The Times of the Signs Part 3: Revelation 6 - Revelation: The Apocalypse

You're listening to the road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

Listen closely, church.

God is not done with this church.

God is going to raise up powerful churches.

God is going to raise up word and spirit churches.

God is going to raise up churches that love their cities, that love the poor, that love the disenfranchised, that love and care for those that are blind and those that are hurting and those who need healing.

And it's going to come through churches that love God's Word and love Jesus.

Today, Pastor Steve continues his series on the Book of Revelation.

At The Road, our vision is to raise up wholehearted disciples of Jesus Christ.

For more information on The Road, visit theroad.org.

We hope you are encouraged by today's message from Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

Okay, guys, would you turn in your Bibles?

We're in the book of Revelation.

But just to bring you up today, those that haven't been a part of the Revelation study, chapters one and three, one, two, and three of Revelation was talking about the present time, the present time of the seven churches.

Then chapters four and five, we look at the throne room of God.

We look at that God is on his throne.

Even in the midst of all of the tribulation that was happening under Domitian at that time, probably around 90 AD, John is taken up into heaven and he gets to see the throne room.

He gets to see heaven.

There's no other passage, there's no other chapters anywhere in the Bible that show us a vision for what heaven is like as chapters 4 and 5 of Revelation.

Then as we come into 6 through 20, as we move toward the coming of the Lord, we're going to begin to see those prophetic signs of the coming of the Lord.

And it's God's intelligence report to us.

And it's like the little boy who went to his class, and there's a new church that they were visiting.

Maybe this will be your experience today if it's your first time here.

And he went to class, and his father was very concerned about what he learned when he went into his little class.

And so little Danny comes running up to his dad and he says, Dad, Dad, it was the most cool story from the Bible that I've ever heard.

And his dad said, Well, what?

And he says, Well, it was about the Israelites, and they were fleeing from Pharaoh and his army, and they they came to the Red Sea, and Pharaoh's army was closing in on them.

And then Moses took out his walkie-talkie and he called in the Israeli Air Force and they just bombed them to smithereens.

And then the navy and the army of the Israelites came together and built a pontoon that went across the Red Sea and they all escaped.

He said, That's what they taught you in your Sunday school class.

Little Danny said, No, but if I told you what they taught me, you'd never believe it.

And so today, I mean, there's skeptics.

There's a lot of skeptics about what's happening.

And if you begin to talk about the things of the Lord and you say, you know, the Bible talks about that.

That is what God predicted thousands of years ago would happen on the face of the earth.

They're skeptical about history, but they're also skeptical about modern things that are happening today.

So two weeks ago, we looked at sign number one.

The sign number one of the coming of the Lord was the great sign, and I think the most important sign and the deepest sign, and that is Israel becoming a nation.

Israel coming back to Palestine and becoming a nation in 1948.

Just miraculous.

No army, navy, marines, nothing.

Just a bunch of citizen soldiers that fought off every Muslim nation that surrounded them in 1948 and they won.

It was nothing less than one of the great modern-day miracles of all time.

And then sign number two, we talked about last week.

The second great sign is the unification of Jerusalem on June 7, 1967.

And we looked at Luke chapter 21.

Luke 21 · chapter mention

Real cryptic verse that's missed a lot of times.

Luke 21, 24.

And Jerusalem will be trampled by the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

And I took you through a brief look at history of from the beginning of the first century onward, and then before that, I'm talking about how the Gentiles had trampled Jerusalem, and on June 7, 1967, in the Six-Day War, the shortest war that we know of in history, Israel unified Jerusalem.

And if you want to watch those road.org, you can go there and you can see the sermons that have preceded this one.

According to Time CNN poll, since the attacks on September 11, 2001, 35% of Americans believe we're living in the last days.

59% believe that the prophecies of the book of Revelation will come true as they are written.

So we are in a nation that believes this, that understands this, but doesn't know what to do with it.

Let me give you three reasons why I believe we're living in the last days.

Three reasons why I believe that we could be the last generation before the coming of the Lord.

Number one is the Bible is very clear of the signs that will precede the coming of the great tribulation, the coming of Christ.

Now I shared two weeks ago, and then a little bit last week, and in two weeks, when we get back into chapter six, I'm gonna share with you that I do not believe chapter six and seven are the great tribulation.

I believe they are the beginnings of sorrows.

The beginnings of sorrows, the big the beginning of birth pangs, and we're gonna go through that.

We're gonna go through, I believe, chapter six and seven.

I'm a believer in the rapture of the church, but I believe we're gonna go through difficult times, men and women.

We are gonna be a part of wars and rumors of wars and tribulation, and some of you are gonna lose your jobs, some of you are gonna be hassled, some of you are gonna possibly pay with your life if you follow Christ in those days.

Chapter 8, I believe, is the beginning of the great tribulation period, and I believe we will, God will take us out before that.

But I just want to say that there's differences of opinion on six, seven, and eight.

But that's where I land, and I'll explain it when we get to that.

Number two, current events are lining up with biblical prophecy, and that's why we're here.

That's why we're gonna be looking at this even for another year.

We're gonna be in the book of Revelation, and you'll, if you don't believe it now, you will as we go as the days go by.

It's it's phenomenal.

As I've said so many times before, you could have we get the Wall Street Journal.

You could have the Wall Street Journal in one hand and your Bible in the other, and it's just amazing how things are lining up.

And then thirdly, events that are occurring on the earth today affect all of the earth today, like never before.

I mean, we now have the ability for everybody in the world to know everything that's happening anywhere in the world.

If you just pick up your device, if you watch TV, if you take your iPad, you can see anything that's happening anywhere across the globe.

And so the ability for mass communication for everyone to know and to see and experience that has never been as it is today.

And it is a is remarkable time.

So let me give you sign number three and four here this morning in our limited time.

I know we're limited on time, but let me cover them as briefly as I can.

We'll see how far we get.

Sign number three is the new internationalism.

New internationalism.

I know the word that many uh progressives are using today would be globalization.

Globalization, I believe, is a sign of the coming of the Lord.

GAT, NAFTA, WTO, NATO, UN, IMF, U W S S D.

The acronyms sound like a kid practicing his newly acquired typing skills on the computer, but actually these are regional, world, and international organizations that daily make the news because of their actions.

The effects of globalization, church, is everywhere.

You guys here that are cadets in the Air Force, you're getting prepared in your training, I'm sure, for internationalization, for globalization, how you're gonna have to engage in that.

We've got military right now.

Some of you are in this room, some of you are special forces, some of you come out of military backgrounds where you actually went in as a peacekeeping force and you couldn't even fight.

You had to simply stay in the back and you actually watch things happen that in days past you would have been able to intervene, but you can't anymore.

You can't even enter a war without getting UN approval.

If you don't get UN approval, it's like the unpardonable international sin of all time is not to get UN approval.

The Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted on December 11, 1967, is an attempt to regulate world environmental conditions.

Before attacking Iraq, the United States had to gain approval from the UN.

And so even if your country's under attack, you have to get approval from the UN.

This new internationalization, and I'm not saying it's all bad, so don't hear me saying everything about that's bad.

I think it's just normal.

You know, as we see, as we look at our world, the globalization.

But here's what is interesting about it is what it's setting up for a one world leader.

So look at your Bibles at Revelation 13.

Now we're gonna cover this more in depth in the weeks ahead, but look at Revelation 13 briefly with me.

And what we're going to see is we're gonna see nations coming together, and we're going to see leaders coming together, and the growth of one particular leader, which the Bible calls the Antichrist.

Now I'll cover this way more detail in the days ahead, but Antichrist, by its very definition, isn't what you think.

It doesn't listen, anti from the Latin phrase does not mean against.

So it's not against Christ.

Antichrist means like Christ.

Antichrist.

It means to be like Christ.

There will be a Christ-like figure.

And first of all, he will have power over global government.

Look at verse 7.

It was granted to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them, and authority was given him over every tribe, tongue, and nation.

In the next verse, the Antichrist will have power over religion worldwide.

Look at verse 8.

All who dwell on the earth will worship him whose names have not been written in the book of life of the lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

In verse 17, we see that the Antichrist will have power over the global economy.

And that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast or the number of his name.

So it's not that globalization is bad, don't get me wrong, or internationalization is bad.

I love the freedom that that gives us to preach the gospel, church.

I mean, it's amazing.

First time I went on a uh mission trip was smuggling Bibles into Eastern Europe.

So I was smuggled, well, it's not the first time I had been to the Middle East in '79, but in 80 I went on a particular mission trip to smuggle Bibles into Eastern Europe.

And I remember it cost me$3,000 just for the flight, okay, in 1980.

And then I think my last trip was to India, and I was paying like$900 for a round trip to India.

So I mean, it's it's amazing how much easier it is to travel now than it's ever been.

And so globalization is also being used by the Lord to get the gospel out.

So it's exciting.

But my point in making it my third sign is that it's also setting up the venue for a one-world leader to have control over the governments, the collective governments of the world.

And so I believe everything's coming into place: international travel, a global economy, rapid communication, surveillance, satellites, a world bank, and weapons of mass destruction.

I'm reminded of Nimrod.

Nimrod represents a kind of antichrist, and the stage was set for such a leader at that time.

As Nimrod came to power.

Look at chapter, I mean Revelation 13, 17.

It's speaking of the mark of the name of the beast, and this mark will be of a leader.

Billy Graham says it this way there are so many interesting references in the Bible to a future world government to be ruled by a great Antichrist.

It is obvious that the world's acceptance of one man rule must be preceded by a period of preparation.

At a recent peace conference in Washington, speaker after speaker referred to the necessity and possibility of a world government.

In the Gideon Seymour Memorial Lecture at the University of Minnesota, Arnold Tolmbe once said, quote, living together as a single family is the only future mankind can have now that Western technology has simultaneously annihilated distance and invented the atomic bomb.

He then added, the alternative to the destruction of the human race is a worldwide social fusion of all tribes, nations, civilizations, and religions of man.

So here's the deal.

The exciting side of this is the opportunity for us to take the gospel to the world.

I mean, if any of you just have a few hundred dollars and you have a call from God, you could go to a nation of the world and preach the gospel pretty freely in most cases, just because you're an American.

Secondly, though, is there is a coming together, a globalization of governments that are going to be a setup for a one world leader.

So that's sign number three.

Sign number four, this is huge, guys.

And some of you have been a part of the email stream that's been going on the last two weeks with a particular pastor here in the country, one of the leading pastors in the country.

I'm not going to give you his name, but this is a sign.

The great apostasy of the church.

Sign number four is the great apostasy of the church.

What would you think of an Episcopalian bishop?

Not an Episcopalian pastor, but an Episcopalian bishop who loudly championed this view that the resurrection of Christ was not a real event, but a legend.

There was no empty tomb, no angels, no bodily appearance of Christ.

No reasonable person could believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible, any of the stories of the Bible.

The virgin of the Bible, the virgin of the Annunciation in Bethlehem and the manger, quote, will have to go.

The church should actively endorse and even celebrate homosexual behavior as well as heterosexual liaisons outside of marriage.

And by the way, you can't have one without the other.

John Shelby Sponge, that's his real name, the Episcopal Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, has enthusiastically promoted all of those heretical views in his many controversial books.

In his latest book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die, which he says is a summation of his life's work, he insists that the first century ideas that shape the New Testament are hopelessly outdated and must be discarded.

Well, some of you know that I was a part of an email exchange over the past week with my brother in Georgia, as well as some of you that are in leadership about a sermon that I wanted you to listen to from a leading evangelical pastor here in the United States.

And then Al Moeller, who is the president of the Southern Baptist Seminary, came out with a fantastic article, actually a pretty scathing article, about this situation.

We are seeing now not just mainline churches, but even evangelical churches compromising, and it always starts at the same place, and that is the interpretation of Scripture.

You see, if you can somehow attack Scripture and begin to have a disbelief in different aspects of the Scripture or begin to make Scripture subjective to your own opinions about what you believe and don't believe, you're moving into what I grew up with in the Lutheran church, ELCA Lutheran Church, what we would call neo-orthodoxy.

And that's what my dad believed.

If you smell liver in the oven, you know that's liver because you've tasted both.

I'll take steak on the grill any day.

How about you?

But the reality is, is because you've tasted it and you've been around it, you know what it, you know the flavor, you know the smell, right?

What I'm seeing increasingly, because I grew up in it, is what I would call neo-orthodox thinking starting to affect not just the mainline churches, beginning to majorly affect evangelicals.

I'm warning you, church.

Wherever you land, if you don't come to the road anymore and you're just checking us out, go to a church that believes in the inercy of scripture and one that teaches it chapter by chapter and verse by verse, because it is dangerous ground when you begin to erode scripture.

You erode scripture, you erode the power of the Holy Spirit.

Apostasy describes opposition from within.

It means to fall away in Scripture.

In 1939, during the Spanish Civil War.

Now listen to it, listen to what I'm going to say closely.

1939, during the Spanish Civil War, General Mola was about to come in and attack Madrid.

And he was interviewed at the time about which column of his four columns he was the most confident in.

He said, I'm not confident in my four columns as much as I am in the fifth column.

And I said, What?

What do you mean a fifth column?

He said, the column that's within.

And it became a famous term, and you in military science know what I'm talking about.

The idea of a fifth column is a column of those that are within the city, those that are on the enemy side, but they support you.

And so when General Mola was coming in to take Madrid, he was most confident that he'd win because of his fifth column, which were those that were Mola sympathizers within Madrid who were attacking from within.

That's my biggest concern about apostasy.

It's not the battle from without, it's the battle from within.

That we're sitting there ready to win the nations for Christ.

We're talking about prayer walking here in Briargate and praying for revival and praying for awakening in our city.

When we have even within our churches, those who don't believe in the prophetic work of the Holy Spirit through the Word of God.

Titus 1:16.

Titus 1:16

They profess to know God, but in works they deny him, being abominable, disobedient, and disqualified for every good work.

Mark Hitchcock writes more and more churches are awash in water-down, doctrinless, soft peddling, pop psychology, don't offend anybody, entertainment-oriented, permissive quagmire.

Wow.

Churches today are struggling with the virgin birth of Christ, the atoning death of Christ, the inerrancy of scripture, the necessity of personal faith in Christ for salvation, and the second coming of Christ.

There's no doubt why most of our mainline churches are empty shells.

But listen closely, church.

God is going to raise up powerful churches.

God is going to raise up word and spirit churches.

God is going to raise up churches that love their cities, that love the poor, that love the disenfranchised, that love and care for those that are blind and those that are hurting.

And those who need healing, and it's going to come through churches that love God's Word and love Jesus.

Worshiping and praying churches that will not only have their theology right, but will be filled and empowered with the Word of God and filled and empowered with the Holy Spirit.

Some have called Romans 1 24 through 32 the stockyard of the New Testament.

Romans 1 24-32 the stockyards of the New Testament.

If you've read Romans 1, you know that that is that passage where Jesus, I mean, where Paul writes and he says he gave them over to degrading passions.

He gave them over to that which they wanted.

J.

Dwight, Pentecost, a noted authority on the Bible, says this.

Abundant evidence on every hand shows that men are departing from the faith.

Not only do they doubt the word, they openly reject it.

This phenomenon has never been as prevalent as it is today.

In the period of church history known as the Dark Ages, men were ignorant of the truth.

But never was there an age, listen, never was there an age when men openly denied and repudiated the truth.

This open, deliberate, willful repudiation of the truth of the Bible is described in Scripture as one of the major characteristics of the last days church on earth.

Remember, Paul, in writing to 1 and 2 Timothy, writing two letters to Timothy, his beloved son in the faith, he knows, Paul knows he's gonna die.

He knows this is his last will and testament.

In his first letter to Timothy, he says this now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron.

This is what's amazing to me, church, is what happens with pastors is their conscience becomes seared, and the conviction of the Holy Spirit no longer has access into their hearts because they're listening too much to the media and not enough to the Word of God.

He continues in 2 Timothy chapter 3.

2 Timothy 3 · chapter mention

But know this that in the last days perilous times will come, for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form, I don't know how you can have a form of godliness after this list, but having a form of godliness, but denying its power and from such people turn away.

I think what he's saying is that we can have the form of kind of a churchianity, kind of a form of the traditions of the church, whether it's going and you know giving Hail Mary's or just attending church, but during the week, their lifestyle has no correlation at all to a personal, vital, dynamic, growing relationship with Jesus Christ.

Does that make sense?

And you know what, men and women, that's all of us at times.

We struggle with that, don't we?

And there's times in our life where we have become more hungry and thirsty for the things of the world than for the things of God.

And so we, as Isaiah 55 speaks of it, and that's why that's gonna be my text, Isaiah 35 and Isaiah 55, when I prayer walk this week, is God, make me hungry and thirsty for the things of the Lord.

So I was with Josh.

Josh and I were on a, my son and I were on a trip this week, and I said, let's look at Isaiah 55 as we drive.

And so as we drove, we went verse by verse through Isaiah 55.

And I said, Josh, what does, what's the key to rain and snow?

Why is that important?

He says, Well, because it waters the earth.

And I said, why?

And he says, well, here it says, because it it produces, it makes the seed grow.

And when the seed grows, then you get wheat and corn, and you get soybeans, and then there's food for the eater, is what it says in Isaiah 55.

I said, so it's pretty important, right?

Because if you don't have the water, then you can't grow the seed, which you can't grow the wheat, which you can't have the bread, and everybody starves.

And he says that's what the word of God is like.

That the word of God is water to your heart, and it causes the seed of faith to grow.

Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.

It's living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword.

So, men and women, listen closely to this.

I can talk to the cows come home about the apostasy of the church, but the reality is it's impossible if you're in God's word.

If you're in his word daily, you're reading God's word, you're meditating in God's word, your faith is growing.

It's like a seed, it's like a harvest in your life.

You'll be able to withstand the attacks of the enemy.

You'll be able to have faith when things are not going your way.

You won't give up.

You'll keep pushing forward.

I know so many Christians, they never open the word.

Except on Sunday morning.

Or maybe that's when they open their app.

Church, if that's you, I want to challenge you to a different way of looking at life.

Go after the Lord in Scripture.

That's how he speaks to you, that's how he builds faith in you.

Pick a book, go through our PB and J, our prayer Bible, and journal, our uh bookmark, and it shows you what day, exactly what to read.

And you'll go through the Old and New Testament.

If you keep following that, you'll go through the entire Bible over the next few years.

And so 2 Peter says this.

But there will also be false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Lord who bought them, and bring on themselves swift destruction, and many will follow their destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed.

You can't know it if you're not in it.

Does that make sense?

So, you know, bankers learn to handle real money before they put them in the uh face of counterfeit.

And so they don't say this is what a counterfeit dollar bill looks like.

They say, no, this is the real deal.

You get you handle the real deal and you can feel when it doesn't feel right.

And church, I'm telling you, we're coming into a time in the future where there's going to be blasphemies, there's going to be false teachers, and if you're not in the word, if we're not growing together in the word, there's going to be some weird doctrines coming up, and it's going to sound really good.

I mean, I've listened to some of this stuff.

It's coming out of the evangelical conservative church right now, and it sounds really good.

But praise God.

I've tasted and seen the real thing.

And when I'm there, I'm going, man, that does not smell right.

And that's one of the reasons why I left the vineyard movement.

I left the vineyard movement because I saw an apostasy, there was an apostasy side of the teaching that was beginning to move in.

Kind of this pop psychology.

And I went, I was on the board for the whole association of vineyard churches at the time.

And said, you guys, you don't want to go this direction.

Because you know what it's like?

It's like you're flying out of LAX and you're one degree off, and you'll still hit Catalina.

You can still land that plane in Catalina.

What's Catalina?

Like 10 or 12 miles off the coast, or maybe even less than that.

It's really close.

You know, but if you're one degree off, you're gonna miss Hawaii by hundreds of miles.

So be careful with one degree off.

Does that make sense?

And so we spend time in God's word and we grow from God's word and we occupy till he comes.

So I want to challenge you here as we close that church, you might consider this week and the next and until November 8th.

From now until November 8th, prayer walking.

Prayer walking.

Take a territory, take a neighborhood, take an area, prayer walk that area.

Pray for revival, pray for awakening.

Gave you that list of six things to pray last week.

They'll be out there in the lobby again.

Pick those up.

We have a prayer guide from Every Home for Christ that Dick in his ministry in Acts Global that Marcus is a part of and his team is a part of.

They're praying for 40 days.

That's what we can do that makes a difference.

You've been listening to The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.

We hope you have been blessed by today's message.

To connect with us further, visit theroad.org.

If you are walking through a difficult time, we want to pray for you.

Go to theroad.org, click on the ministries tab, and go to our prayer page to send us your prayer request.

Thanks again for tuning in today, and be sure to listen to the next edition of The Road with Pastor Teacher Steve Holt.