We are seeing this morning, the kingdom of Christ proclaimed. We recently discussed the two witnesses - we saw the trials we believe the church went through. We saw the Satanic opposition to God's church. This morning, we have a beautiful, encouraging passing where we see the triumph of a church. This passage aplies to the age that we are in, with the church often being persecuted and despised but never destroyed.
We want to consider the church's witness to the kingship of the Lord Jesus. One of the tings we see over and over again is that we see it is applicable now, not just the future. So when we study this book, we see what God is speaking to His people today.
We see in the fifth and sixth trumpets symbolic language that describes the rage of Satan and the futility of idolatry.
We are going to review and see where this chapter fits into the broader scheme of Revelation. Then we'll explain the meaning of this text - we see a Falling star - it's not a physical star, but it is Satan, then we'll walk through the rest of the text briskly and explain the rest of the meaning of the text.
I want you to be reminded that the book of Revelations was written to overcomers. It was written to real churches and real Christians in very real cities in Asia Minor. They were Christians under attack. It was not easy to be a Christian in AD90.
This morning, we will focus on the first 6 verses of Revelation chapter 8. This is a very reassuring chapter, because we know sometimes what it feels like as we stumble through our prayers, yes? Sometimes our prayers feel very weak and earthly and are mixed with our own agendas and self-ambitions...What we see in chapter 8 is Heaven's perspective on prayer.
We are going to look at a passage containing a very famous number - one that people will quickly recognize - it is the 144,000. Probably the two most numbers in the Bible are the numbers 144,000 and 666.
We are again, looking at the second section of visions of Revelation and this morning we will be looking at the Persecuted church. That first group of visions, we saw the church from the heavenly perspective.
We are at one of the most famous passages in Revelation - we see the four horsemen, commonly called the four horsemen of the apocalypse. This is where many Christian interpreters have to part ways and say "see you later." Many premillenial perspectives will diverge greatly from cahpter 6-20, but we are of course, looking at this from an amillenial perspective. The book is addressed to seven real churches and what was written was written pastorally to them.
We will see the scroll, the Savior and the song - the three dominant themes of Revelation chapter 5. This is part of the second cycle of visions in Revelation.
We have a difficult passage to walk through this morning - but we know that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God. That includes the church of Laodicea, which is a lukewarm church. Another way of saying that it's a proud. self-sufficient church. You could say a self-righteous church, it seems a natural reading of this passage would suggest it's a largely unredeemed church, not a lost church.
The church of Sardis is a dead church. This is the fifth of the seven churches that our Lord addresses in Asia Minor. We don't know all the details of Sardis and when this began, we've mentioned every week in how Acts 19:10 says the word of the Lord went out through Asia, and so we can supposed that as Paul did ministry in Ephesus, the word of God reached Sardis and the church was founded.
