blood. How can it say that? God doesn't have any blood. Well, that's true, but Jesus is both man and God, and Jesus purchased us with his own blood. And the doctrine of communicatio idiomata, there's a $10 word for you, that you can put under your belt. Communicatio idiomatum, it's how you communicate these, the communication of these divine natures in the personhood means that what can be attributed to one nature can be attributed to the whole person of the Lord Jesus Christ, even though it cannot be attributed to the other nature, okay. So The human and the divine are not confused, they're clearly distinguished, but they cannot be separated. Now, using the incarnation of Christ as an analogy might help you to understand how the scriptures, which are God's own words being communicated from his mind to our mind, can be incarnated in human language and emotion and idioms without in any way having error. 19th century reform scholar Charles Hodge said this, If a Hebrew was inspired, he spake Hebrew. If a Greek, he spake Greek. If an educated man, he spoke as a man of culture. If uneducated, he spoke as such a man as want to speak. If his mind was logical, he reasoned as Paul did. If emotional and contemplative, he wrote as John wrote. All this is involved in the fact that God uses his instruments according to their nature. His son, A. A. Hodge, wrote, the Bible is as intensely and thoroughly a human book as ever existed. It is based on human intuitions. It proceeds through the lines of human logic. It implies human feelings, tastes, and experiences. Every separate book is a spontaneous work of human genius and bears the marks of all the personal idiosyncrasies of the historic situation of its author. The individuality of Peter, Paul, John, David, Isaiah, and Moses is as fully expressed in their writings as that of Shakespeare or of Milton in theirs. Each of these books was also a book of its time, bore the marks of its age, and was specifically adapted to accomplish its immediate end among its contemporaries. The provincialisms of thought and idiom proper to the situation of their writers are found in these books. Of all books, it is the most comprehensively human. Of all God's works, it is the most characteristically divine. The doctrine of inspiration Well, we'll just stop the quote there, but what I just taught here is the historic Church, Church's doctrine of inspiration, all evangelicals hold to this view of inspiration, and it perfectly fits the description given in Revelation 1, verses 1 through 2. Not one bit of this book failed to originate from God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And yet John saw it. He wrote it. He witnessed to it. And he was very active in the production of this marvelous book. All the way through this book, you're going to see John expressing his own thoughts and feelings and interactions and puzzlements and responses. For example, if you look at verse 4, it says, John to the seven churches. He couldn't say that if you take a dictation view of inspiration. You'd only say God said. You couldn't say John said this. And yet this is a word from John in his capacity as an apostle over the churches of that region. And we'll later look at the doctrine of church government. where John represents the General Assembly of Asia Minor. He writes to the Presbyteries and the seven cities and their environments. But the point, again, is that John is active. In verse 9, he says, I, John, both your brother and companion in the tribulation and kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ was on the island that is called Patmos, etc. Well, is it John's words or is it God's words? It's both. It's God's words being spoken through God's prepared instrument. In other words, God is not dictating to John and bypassing John's mind. It's just not the way inspiration works. God used John and John's vocabulary, which God had prepared beforehand anyway, to write his revelation. In verse 12, John narrates his reaction to hearing a voice. And in this book, you see him expressing amazement, sorrow, rejoicing. John's whole personality, experience, position as an apostle, even his unique vocabulary and grammar are part of the incarnation of God's Word in this book. It's really what makes the Bible have such an impact on us. It's what enables us to identify with the Bible. It's incarnated in human form. Now I mentioned grammar. Entire books have been written on the unique vocabulary and grammar that are found in John's gospel, his epistles, and especially in the book of Revelation. But earlier commentaries sometimes missed this and they thought that John was making grammatical mistakes. No. He was a Hebrew, speaking with Hebrew thought, using Greek grammar. In fact, more and more commentaries are recognizing this is very deliberate. He could have written in normal Koine Greek or classical Greek, but God wanted these Hebraisms. It was the only way to effectively communicate what he wanted to communicate. And even liberals like Charles recognized this. He said, While he writes in Greek, he thinks in Hebrew, and the thought has naturally affected the vehicle of expression. And it's one of the reasons I so love this book. It is so Hebraic. It is Jewish through and through. It's a wonderful book, and it makes a difference on how you translate certain sentences when you realize there's Hebrew grammar that's underlying the Greek grammar. And we'll get into that in the future. Now, these first five verses of Revelation have given a fairly I've given a fairly extended doctrine of inspiration, that's important in its own right, but I've already hinted that the main reason I'm describing this human side to inspiration is to demonstrate the legitimacy of asking the question, what was John intending to communicate? Two sermons ago I quoted from some people who think that authorial intent is meaningless, that it's impossible to even determine. In fact, one writer said that his opinion of a novel's meaning is just as authoritative as the author's opinion of that novel. Even if the author disagrees with him, it doesn't matter. It's a very subjective view of meaning. Postmodernism has destroyed any attempt to find or be able to find original intent meaning. And this is one of the reasons why the courts today pretty much have discarded the idea of original intent on the Constitution. They think original intent is a meaningless concept. They're approaching it very much from an evolutionary perspective. It's one of the reasons why I pointed out before that these critics of English literature, the vast majority of them, they don't care about original intent meaning. And more and more you are seeing people interpreting the Bible without caring about what original intent meaning or authorial intent was there. Just this past week I talked to a Christian, we were debating on the death penalty for murder. And he said, you know, nobody can really know what the scripture says about the death penalty for murder. And I'm thinking, I've just read it, it's just so straightforward. And he said, oh yeah, everybody's got a different interpretation on the scripture and everybody's Opinion is just as legitimate and I said no everybody's opinion is not just as a legitimate So as we go through this book of Revelation, we're gonna be asking what was John's intent? What was? He trying to get across to his original audience So I want to end by giving you several rules that John Piper wrote About that helped to discover original authorial intention in every book of the Bible He said first Be very self-conscious about reading for the author's meaning, not your own. Too frequently, Christians read the Bible because they want some subjective, immediate experience as they read the Bible. And they don't have the patience to find out what the author wanted his original audience to know and experience. It's kind of a stream of consciousness. You know, as I read this, what do I feel? What thoughts does it generate in my head? No, that's a sure way of going down into liberalism. Guaranteed. Piper said, when we read, we want to know what an author intended us to see and experience in his writing. He had an intention when he wrote. Nothing will ever change that. It is there as a past objective event in history. And I say amen. We must discover that meaning that existed back then and has been preserved for us in the text. Well, how do we discover that meaning? He says we discover it by asking questions of the text. By the way, asking questions is a great way to stay awake when you're ready to fall asleep during my sermon, start asking questions. The moment your mind starts thinking of things as, oh, there's a puzzle that I need to solve, there is a conundrum I need to think through, it immediately starts engaging in a different way. And too frequently, when people are listening to sermons, they're just passively listening to the sermon. When is this going to ever be over? Or when they read the Bible, they're just passive about it. No, you got to be active with your mind. It's one of the reasons I'm able to, when I do devotions at home, able to get applications as I'm constantly asking questions of the text. But anyway, what kind of questions should we ask? Well, he says, first of all, ask, what does that word mean? And what does the word mean in this specific sentence? Because sometimes words can have two or three meanings. Well, you can look it up in the dictionary, but sometimes the very asking of that question makes it intuitively obvious what the meaning is, because the context tells you what the meaning is. Let me just give you an example from Revelation. When John says, to the seven churches which are in Asia, we can ask, what does Asia mean? And you look it up in your map, and it's like, wow. Asia overlaps with modern Turkey. But the mere asking of that question, what does the word Asia mean, immediately begins you to process through and you realize, hey, this was an actual place, and these are actually seven churches. He's talking about something real in history. And yet it's astonishing how many commentaries are out there who say, no, it's not really seven literal letters to seven literal churches and literal Asia. These are just metaphors to the church at large. In fact, how many historicists and how many futurists take each of these letters as different ages of the church? And we say, no, if you start asking questions of the text and what would the original authors, I mean, readers have said, you know he's talking about a literal church in the first century in a literal Asia. So you ask questions like that. What does this particular word mean? Next, ask yourself what a phrase means. A phrase is a group of words without a verb. So if you have a sentence that says, put sin to death by the Spirit, it has two phrases, and when you ask what does the phrase by the Spirit mean in relationship to putting sin to death, it tells you how we kill sin. We don't kill sin by beating up ourselves, starving ourselves, trying harder. I mean, the Pharisees tried harder. They tried very hard. But God says they were utterly unsuccessful in putting sin to death. So you realize, OK, putting sin to death by the Holy Spirit means he wants it done in a specific way, not in all of these other ways. And what does it mean to put to death sin by the Holy Spirit? I'm not going to tell you this morning because that'll get us down a rabbit trail. But just asking that question, not only makes you interact with the meaning of the text, but it makes you interact with, have I experienced that? Am I just doing what the Pharisees did, or am I putting sin to death by the Holy Spirit? What does that mean? It forces you to begin investigating. Next, he asks, he says, ask about relationships between propositions. And let me quote him here. He says a proposition is a group of words with a subject and a verb. How propositions relate to each other is one of the most important questions we can ask. Often there will be a small connecting word that holds the answer. For example, but, if, and, therefore, in order that, because, et cetera. Sometimes the major differences between whole theologies hang on these connections. So when you're reading in Revelation, don't just quickly skip over a because. It's showing that there is a relationship, a dependency there. Don't skip over an if. It's showing contingency there. Don't skip over a but. It's showing there must be some kind of a contrast between the thoughts of these two propositions. And it may seem foolish for me to even have to bring up a rule like this, and yet it's astonishing how many commentaries out there skip over and get wrong conclusions because they skip over words like for example I'll give you on historical sequence words like then, after this, after these things, the second woe, the third woe is coming quickly and yet you'll see commentaries that invert things and mix them around and you're thinking they're not taking these connections between propositions seriously. Even in this chapter, there's controversy on what verse 9 means. I don't think it should be any controversy. If you take the Hebraic grammar that underlies the Greek and the word and, the way that the Hebrews used it in early first century Jewish Christianity, it's straightforward. It's straightforward. The next thing Piper says is, ask how the context helps to define the meaning of the words and phrases. So if the context is in the first century and then you arbitrarily take the next phrase off into the distant future at the second coming, you violated this. Okay, so the context is king. The context is so, so important. And again, you've got commentaries who go back and forth between first century and 2,000 years later. It doesn't work. You've got to take context and make it king. Fifth question is, how does this passage relate to other parts of the Bible? Now most errors in Revelation flow from a failure to ask this question. Quite a few books that have studied the relationship between Revelation and the Old Testament recognize that this book has more Old Testament references than any other book of the Bible. The Nestle-Allen Greek Bible has 635 cross-references to the Old Testament, and van der Waals' commentary claims there's approximately 1,000 allusions to the Old Testament. I haven't counted them all up. But that means you're missing a lot if you don't ask how a sentence relates to the Old Testament. John was saturated in the Old Testament, and to understand John's covenant lawsuit, We need to understand the Old Testament. Now, it's at this point that almost all futurists, historicists, and idealists fail. They don't treat the book as a prophecy, okay? That is a covenant lawsuit against churches and nations of John's own day. They've got things way off into the future. But that's how covenant lawsuits work. Now, if you have a cross-referenced Bible, it'll give you some help. I've already mentioned Beale and Carson's massive book. Commentary in the New Testament, use of the Old Testament. But hey, just the simple cross-references in your margin ought to be sufficient. So don't ignore them. If you've puzzled, what in the world does this mean, and you start looking up the references in your margin, it may help you solve the problem right there. The sixth question relates to application. How did the author want his readers to change? Or if you want to personalize what Piper said, how does God want me to change? See, John did not write this book as a purely academic exercise. In verse 3, it says he wants his readers to be blessed by this book. He wants his readers to obey this book, to keep the things that are written in it. He wants us to change. And then the seventh question Piper asks is, what is the appropriate response of my heart and my affections? He said, the aim of our Bible reading is not just the response of the mind, but of the heart. The whole range of human emotions are possible responses to the meaning of the Bible. God gave us the Bible not just to inform our minds, but also to transform our hearts, our affections. God's Word is honored not just by being understood rightly, but also by being felt rightly. Finally, he says at every page, pray and ask for God's help. Every time I read the Bible, I'm praying for God to give me illumination, to open up my eyes. Sometimes I use David's prayer, Open thou mine eyes, that I might behold wondrous things out of thy laws. Psalm 119, verse 18. But here was John Piper's prayer. Oh Lord, incline our hearts to your word. Give us a desire for it. Open our eyes to see wonders there. Subdue our wills and give us an obedient spirit. Satisfy our hearts with a vision of yourself and your way for our lives. And it's my prayer that God has opened your eyes to at least two things this morning, to the incredible role that angels have in our day-to-day lives and in history, as well as the meaning of the inspiration of the scriptures. But the second thing that I hope you will come away from on this sermon is a real desire to grow, change, become more and more like the Lord as you read through these scriptures. May it be so, Lord Jesus. Amen. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you for the intentions that you have placed there. And we pray that the word would not fall to the ground, but it would accomplish its good work in our hearts. Help us to approach your word with reverence and to approach it in a way where we will be transformed, where it will turn our lives inside out and upside down and reform us and make us more and more conformed to the image of Jesus. And it's in his name that we pray. Amen.