Shabbat shalom kol beit Yisra'el and Mishpachah as we transition from our 5-week study of the Heavenly Throne Room of the Book of Revelation, chapters 4 and 5, and turn our gaze 'down' to the earth itself and to chapters 6-16. Rather than plunge straight into the text over the next 5 or so months, I think it's important that we step back and survey the panorama of the next 11 chapters so that we have some idea of the parameters of this large chunk of text.

First of all I have to say that this is my third attempt at doing this, not because I was defeated spiritually the first time round but because in a moment of exhaustion I accidentally deleted about 6-7 hours' of work. Each of these sermons takes about 12-15 hours to prepare. So I had to write a completely new sermon early this morning at the crack of dawn. Then all the work I did early this morning was lost too when my computer crashed after a night of multiple cramps and sleeplessness followed by a man writing to me and accusing me of being a heretic without saying what my alleged 'heresies' were...or who he was. People! Considering the physical struggle it is for me these days to prepare this material for you, I have to say I was utterly demoralised after the first débâcle. This series has been the most challenging and fearful material I have ever prepared in my life - fearful because I am genuinely afraid to get so important a subject wrong and so inadvertantly mislead anyone. It isn't worth my life to do that. I have been aware since the beginning of this project that Yahweh wanted a fresh approach to this end-times book and for me to be as little influenced by the interpretations of others from both the past and the present. May I say, though, that I am truly grateful for all the suggestions and recommendations made to me by several of you as there are some great exegetes out there whom I will get around, eventually, to listening to and acknowledging; but at the same time there is far too much eisegetical material created by those who are led by their feelings and impulses which are frequently not the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit).

So it's perhaps worth my reminding everyone, before we resume, what our methodology is here, because what Bible students don't always realise is they're not conscious of the processes involved in the way they interpret scripture - we all follow (consciously or unconsciously) a method of interpretation that is based on many initial assumptions, few of which people bother to examine or test. All the ideas that pop into our head are not necessarily, or even usually, the spontaneous, supernatural activity of the Ruach haQodesh (Holy Spirit) no matter how much we want to believe that to be so and no matter how much we have convinced ourselves that what we're receiving is pure revelation because of what we believe about the nature of personal inspiration.

The interpreting process is based on a number of important assumptions. For most, these are not usually objective. How many people do you know (and you may possible be one of them) who assume that they are 'Spirit-filled' (because they speak in tongues, for instance) and therefor conclude they must be inspired even though so-called 'Spirit-filled', tongue-speaking people frequently contradict one another when they analyse the Bible. This alone should be a warning light, so demonstrating that there are other elements at work in the processes that are going on in their heads. However, equally, there are many believers who are not the least bit phased by contradictions as they ought to be. Many, rather, are 'filled with spirits' which they little understand because they have uncritically received the impartation or laying-on-of-hands of some charismatic minister or some pulpit-preacher's teaching without doing their biblical homework. Such often need deliverance, not an audience eager to have their ears tickled by some new-fangled prophecy conjured up in the echo-chamber of their own heads. It is both foolhardly and very dangerous to uncritically equate and accept either emotions or thoughts, that pop into our heads and hearts, as being 'God' speaking. How do you know? And frankly most believers are either too scared or too lazy to put their thinking processes and feelings under the microscope. You see, there is always an underlying philosophy that lies behind any thinking process, and motives that lie behind any stream of emotions, that are quite separate from what the Bible says. And most of the mumbo-jumbo coming out of the charismatic movement is lawless devilry. Check first of all to see what Yahweh has clearly stated in His Davar (Word) and if He says that speaking unintelligible nonsense if profitless, or the heart is deceptive, believe Him. He isn't giving an opinion but stating a fact.

Like it or not the Bible is three to four thousand years old (a century short of 2,000 in the case of the Book of Revelation) and the world the ancient authors lived in, and the linguistic devices they employed, are very different from our own. This is why I insist that we be good historians, detectives and linguists. History shapes the way we think and the way we interpret and the Book of Revelation is unlike anything that is produced today. It uses religious language that was commonly understood back in John's day which is largely meaningless to a 21st century audience. I would hazzard a guess that even after five weeks of intense study of the Throne Room that most of us still have little to no idea what the four living creatures were, and still are, because we're still not accustomed to thinking in this kind of symbolic, pictorial language. The idea that there are higher dimensional supernatural creatures with four faces, three pairs of wings and thousands of eyes, freaks most people out. And if you think chapters 4 and 5 were hard enough, wait until you get into chapters 6 through 16!

I don't want to waste my time and yours talking about something we don't properly understand and in consequence are more than likely to misrepresent. There's enough false prophecy and teaching going around for me to add any more to the confusion. We have to be accurate or shut up. I try to be careful and thorough because I won't get a second chance at this. I know - and that's partly why I approach this subject with such fear and trembling - that I will not be making a systematic study of this material again in this life and where there are gaps in my understanding, I am leaving for the last generation to fill in. So I am treating this like a journey to the moon - one wrong calculation could send our minds hurtling into the abyss of deep spiritual space. I meet enough lost souls as it is, who have put all their eggs into the 'rapture basket', for example, who live under the delusion that Yahweh will spare them from the tribulation spoken of in Revelation by whisking them away to some Disneyland-in-space and who therefore adamantly refuse to prepare themselves and their families, or warn their neighbours - physically - for the world of privation that lies ahead - I don't want to contribute to their numbers! Rather, I want to wake them up by throughly informing them of what I know. I want to prepare believers for REALITY coupled to real HOPE; and the world described by the Book of Revelation is stark reality that we are about to be immersed into, whether we like it or not. We are walking into the heart of prophecy and making history right now.

So to remind everyone, especially those who are joining us for the first time today, I teach and preach what Pauline scholar N.T.Wright, who invented the term, calls Critical Realism. Critical Realism combines professional scholarship with supernaturalism, meaning we must use our heads critically, engage our hearts compassionately, as well as be spiritually open to the supernatural activity of Yahweh's Ruach (Spirit). We have a threefold responsibility there. We are very cautiously continuationists in this ministry, not cessationists, meaning we believe that all the spiritual gifts that were present in the first generation of Messianic believers are available to us too but only as, and when, Yahweh wills them. However, that doesn't mean there aren't active and widespread counterfeits in the churches, because there are, and it is all these false manifestations which tend to scare Christians into becoming cessationists - those who believe the major gifts like revelation, prophecy and the supernatural ability to speak unlearned foreign languages, ceased when the apostles died, John being supposedly the last. Professional scholarship and supernaturalism are key - one without the other is potentially lethal, spiritually-speaking - and may result in either blind, spiritless intellectualism and/or blind subjectivity. The latter is known as existentialism ('what you experience must be true') and along with cold, spiritless and heartless reason, has been the ruin of so many people, for both are forms of idolatry, a kind of of self-worship, whether it be worship of what is produced by our heads or worship of what is produced by our hearts, which we then falsely label as 'the Spirit'. Critical realism gives us important checks and balances so that we don't get carried away by our thoughts masquerading as the voice of Yahweh or by our feelings masquerading as the Ruach Elohim (Spirit of God). So take a look at our comparitively new Critical Realism and Phronema websites for orientation if you're new here.

So my assumption, which I believe to be sound, is that a man's knowledge of the real world is always framed by his worldview, of which stories (meta-narratives) are an essential part, and the Book of Revelation is full of meta-narratives of the most unusual, and to some, bizzare kind. We will not, as some scholars and scriptorians do, throw up our hands and despair of ever understanding them, because Yahweh does not give believers the unintelligible but He does ensure that it is unintelligible to Satan, demons, and to those humans who are not only unregenerate but who refuse to grapple with historical and rpesent reality. This means that we, 2,000 years down the line, have to do a lot more work to understand Revelation than the first generation of believers did. We have, therefore, to become historians as well as scriptorians, and in case you haven't noticed, there has been a sudden upsurge of interest in history on the internet. The number of history channels on YouTube, for instance, has been growing exponentially, which I attribute to Yahweh wanting mankind to reject illusion and embrace reality, however brutal or unpleasant it may be. And the next 11 chapters of the Book of Revelation are unquestionably harsh and brutal as the toppling of all intractable dictatorships tends to be.

Yahweh has devoted half this book to Satan's Kingdom, how it's going to evolve, and what He's going to finally do about it in the end. One of the reasons people skip this book is because, like ostriches with their heads burried in the sand, they don't want to deal with reality or with anything negative. Wake up! You have to know something about your enemy in order to defeat him in your life and to protect the lives of your loved ones - this is why Yahweh gave us this prophetic material. Who do you suppose He inspired John to write it for? Specialists in the prophetic, for ministers only, or for all believers? As I said at the beginning of the course, this is a 'peoples' book'. Now, personally, I would rather give my exclusive attention to the Kingdom of our Elohim (God), and come the Millennium I will, but I have people - family and brethren in the Gospel - I am responsible for, to protect and inform. That is why I immerse myself in such things as Revelation 6-16 and why I have called this two-part overview, Satan on Earth, because he is most definitely down here and is currently its lord for now. That's reality and I want us to know how to live in, negociate our way through it, and live victoriously in that reality. Don't ignore it until it is too take for you to proactively respond when it's pressing a dagger to your throat. If you'd rather live in cloud-cuckooland - in a fantasy world - and choose to either ignore reality and slip into an infantile mindset that elevates gibberish to divine language, and hope that you'll be wisked away in some make-believe fairyland tale because you're 'so much better' than other believers who are going to be 'left behind', then I can't help you and you will gain nothing from these ongoing studies. News flash: it was Noah and his family who were 'left behind' - the unbelieving and the wicked were the ones 'whisked away' in death by the flood waters, only this time round it will be by fire, not water, that does its work of separation. So we aim to be a 'left behind' remnant in an Ark as Noah was...an Ark that passes unharmed through the fire so that we can carry on working for our Heavenly Father down here until Messiah returns.

I'd like to invite everyone to read through chapters 6-16, preferably in one sitting - it should take you about an hour - and to try and get an overall perspective. I'm including a chart consisting of three sets of seven images, which I'll have up on the screen next time we go through them. I hope it will help you remember the 21 different prophetic elements or scenes of these chapters. And if you genuinely can't manage to read 11 chapters (you don't have to analyse anything, just enter the storyline, sense the phronema, watch, and listen), at the very least meditate on the chart. Ask Yahweh to show you any prophetic patterns (see the Tavnith website) - note especially the link betweern the 7th item of each series. Don't at this stage be too concerned about whether anything has been fulfilled or not, or is being fulfilled now, even though I'm sure many of you will have definitive views already. Just be observers, as John was.

• 1. White horse - military aggression
• 2. Red horse - bloodshed
• 3. Black horse - famine
• 4. Pale Green/Blanched/Pallid/Sickly-looking horse - disease, epidemics

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• 5. Persecution & prayer
• 6. Tremour & terror

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• 7. Silence in heaven, listening to prayers which are then answered in a final catastrophe: a severe earthquake

• 1. Scorched earth
• 2. Polluted sea
• 3. Contaminated water
• 4. Reduced sunlight

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• 5. Insects and plague (for five months)
• 6. Oriental invasion (200 million army)

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• 7. The Kingdom comes, the world is taken over by Yahweh & Yah'shua (Jesus) after a severe earthquake

• 1. Boils on the skin
• 2. Blood in the sea
• 3. Blood from the springs
• 4. Burning by the sun

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• 5. Darkness
• 6. Armageddon

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• 7. Hailstorm (OB 368:11-12) and severe earthquake, leading to international collapse

A final thought before we end today as we wrestle with the thought as to what our present biblical studies mean to us. First, the words of William Temple, who was the Anglican Archbishop of York at the time, later to become the Archbishop of Canterbury (1942-44), to have in the back of your mind as we work our way through Revelation 6-16:

"The truth of things is what they are in the mind of God (Elohim), and it is only when we act according to the mind of God (Elohim) that we are acting in accordance with the truth (emet), in accordance with reality. Everything else is making a mistake" [1}.

Remember that what you are reading, seeing and hearing in the Apocalypse is the mind of Elohim (God) and that it's describing reality even if the language may seem baffling at first. Finally, the words of the late theologian William Barclay, a minister in the Church of Scotland, whose New Testament translation I sometimes cite here, who said this which I hope will both get you thinking and inspire you to work harder at thinking more:

"There is a certain paradox in the human situation. God (Elohim) gave man a mind, and it is man's duty to use that mind to think to the very limits of human thought. But it is also true that at times when the mind can only go so far, and when that limit is reached, all that is left is to accept and to adore" [2].

Many times we may find ourselves in that position as we get into the heart of the Book of Revelation. It will take us to the very limits of both our thinking abilies and our faith. Yet we must remember it is the mind of Elohim (God) and it is reality to which we, of necessity, must adjust. We cannot be allowed to force the Book of Revelation to wrap itself around our own flawed thinking and, indeed, at times, faithlessness. There will always be things beyond our ken, our ability to know, and at such moments we will be challenged to either hang on or abandon the faith. For me, I can only hang on in such moments, until I am further illuminated, because, seriously, what's the alternative? Judaism? Islam? Buddhism? The New Age? Occultism? Atheism?

Yah'shua is still Yah'shua - Jesus is still Jesus - His resurrection is, to my mind, undeniable, His love greater than any love that ever was or will be. And He's alive and available! What a safety-net! When the mind reaches its limits, the heart must take over. (Ideally, of course, it should be working in sync with the mind all along). The poet Shelly, whose memorial still lies in my college in Oxford University, and is one of its central attractions for visitors, said that "every heart contains perfection's germ" [3], and who else but Christ could possibly match that Perfection in the wholeness of His character, love and life? It is to Him, the Living One, the Lion-Lamb, that we must always fall back to when our minds reach their limits of comprehension, because philosophy and theology, like science, cannot answer all questions. The Book of Revelation, like the rest of the New Testament, is in any case all about Him. It's His Testament. Everything points to Him for He alone is our hope and eternal future.

Until next week, then, when we'll also be assembling for Shavu'ot and Rosh Chodesh, may the Master of Life bless you and keep you! Amen.

Endnotes

[1] William Temple, Basic Convictions (Hamish Hamilton: 1937), p.78
[2] William Barclay, The Letter to the Romans (The Saint Andrew Press: 1969), p.167
. Barclay represents for me, personally, the 'acceptable' side of liberal Christianity, at least as it was over half a century ago. He believed in universal reconciliation, and was a pacifist, calling war 'mass murder', which I would go along with most of the time. Alas, like most liberals, he was an evolutionist, which we are not, nor can we ever be.
[3] Percy Byssbe Shelley, Queen Mab, v.146, in Thomas Hutchinson (ed.), The Complete Works of Percy Byssbe Shelley (OUP, Ocford: 1935), p.772

Acknowledgements

[1] Tom Wright, Revelation for Everyone - The New Testament for Everyone Commentary Series, Vol.19 (SPCK, London: 2011)
[2] E.W.Bullinger*, Number in Scripture (Kregel Publications, Grand Rapids, Michigan: 1967)
[3] E.W.Bullinger*, Commentary on Revelation (Kregel Classics, Grand Rapids, Michihan: 1984)
[4] E.W.Bullinger*, The Companion Bible being the Authorized Verion of 1611 with Structures & Critical Explanatory Notes (Samuel Bagster & Sons Ltd., London: 1974), pp.1883-1914
[5] David H. Stern, Jewish New Testament Commentary (JNT Publications, Clarksville, Maryland: 1992)

*E.W.Bullinger was a brilliant Anglican clergyman and scholar whose works merit careful study by serious students of the Bible. He was, however, seriously in error in at least three main areas, namely, (1) he believed the 'Church' has been raptured before the Book of Revelation opens, (2) he believed that the 7 churches in Revelation 2-3 are 7, literal Jewish churches or assemblies yet to come, and (3) he believed in a pre-tribulation, pre-millennial rapture.