Participants:
Series Code: ICJ
Program Code: ICJ190007B
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00:02 Watching Jesus break these seven seals,
00:05 we're now looking at the second seal 00:07 as the spirit of Antichrist, taking centuries to mature, 00:10 develops even a deeper hold on the church. 00:14 Revelation 6:4, "Another horse, fiery red, went out. 00:18 And it was granted that he who sat on it 00:21 would take peace from the earth, 00:23 and that people should kill one another." 00:25 In other words, war. A great sword was given to him. 00:29 You know, if the church had been faithful, 00:31 if it had resisted the spirit of Antichrist, 00:34 I think it could have banished war from the earth. 00:39 But the spirit of Antichrist, 00:41 the spirit of wanting human power and earthly results 00:47 kept the church from fulfilling its great destiny. 00:51 So the spirit of Antichrist gets deeper. 00:53 Yet Jesus preserves His church. 00:56 Still He carries it through despite this difficulty. 01:00 And then the third seal, Revelation 6:5-6. 01:03 "So I looked, and behold, a black horse. 01:08 And he who sat on him had a pair of scales in his hand." 01:13 Now those scales represent commerce. 01:17 Somebody is going to do some trading here, as it were. 01:20 "And I heard a voice in the midst of the four living 01:22 creatures saying, 'A quart of wheat for a denarius, 01:26 and three quarts of barley for a denarius; 01:28 and do not harm the oil and the wine.'" 01:31 So what is this saying? 01:32 It's saying here that this power is going to take away 01:37 the ability of the church to have bread. 01:39 In other words, there's a famine of bread. 01:41 And bread represents the Word of God. 01:44 So the church is going to become so imbued 01:47 with the spirit of Antichrist that it's going to make 01:50 the Bible, if you please, God's Word, scarce. 01:54 And that's exactly what happened. 01:56 As the church became more political, 01:58 as it became more power hungry, 02:00 as it became more earthly focused instead of 02:02 heavenly minded, then they didn't like what the Bible would 02:06 do to their members, because the Bible shows the truth. 02:12 The truth about what the church ought to be like. 02:16 The Bible is a great power. 02:18 And so they made the Bible scarce, 02:21 they made the Word of God like a famine. 02:23 But you can't stop the blood of Christ from still working. 02:27 You can't stop the Holy Spirit from still working. 02:30 And so Jesus still takes His church through a time 02:34 of terrible famine of the Word of God. 02:39 So we come to the next one. 02:41 The fourth one is found in Revelation 6:8, 02:44 and it really breaks your heart. 02:46 And this shows the full development of what Antichrist, 02:50 the spirit of Antichrist, will do in the church 02:54 when it's not arrested. 02:57 And here it is, the fourth seals say in Revelation 6:8, 03:01 "So," John speaking, "I looked, and behold, a pale horse. 03:07 And the name of him who sat on it was..." 03:10 This is unbelievable. 03:11 Death and Hades. 03:14 Death and the grave riding this church, 03:19 this horse, if you please. 03:23 "And power was given to them over a fourth of the earth 03:27 to kill with sword, with hunger, with death, 03:29 and by the beasts of the earth." 03:31 It pains my heart to tell you this. 03:35 But the church, in the name of Jesus... 03:37 Jesus still had all of His faithful people. 03:40 But never the less, the church, the visible church 03:43 that many people saw, not everybody but most people saw, 03:48 that church became so corrupt that it actually, 03:54 it actually took the instruments of torture 03:57 from the old Roman Empire and began to torture its own members 04:02 that refused to go along with its own heresies 04:07 and its own apostasy. 04:09 That's why death and the grave ride this. 04:12 And this horse is pale. 04:14 It's greenish, if you look it up in the Greek. 04:17 It's sickly. 04:19 That's what the Antichrist is meant to do, though. 04:22 Satan is trying to destroy the church from within, 04:25 because he wants to wipe it off the face of the earth. 04:28 But I want to ask you a question. 04:29 Through all of this terrible thing, the rise of the 04:32 inquisition and all of these things, 04:34 has God been able to carry His church through? 04:39 And the answer to that is, yes, amen, and hallelujah. 04:44 If that were not true, I would not be standing here today. 04:47 The church would not be alive and well today. 04:50 The church would not have any power in the earth. 04:52 If the spirit of Antichrist had been totally successful, 04:56 if it had not met the power of Jesus to break it, 05:00 it would have destroyed the church from the inside. 05:06 The next one is the fifth seal. 05:09 And we hear that coming now from Revelation 6:9. 05:18 "I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain 05:22 for the word of God and for the testimony they held." 05:25 Now remember, we're in symbolic prophecy. 05:28 Jesus Himself said the dead are in the grave 05:30 waiting for the morning of the resurrection. 05:32 We'll talk about that sometime later. 05:34 But this is symbolic. 05:36 You know, Abel's blood, the Bible tells us, 05:39 after he was killed by Cain cried to God from the ground. 05:43 Well Abel's blood didn't actually cry. 05:45 It's symbolic. 05:47 God hasn't forgotten. 05:48 Some time ago I stood in Germany at one of those 05:51 concentration camps where so many people lost their lives. 05:54 And it just overwhelmed me as I thought of the 05:57 misery and the suffering, the death, and the horrors 06:00 that Nazi Germany had imposed on Jews and 06:02 people that they didn't like. 06:04 It showed the board up there, it showed how many thousands 06:07 of people would perish every day. 06:09 And I remember standing there by myself just thinking, 06:12 "Oh Lord, do not let the earth cover their blood." 06:16 In other words, "Oh Lord, remember. 06:19 Oh Lord, do something about this injustice." 06:23 And God will do that. 06:25 That day of judgment is coming. 06:27 And it's something similar here. 06:29 You know, as the spirit of Antichrist developed, 06:34 God also sent something to counter it. 06:37 And we call that the Protestant Reformation. 06:40 And the thing about the Protestant Reformation, 06:42 one of its first tenets was that we have to have Sola Scriptura 06:45 that restored the Bible to people in the common tongue. 06:49 One of the greatest things Martin Luther did was 06:51 to translate the Bible into the common tongue of German. 06:55 And then William Tyndale translated it into the common 06:58 tongue of the English. 06:59 And when people got the Bible, they began to be able to 07:02 see things like they had never seen before. 07:04 And that's really what caused the reformation. 07:07 But there was a terrible persecution 07:10 launched against them. 07:11 I don't have time to tell you about all the persecution that 07:15 went on as a result of the Protestant Reformation. 07:18 You have the Waldenses. 07:20 You ought to read the story. 07:21 A few years ago the Pope apologized to them. 07:24 But they met in a council and they said, 07:25 "We can't accept that apology because we weren't the ones 07:28 that were tortured and put to death, 07:30 and our women and children ran out into the cold 07:33 in the middle of winter to die on the hills of the Alps." 07:37 The suffering of these people is incalculable. 07:41 It cannot be calculated. 07:44 And yet, the Protestant Reformation survived. 07:48 The United States of America came up and 07:50 made it one of the greatest influences on the planet, 07:53 on the earth. 07:55 The constitution of the United States is really a Protestant 07:57 document with those guarantees of freedom that have been 08:00 exported all over the world, as it were. 08:03 But God's people have always been suffering. 08:05 Communism comes along, and Nazism comes along, 08:08 and God's people suffer under this. 08:11 And before Jesus comes with the mark of the beast, 08:14 God's people are going to suffer again. 08:17 I think that many people are going to lose their lives. 08:19 Some people think, "Well you know, we're just going to 08:21 kind of march through this." 08:22 No, a lot of people are going to lose their lives 08:25 as they face these terrible, terrible things 08:28 in the end of time. 08:31 So Christians today are still suffering. 08:34 Sometimes they suffer in countries that are communist, 08:38 like maybe North Korea for instance. 08:41 Maybe in Muslim countries. 08:43 Many closed countries that will not allow the gospel, 08:46 and you can get yourself in real trouble really quick 08:49 if you try to share the Word of God. 08:51 But you know, they're not going to be able to stop it. 08:53 God's Word is going to go forward. 08:55 You're not going to be able to stop the word of God. 08:57 How many people have succumbed their faith 09:00 to the icy fingers of delay? 09:02 They hoped Jesus had come in their day, 09:04 and yet He hasn't come. 09:06 Many people, generations, have gone to sleep 09:08 hoping that Jesus would come. 09:11 The icy fingers of delay. 09:13 But can Jesus bring His Church through delay? 09:16 And the answer to that is, yes. 09:18 Amen and hallelujah. 09:21 Then we come to the sixth seal. 09:23 And it gets very fascinating here. 09:25 The sixth seal is found in Revelation 6:12-17. 09:29 And then it says, "Behold, there was a great earthquake; 09:32 and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair... 09:35 And the stars of heaven fell to the earth, 09:37 as a fig tree drops late figs when shaken by a mighty wind. 09:42 Then the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up, 09:44 and every mountain and island was moved out of its place. 09:47 And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, 09:51 the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, 09:55 hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, 10:00 and said to the rocks and the mountains, 10:02 'Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits 10:07 on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!'" 10:11 And this heart rendering cry comes up from the earth, 10:14 "Who will be able to stand?" 10:18 This is a picture of the stars of heaven. 10:21 And I could talk about how we have seen 10:24 some of those signs already. 10:26 But they're also symbolic. 10:28 Symbolic of the powers of heaven being shaken. 10:32 The earth is headed toward chaos. 10:35 A terrible time of trouble that no political powers 10:40 will be able to control. 10:42 Chaos! 10:43 And then all of this ends with the coming of Jesus 10:46 in great glory. 10:48 But people are not ready. 10:50 They're not ready for Jesus to come. 10:52 He comes in judgment, as it were. 10:55 And they look and they say, "Who will be able to stand?" 10:59 We don't have time to answer that question, 11:01 but we're going to answer that question in our next session. 11:04 "Who will be able to stand?" 11:08 And then we come to the last one found in chapter 8 verse 1. 11:14 And it says that, "There was silence in heaven 11:18 about the space of a half hour." 11:21 What does that mean? 11:24 We have to understand that through time 11:26 Jesus has been breaking these seals. 11:29 Satan has been forced to surrender each time. 11:33 He couldn't prevent, he couldn't use Antichrist 11:36 to break the church, and destroy it, 11:38 and make it unready for Jesus. 11:40 He couldn't use the icy fingers of delay. 11:44 And even the coming of Jesus with great chaos in the earth, 11:47 there's still a people ready for Jesus to come. 11:52 So Satan has got his back up against the wall. 11:55 Where is he going to go from here? 11:57 He's only got one thing left. 12:01 And that word, "silence," tells us what it is. 12:05 You see, there's silence in heaven 12:08 because there's a shout on earth. 12:12 The graveyards are Satan's prison house. 12:16 And so he's saying, "You can't have these. 12:18 You can't have these." 12:19 But when Jesus comes in the clouds of heaven, 12:23 He comes with a voice of the archangel. 12:25 He comes with the trump of God. 12:28 And when He blows that trumpet, when the archangel sounds, 12:34 the dead in Christ wake up and they come forth 12:38 from the grave, and the prison house of Satan is broken. 12:42 The last seal is broken. 12:47 And Jesus has His Church ready, and He delivers them. 12:53 And He gives them the deed to the new earth, 12:56 to everlasting life. 12:58 What a marvelous Savior! 13:00 What an incomparable Jesus who is invincible! 13:05 My dear friends, listen. 13:07 If Jesus can break these seals down through time, 13:11 He can take care of your life. 13:13 He can fix whatever needs to be fixed in your life 13:16 and in your heart. 13:18 Listen, Jesus, He's the invincible one. 13:21 He can fix the unfixable. 13:23 And He can break the unbreakable, 13:26 the seals that keep us, and deliver to us the deed. |
Revised 2019-07-15