The book of Revelation.
I'll just read the first three verses, and
probably not any further than that tonight.
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave
unto him, to show unto his servants things
which must shortly come to pass.
And he sent and signified it by his
angel unto his servant John, who bare record
of the word of God, and of the
testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things
that he saw.
Blessed is he that readeth, and they that
hear the words of this prophecy, and keep
those things which are written therein, for the
time is at hand.
This book is called sometimes the Apocalypse, the
book of Revelation, or the Apocalypse.
The odd part about it is that both
words mean the same thing.
Apocalypse means an unveiling, a revealing, usually a
revealing of something that was mysterious before.
And this book of Revelation is the most
comprehensive book in the entire Bible, without any
doubt.
That is, John saw further in all directions
than any other writer of the Bible, Moses
included, or David, or Isaiah, or any of
the rest.
He saw not only further forward, he saw
further back, and he saw further up, and
he saw further down.
And he saw more in detail than any
other man did.
Now, that leads me to a remark here,
although this is not really part of the
sermon, that when the devil banished John the
Beloved to the Isle of Patmos out in
the Aegean Sea, he did what they say
he does if he give enough rope.
They say if he gives the devil enough
rope, he hangs himself.
And this is exactly what the devil did
here when he took this man John, this
good man who had lain in the bosom
of Jesus and heard his heart beat.
He got enough of John, he couldn't stand
John's godliness and John's love, and so he
worked on the Roman Empire to send John
out to the Isle of Patmos, and they
did.
And history tells us, or rather I don't
think it's authentic history, but it's come down
to us, that John was put in a
slave labor battalion and sent to a mine
and forced to work under the ground in
a dark mine.
Right there was where the devil hanged himself,
because John saw farther from that mine than
any king has ever seen from his throne.
And John saw farther from that mine, that
deep hole in the ground where the devil
had thought he had buried John.
John saw farther than Uri Gagarin saw from
his monkey cage up there, if he was
up there.
I personally doubt he ever was, but they
say he was, and that would be my
reason for doubting it, because if Communists said
it, it's a lie.
But he was up there looking down on
the earth several hundred miles up, but he
didn't see as much as John saw, because
he didn't have what John had.
You take a man, put him up there
and orbit him around the earth, and he
looks down and he'll say some dumb thing
like, oh, it's beautiful, or something.
But you take a man full of the
Holy Ghost and bury him in a mine,
and he'll be in the Spirit on the
Lord's day, and he will see things that
the mind of man has never known, or
the heart of man has never understood.
Now I just wonder if you've ever gone
over this book of Revelation and noticed how
many things John saw here.
This book views the universe, and in it
we see displayed the swift succession of everything
from the highest heaven to the deepest hell.
And my sermon tonight will chiefly be running
over this, sort of taking a panoramic view.
What we're going to do tonight is to
take you around the place and show you
a few things and say, now, here's what
John saw, and here's what we'll see if
we continue through the book over the next
weeks.
Well, John saw God, and he saw him
sitting on a throne with a rainbow around
the throne, and he saw Christ under several
phases.
He saw him once there in the first
chapter, standing in the midst of the churches.
He saw him in the fifth chapter, a
lamb standing before the throne.
He saw him in the nineteenth chapter riding
down the sky to the marriage supper of
the lamb.
Then John saw the Holy Spirit, the seven
Spirits of God which were before his throne.
And we find in this book hell revealed,
and we find in this book the earth
seen from all sides.
We find the sea here.
In fact, this book of Revelation is like
a storm at sea.
And we see the sky arched overhead and
the clouds floating through.
We see the sun, and we see it
turned into blood, and we see the moon,
and we see the moon all red, and
we see the stars shaken in the firmament,
and we see the rocks, and we see
great men and mighty men and politicians and
big shots all down on their knees praying
to the rocks and saying, O, cover us
from the wrath of God.
We see the rivers flowing and see them
turned into blood.
We see the mountains here in the book
of Revelation, O, the fountains flowing up, and
we see the mountains being torn down.
And we see strange horses of red and
black and white, and a pale-colored horse
of no particular color which was death.
We see lions here, and we see the
nations of the earth, and they don't look
very big to us the way John saw
them.
We talk now about the powerful nations of
the earth.
We say Russia is a powerful nation, the
United States a powerful nation.
When you see them from down here, they
are powerful nations.
But when you see them the way John
saw them, they look awfully small indeed.
Did you ever look down from about 37
,000 feet in the air?
I came in from Canby the other day,
37,000 feet up.
That wasn't as high as Gagarin, but it
was up further than I had been before.
And when you look down, all those big
things, you see little tiny spots down there,
and that cost $230,000.
And over here is another little tiny spot,
that cost a million.
That little spot over there took five years
to build, and that cost two and a
half million, and so it goes.
But up there it just looks like another
flyspeck down on a little piece of dirty
paper, 37,000 feet down below you.
So when John saw the nations of the
earth, from his high place in the coal
mine, where he was in the Spirit on
the Lord's Day, the nations of the earth
looked awfully small indeed.
And John saw the church also, that wonderful
church of which we are a part.
And John saw Israel, 144,000, sealed with
the shield of God.
And he saw darkness, and he saw light,
and he saw night, and he saw day,
and he saw leopards, and he saw fire
and lightning and earthquakes, and he saw soldiers
marching, and he saw the birds eating the
soldiers, and he saw kings, but they weren't
very big kings, and their crowns weren't any
bigger around than a small ring off your
finger by the time John got through with
them.
And he saw scorpions coming up with a
sting in their tail, and he saw the
rich, but they weren't very rich, and he
saw the poor, and they weren't very poor.
And he saw the small, and they were
great, and he saw the great, and they
were small.
And he saw the dead, and they came
up, and he saw the living, and he
saw saints, and he saw the damned, and
the resurrection of the wicked dead.
Now, I'm not putting any of this on.
I just tell you what John saw here.
All this is in the book of Revelation.
Aren't you ashamed that you haven't been reading
it lately?
And then he saw also the prophets, and
he saw martyrs, and he saw witnesses, and
false teachers, and he saw merchants, and they
were, as usual, complaining about sales falling off.
And he saw idolaters down on their knees
worshiping, and he saw kingdoms, and he saw
virgins, and he saw a great whore.
And he saw the temple, and he saw
the altar there in the temple, and he
saw them measuring the worshipers beside the temple.
And he saw the sorcerers, and murderers, and
viles, and he saw herd trumpets, and blasphemers,
and he saw famine and war, and he
saw books opened, and he saw cities, and
he heard liars and saw them.
He saw the synagogue of Satan, and heaven,
and the throne of God, and the Lamb.
And he saw the beasts, and the elders,
and the waiting souls under the altar.
John saw all this from that hole in
the ground where the devil had put him.
He wouldn't have seen that much if he'd
been riding on top of a star somewhere.
But when he was in the Spirit on
the Lord's day, he saw it all.
And he saw the sealing of the righteous,
and he heard and saw the triumph of
the multitude singing unto the Lamb.
He saw hail and fire with blood falling
upon the earth, and a blazing mountain hurled
down.
He saw candlesticks in the winepress of God's
wrath, and he saw a unified world.
He saw what you and I are now
seeing the beginnings of.
He saw the world unified.
They've got the common market, and they have
NATO, and they have CETO, and they have
the United States of this and the United
States of that, and one of these times
there is going to be a world unified.
Not only a world unified, but there is
going to be a church unified.
And that word we're hearing now, ecumenical and
ecumenicity, is simply the fulfillment of what John
saw, the unification of everything.
And Papa John over there on the Tiber
is now stretching his fat arms around the
world and telling us that he wants all
the churches to come my way and let's
unite.
To unite with the Roman Catholic Church is
precisely the same as for a lamb to
unite with a tiger.
The lamb unites with the tiger, and then
the tiger picks his teeth, lies down and
sleeps it off.
And if the church of Christ unites with
the Roman Catholic Church, we'll unite by going
their way.
And John saw the sun turn to blackness,
and the moon into blood, and the stars
fall on the earth.
And he saw the sky rolled up as
a scroll, and he saw the opening of
the terrible bottomless pit, and he saw the
destroyer of fear.
And he saw four angels released and 200
million horsemen coming out.
And he saw the mighty angel that said
he'd put one foot on the sea and
the other foot on the land.
That's a favorite passage of Scripture for some
of our dear colored brethren.
I used to listen to them preach almost
every Sunday when I was in the city
of Chicago.
And some of them are really orators.
They take off in a great and mighty
imaginative flight.
And one of their favorite passages is that
mighty angel that said, one foot on the
sea and the other on the land.
And I want to see that angel.
And then there was the woman clothed with
the sun, and the red dragon that stood
in front of her, and the man-child
that was born.
And the war in heaven when Michael and
his angels fought against the devil and his
angels.
And then the devil appears on the earth.
And there's the beast with seven heads and
ten horns.
What a terrible thing that is.
I don't know what it is.
There's a lot of things I don't know
about this.
If you expect me to get up here
and tell you everything about this and explain
it all, you're going to be deeply disappointed,
because I don't know about this and what
I do.
But what I do is sufficient to keep
me quite interested and expectant.
And then the Son of Man appears on
a cloud to reap the earth.
And he puts in his sickle and reaps.
And we see the rise and fall of
the scarlet woman.
And we see the fall of Babylon.
And we see the mighty clash of armies
at Armageddon.
And we see the married supper of the
Lamb.
And all the beloved saints who have been
washed in the blood of that Lamb come
before the face of their bridegroom.
And they are married in solemn nuptials to
the one who had redeemed them.
And then, of course, there's the chaining of
Satan, for Satan is going to be chained.
This would be a wonderful world if Satan
was chained.
Satan is not chained.
He's busy.
He's everywhere about, hustling here and there.
He is not omnipresent, but he's ubiquitous.
Which omnipresent means he's everywhere at once.
Ubiquitous means he isn't everywhere at once, but
he makes up for it by getting around
fast.
And so the devil makes up for all
the fact that he isn't omnipresent by being
ubiquitous.
He gets around and he's here and there,
walking up and down in the earth.
And you're just as likely to run on
to him on your way home as not.
And there was the reign of Christ on
the earth, which is a beautiful thing that
has become a cause of contention among the
people of God.
And there's the great white throne judgment when
the wicked dead are raised and stand before
that great white throne and the books are
opened and they give account of the deeds
done in the body.
And there's the new heaven and the new
earth and there's a tearless, warless, deathless world
emerging, established in full view of the throne
of God and the holy city.
And there's the river of life which bears,
which flows out and beside it, there's the
tree of life bearing its fruit every month.
And the leaves of the tree are for
the healing of the nation.
Now that's only just a little sketch.
That's not by any means everything that John
talked about here.
But by going over that list and showing
you this mighty panorama, I think I have
proved what I said to begin with, that
this man John wrote the most comprehensive book
of the entire Bible.
For there is not another book from Genesis
right on down that takes it all in
like this.
Unless, of course, when the scripture says, God
made the heaven and the earth and all
things that are therein, that takes it in,
but not in such detail as John saw
it.
Now, this isn't a very big book, this
book of Revelation.
It's a rather modest book.
You can sit down and read it through
in an hour's time if you're a good
reader.
It only has 22 chapters and they're not
long.
The last one's 21 and the 22nd is
27 long and the 20th is only 15
and the 19th is only 21 and so
on.
Some of them are even shorter than that.
So it's not a very long book.
The 15th is only 8 verses long.
And there we have it.
Now, it has been a cause of a
good deal of contention, but that doesn't bother
me because everything good has been a cause
of contention.
They told me about a brother one time,
a godly man who was out with his
master in those old days of the slaves,
and the slave was trying to talk his
master into being a Christian.
He was a godly man and his master
wasn't much interested.
And he said to him, listen here, Tom,
how is it you're a Christian and I'm
not, yet you have all the troubles?
And they were duck hunting.
He said, you have the troubles and I
don't have any.
He said, your family gets sick and mine
doesn't.
You get sick and I don't.
You're poor and I'm well to do.
And I'm widely known and you're scarcely known
off the plantation.
How do you figure if the Lord is
on your side, why is everything going my
way and nothing going your way when I'm
not on the Lord's side?
Well, the dear old saint said, Matthew, he
said, did you ever notice when you shoot
a duck and shoot up and a lot
of ducks come down?
He said, do you know the ones you
always hurry after and try to catch?
He said, yes, the ones that are getting
away.
He said, the ones that I've already killed,
I don't bother.
I can pick them up anytime.
And he said, well, that's the way with
you and me.
He said, you don't have any troubles and
I do.
He said, the reason of that is that
I'm getting away.
And the devil knows he's already got you.
So he figures he's got you in the
bag and he's not bothering you.
But he's bothering me because I'm getting away.
Now, I think he had some good theology
there and a lot of good philosophy and
some good sound reasons for things.
And if you as a Christian find that
you run into trouble and the fellow that
gets up at five o'clock in the
morning and mows his lawn the size of
two postage stamps with a power motor and
then goes fishing right after breakfast and doesn't
go to church and you go to church
and give and work and sweat and labor
and he's well and you're sick and he
had no trouble and you barely make ends
meet, don't worry about it.
The devil knows he's got him and has
given him no trouble, but he knows he
hasn't got you.
And so he's after you.
So it is with books of the Bible.
They try to take the book of Revelation
away from it.
And they say that the book of Revelation
was not written by John.
Well, I don't believe it was written by
John either.
They said that once, you know, they've had
an awful contention about who wrote Shakespeare's plays.
One fellow said that after everybody lectured and
argued and debated about who had written Shakespeare's
plays, one fellow summed it up.
He said he didn't think Shakespeare had written
the plays, but a fellow named Shakespeare had
written.
And that's the way I think about John.
If they say John didn't write it, I
won't be nice.
I'll say, okay, John didn't write it, but
a fellow named John wrote it.
And we'll settle at that and we won't
fight.
Personally, I think John the Beloved wrote it.
And I can go through the book of
Revelation and I can show you the same
style as the 1 John, 2 John, 3
John, and the gospel according to John.
Some of the same words come out.
You ever notice this, that you ever listen
very carefully to a man, a preacher or
a politician?
You would probably hear more preachers than politicians.
I hope you would.
You'll notice certain men get certain words and
they write those words.
I heard a man preaching not long ago,
and I've heard him now for 25 years
quite frequently.
Every time I hear him, he uses the
same words, the word articulate.
He says when he means give forth or
show forth or speak forth or anything, he
says articulate.
He says the Lord articulates the Bible and
people articulate their testimony and all people are
articulating.
Now if I were blind or walking backwards
in the Stygian darkness and I heard a
man up preaching and he said you ought
to articulate your Christianity, I'd smile and say
I know that boy.
I know who he is because he's got
a pet word there.
Now the writers of the Bible had pet
words too.
Just as sure as you live, there were
men of like passion.
They would speak as they were moved by
the Holy Ghost, but they weren't wax saints
and they weren't angels, they were men.
So John used certain words in his gospel,
and he used them again in his letters,
and now we find him using them in
the book of Revelation.
So I think a man named John wrote
the book of Revelation, the Apocalypse.
Whether he did or not wouldn't make too
much difference except for the fact that he
said he did.
If you get a letter and it isn't
signed, it doesn't make much difference who wrote
it.
But if you get a letter and it
says love John, and then you find John
didn't write it, you might be in trouble.
You'd say to yourself, well, I wonder who
did write it and sign John's name.
Or if John signed his name and then
declared he didn't write it, you'd be worried.
But if it was anonymous, why, you wouldn't
mind.
Now John said he wrote this book, and
I'm going to string along with John myself.
Now about the interpretations of this book of
Revelation.
I'd like to tell you to start with,
and I'm going to disappoint 106 percent of
you, for the reason that I'm not going
to conform to your school of eschatological interpretation.
That long expression means your view of prophecy.
And I'm just going to teach what I
see here and preach what I see in
this book of Revelation.
Certainly you've got a lot of material to
work on, haven't you?
A man that couldn't work on this book,
he's not called to preach, and he ought
to go doing something else.
But all this hundred and some topics that
I've given you here, that I have actually
taken from the book of Revelation, certainly a
man ought to have something to talk about.
And it's here.
Now there are three main schools of interpretation
about this book of Revelation.
One is called the preterist school, and one
is called the historical school, and one is
called the futurist school.
Now I'll not mention this any more after
tonight, because it isn't worth mentioning.
But the preterist school says this, that all
the revelation is past and fulfilled and period
and finest has been written after.
That everything I have talked about here tonight,
God and Christ and the Holy Spirit and
hell and earth and sea and sky and
liars and cities and nations and thrones and
horsemen, all this is past.
It's all taken place.
It is simply a colorful history of certain
events that have had happened before John ever
wrote the book of Revelation at all.
And then there's the historical school of interpretation.
And the historical school, I think Dr. A.
B.
Simpson belonged to the historical view.
He held that it was in process of
fulfillment, that some of it began to be
fulfilled when it was written, and that it
has been in process of fulfillment ever since.
And then there's the futurist school, that it
is still awaiting fulfillment.
And outside of the first chapter, the rest
of it all remains to be fulfilled.
Now that's the futurist school.
The historical school is that it's being fulfilled.
The preterist school is that it was fulfilled
before it ever was written.
And it's simply a dramatic history of what
had been.
And the futurist school, that it is still
awaiting fulfillment.
Now this generation of Christians has been raised
on the futurist view through the teaching of
W.E. Blackstone, and C.I. Schofield, and
James M.
Gray, and Arnold Gableine, and William Pettengill, and
many others.
These were the great leaders of the teaching.
We have been fed up and completely taught
on the futurist view of the book of
Revelation, so that we tend to look out
to the future and believe that it's yet
to be fulfilled.
I remember that when the First World War
started, that was back before some of you
were born, a long time before some of
you were born.
The First World War started, they immediately got
up a scare about the Lord's return.
And all during the First World War, prophetic
teachers were going about everywhere teaching that this
was Armageddon and that the coming of the
Lord was drawing nigh.
And I heard a southern preacher say at
that time, I'm afraid of this, he said.
He was a man who believed in the
coming of Christ, as we all do.
But he said, I'm afraid of this, because
I am afraid that Satan is going to
use this excitement.
He's going to get everybody steamed up about
the coming of the Lord, and then if
the Lord doesn't come, he's going to disappoint
us all, and we're all going to have
a sense of letdown.
Well, he was a prophet for that exactly
what happened.
And then during and after the First World
War, we had prophecy fed to us constantly,
and there were men running about everywhere with
their scrolls, their rolls, and their long charts.
And in those days, if you wrote a
book, a little different interpretation of some point
of prophecy, you were sure to have a
big sale.
I remember that one fellow wrote a book
stating that things were going to be in
a certain way.
And then one morning when the newspapers came
out, he saw that he had been sold
downriver, so he raced to the printer and
said, Stop the press, stop the press.
So they stopped the press.
And the last I heard of his books,
they were all in his basement getting mildew.
The movement of fulfillment and of history had
proved that the fellow was wrong.
Now, the trouble with the Brethren was that
they knew more than Daniel, they were wiser
than Isaiah, and they saw further than John.
But of course they didn't see as far
as John, and they weren't as wise as
Daniel, and they'd got a lot to learn
from Isaiah.
But we did hear about it an awful
lot.
And then when the Second World War, you
see, they said the Roman Empire is going
to be established, and they even said that
they already had the materials to build a
temple, and Babylon was going to be rebuilt.
And they had the materials all waiting around.
And Mussolini was going to be either the
Antichrist, or he was going to be the
sponsor, as we say now, of the Antichrist.
And the Roman Empire was rising, and the
West was in decline and on its way
down.
And one man wrote a book called The
Decline of the West.
And then the Second World War broke out,
and you know what happened to that fellow
Mussolini.
We won't have to go into that sticky
bit of history, because everybody knows about that.
You either were present, and that is, you
were living on the earth and heard about
it from the newspapers, you read about it
since.
And when the Roman Empire wasn't fulfilled, and
instead of Rome becoming once more the great
center and the Antichrist sitting there, when it
turned out otherwise, people got awfully discouraged.
And you know what's happened from the Second
World War to this hour?
The doctrine of the return of Christ has
gone into decline, amounting almost to a total
eclipse.
And there's scarcely anybody who preaches about it
anymore.
It used to be the preached about of
these conventions.
And I've been to convention after convention where
it was never as much as mentioned in
recent years.
The burnt child read the fire, and we
were burnt by knowing more than the Bible
knew.
And the result is there was an awful
lot of discouragement among the children of God,
and they were worried a great deal.
But you know, there's this, friends.
We don't make this the test of orthodoxy.
We don't in any way make it the
test of orthodoxy.
Whether you belong to the preterist school that
says that John wrote history, whether you belong
to the historical school that says the book
of Revelation is in process of fulfillment, or
whether you belong to the futurist school which
says the book of Revelation is yet to
be fulfilled, that doesn't mean that you and
I are to build three churches and call
them the first church of the preterites and
the first church of the historic lights and
the first church of the futurites.
We can love each other and serve God
together and send the gospel to the ends
of the earth and pray together and sing
together and shake hands together and love each
other, even if we don't have the same
views about the coming of Christ.
Now, there are those who feel otherwise about
it.
And the very fact that I've said as
much as I've said tonight would rule me
completely out of some churches.
I'd never get back in there again.
Our brother Camfield here would be interested in
this, over on your side of Chicago, incidentally.
It wasn't a Midwest church, I'll tell you
that now.
But it was over there in one of
the big, well-known churches, and it wasn't
Moody's either.
I've never been kicked out of Moody's yet.
But I've been thrown out of some interesting
places, but not Moody's.
Well, anyhow, this church, they had me over
there to preach, and I went and I
took from a text, that passage in the
book of Peter that says that we are
to look for a new heaven and a
new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness and we're to
be holy.
And then I made the mistake of making
this statement.
I said, We are supposed to live as
though Christ were coming tonight and work as
though he were not coming for a thousand
years.
And then they all stood up, and I
saw that I'd thrown cold water in the
baby's face, all right.
And they stood up and they said, Brother
Carlson, will you dismiss us?
I don't know, Brother Carlson, he's probably dead
and in heaven now, I hope.
But he stood up and he waited quite
a little while, and I wondered why he
wasn't going to pray.
And then here's the way he prayed.
He said, Oh, Father, we'll have to confess
we didn't get much out of this sermon.
And he went on and laid me out
to know, and his nice Swedish prayer was
all right.
He was a dear old man.
But the pastor was too humiliated even to
come around and say, Excuse me, Brother Tozer,
but we have this treasure in earthen vessels,
and some vessels get cracked, and I'm not
responsible.
I'm not responsible for my brother's conduct.
But he said he didn't get much out
of the sermon.
Well, he was honest.
You'll have to say that for him anyhow.
He was honest.
But my trouble was that I had suggested
that maybe Christ might not come yet for
a while, but I had said we ought
to live as if he was coming tonight.
And I think that's the important part myself,
really.
I think the coming of Christ, the very
fact that he's coming, has taught us in
order that we might become holy and perfect,
even as he is perfect, and that we
might be watchful and waiting for our Lord's
return.
When he returns isn't so important as the
fact that we're ready for him when he
does.
And I was naive enough to say that,
and I stayed in that city for about
15 years after that, and I never got
invited back to that church by them.
I was invited to a convention once, and
I stood in that holy place and preached,
but it was never but the invitation of
the church.
They didn't want any of that heresy.
You either had to be exactly what they
were and believe exactly what they believed down
to the crossing of the T, the dotting
of the I, or else you couldn't be
in their church.
Well, I consider that a terrible way to
live, my brethren.
I won't live that way myself if I
can help it, and I don't want you
to.
Well, anyhow, I'd like to say this to
you, that most of the great saints, though
they believed in Christ's return, didn't believe in
what we call the futuristic school.
They believed he would come back in one
way or another, and they wrote some wonderful
hymns about his coming.
We sing some of the hymns, Ten Thousand
Times Ten Thousand in Shining Garments, the Army
of the Ransomed Saints, Move Up the Steeps
of Light, and all such songs.
They were written by people who didn't hold
to the futuristic view, but they did believe
that Christ was coming back again.
You know, there's a doctrine.
I just got some magazines from England yesterday,
some dear friend sent me from London, and
I find they're still harping on that same
old doctrine, that we have more light in
these last days than the saints had.
That is, we have more light than John
Wesley had, and we have more light than
Phinney had, and we have more light than
Luther had, and we have more light than
Ter Stegen had, and we have more light
than Madame Guion had.
We have a lot of light, they say.
Well, but we've got more light.
What I'd like to know is, why were
they such good saints, and why are we
such poor, wretched examples of Christians, if we
have the light and they didn't?
I'd settle for less light if I could
get more holiness, wouldn't you?
I don't believe that doctrine at all.
I believe these boys that went around with
their charts and pulled the blind down on
the coming of Christ and made everybody ashamed
to preach it, and made every preacher ashamed
to announce he's going to preach from the
Book of Revelation.
I don't believe they did as good, but
they did as harm.
And they justified it on the grounds of
the latter-day light.
Everybody has more light now than they had
then.
Well, I might say again, I don't believe
it.
But what do I hold?
What do I believe?
Do I believe that this is all past?
Do I believe that everything in this Book
of Revelation is all past?
Well, now I'm not going to run over
this long list here again.
But I wonder if the sun has yet
been turned into blackness, and the moon into
blood, and the stars have fallen from heaven,
and the mountains have moved out into their
place in the sea, and the sky has
been rolled up as a scroll, and the
bottomless pit has been opened, and the devil
has come forth, and there are any strange
poisonous locusts killing a third of the inhabitants
of the earth.
I wonder if the destroyer has appeared, and
the four angels have been released from the
four quarters of the earth, and two hundred
million horsemen have come.
I wonder if the mighty angel has appeared
to set one foot on the sea and
one on the land.
Where are those two witnesses that lived a
while and then were martyred?
Where is that woman clothed with the sun
and that red dragon and that war in
heaven and the devil appearing on earth?
Where is that Antichrist?
Somebody says he's over in Rome.
Well, if he's who you say he is,
well, he's been over there a long time.
Where is the unity of politics?
And where is the Son of Man appearing
on a cloud and wreathing the earth, and
the rise and fall of the scarlet woman,
and the fall of Babylon, and the battle
of Armageddon, and the marriage supper of the
Lamb?
No, my brother, I don't believe it's all
happened at all.
I think that it will yet happen, and
I believe that we stand on the verge
of one of the most dramatic and colorful
and wonderful and far-reaching and mighty and
horrendous and terrible and glorious developments that ever
has been known since Adam stood up on
the earth and Eve stood by his side.
I believe that.
I don't know all the details, and if
you have a different view from mine, I
want you to love me still.
But I believe that we are in and
not very far from the time when our
Lord shall be back again, and we shall
see him appear on the earth.
And when there won't be too long until
there will be a tearless and a warless
and a deathless world that will emerge and
be established in full view of the throne
of God, and the holy city will come
down out of heaven clothed as the bride
adorned for her husband.
I believe it.
And I believe, therefore, that you and I
ought to be prepared and ought to be
ready, and we ought to do everything possible
to live not for this world but for
that world above.
So remember that there is an old world
and old heavens and old stars and an
old sun, old mountains and old seas and
old earth, and it's all going to have
to pass away with a great noise.
And in its place there will be a
new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness.
And I cannot close any better than to
remind you of these words of the man
of God who said he wrote that we
might stir up our pure minds, looking for
and hastening unto the coming of the day
of God wherein the heavens being on fire
shall be dissolved and the elements shall melt
with fervent heat.
Nevertheless, we, according to his promise, look for
new heavens and a new earth wherein dwelleth
righteousness.
That was the passage that got me thrown
out.
Peter and I got thrown out on the
same year.
Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such
things, be diligent that ye may be found
of him in peace without spot and blameless,
and account that the longsuffering of our Lord
is salvation, even as our beloved Paul also
wrote.
He says, Therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these
things before, beware, lest ye also be led
away with the air of the wicked fall
from your own steadfastness.
So there is a time coming when the
new heaven and the new earth shall be
established.
You see, you and I live for that
time.
We don't live for the time when the
new party will have a prime minister in
Ottawa.
We don't live for the time when the
Republicans will be able to elect another president
in the United States.
I don't know whether that will ever be.
But we don't live for that time.
We don't live for the time when any
political party shall forge to the front and
rule the world.
We live for the time when there shall
be a new heaven and a new earth
wherein dwelleth righteousness, and when we shall look
upon the face of him who loved us
and gave himself for us, and we shall
go forth leaning upon the arm of our
beloved, and he shall present us to the
Father with exceeding joy, and all things under
the earth and on the earth and above
the earth and around the earth and all
creatures heard I say, glory and honor and
power and dominion and might be unto him
that sitteth upon the throne forever and forever.
I live for that time.
My heart looks to that time.
I'm writing my books with that in view.
I'm preaching my sermons with that in view.
I'm living my life with that expectation.
I'm waiting and looking to that hour.
If I can't figure out all the details,
I'll do the best I can.
But one thing I will be able to
do as we go along, and that is
decipher some things and show maybe that they
were, but show that how many more were
not yet, and that the coming of the
Lord draweth nigh.
And if the coming of the Lord is
drawing near, Israel is yet to be restored,
and the Church is yet to be glorified,
and Antichrist is yet to appear, it's time
we Christians do something about it.
Not that, for we can't help that.
That's out of our hands.
But I mean do something about preparation and
readiness for the coming of Christ.
Somebody said to John Wesley, Mr. Wesley, if
you knew that Christ was coming tonight at
midnight, what would you do?
He thought a moment and said, I don't
think I'd alter my plans any.
His plans were so in the will of
God that the coming of Christ wouldn't change
them for him.
One of the great leaders of Europe, the
Kaiser, who was blamed for the First World
War, who had mighty Teutonic ambitions to rule
the world, he had a great Lutheran preacher
who was a kind of, I don't know
what you'd call him, but he was the
man who preached to the big shots.
And one day to the surprise and chagrin
of everybody, he arose and preached on the
coming of Christ.
And the Kaiser said to him, he didn't
want to hear any more of that, he
said it would spoil my plans.
If your plans are in the will of
God, the coming of Christ will not spoil
your plans.
If you have plans that the coming of
Christ would destroy, then you have plans that
God has never given you.
I want to write at least one more
book.
That series on the attributes will be out.
It's out now, and I have eleven copies,
and there's one downstairs, but it's not out
yet, you see.
But the way they do down there, they
keep it for you and say it's released
on such a date, so it's going to
be released August 30th in the attributes.
And I want to write one on the
worship of God.
But if I don't succeed in getting the
next one written, it'll be all right.
I'd rather see Jesus Christ come than to
write my book.
And if he comes before they release it
on August 30th and take the wraps off
of it, I'm happy about that, too.
I had the fun of writing it.
And a few people read it, editors and
copy readers and copy editors and proofreaders and
typesetters.
Maybe it did somebody some good.
If you've got any plans that the coming
of Christ would disturb or upset, you ought
to get immediately on your knees and get
straightened out.
Even so, come quickly.
Come, Lord Jesus.
Let's pray.