Sunday School | Revelation Part I

You guys, we're very close to the end of a very long journey. We're in Revelation. Praise the holy name. We are finally here. For the last five months or so, we have been looking at every book in the New Testament, basically one a week. A couple of them got two. Hebrews got three. And we are finally ready to take on Revelation.

So I'm gonna tell you, I'll give you a couple of disclaimers here. You'll need one of these. I think this would be helpful to you to have this. Bob Blecksmiths is running around with them. If you didn't grab one, get one.

I had every expectation that our guide on Revelation was going to be one of the big ones. We did like four-pagers for Romans, for Hebrews, a couple of books that got the long ones. And I was certain that's what I was going to do for Revelation. But I didn't. I wanted to keep it tight because everything I looked at—everybody—there's a lot of people that have tried to do summaries of Revelation. And when I've read their summaries and it's all over, I'm like, well, I don't know anything more than I did when I started. It's still just as bizarre and weird and confusing.

Even the great and magnificent Bible Project—I love those guys. Everything they do, I think they do with excellence. I'm a huge fan. I don't think I've literally ever disagreed with them. I think they're just so on point. But their Revelation got—I'm like, okay buddy, but it's still just horrifically complicated.

So I decided to try to make it tighter. And there's still a lot of words on this, okay? But it's tighter.

The second thing that I tried to do differently is weird. If you look at any one of the other twenty-seven of these guides, they're just filled with Scripture. Pretty much if you look at any of these summary guides, there's not that many words from me. It's just "here's what the text says." And I tried to organize the text and show you how this is leading to the text.

That is not true for the Revelation guide. And I think the reason I did that is I think that if we just quoted Revelation one and Revelation two and here's this really important passage in Revelation 12, you'd still be just as confused as you were. Because John's words really need explanation. You just look at Romans and see what it says. But Revelation doesn't work that way because it has certain rules.

So rather than do that, at least on the front, we're going to look at the text this morning. Not next week because it's Easter, and then the week after that we'll finish up, I hope, Revelation. But by just the nature of this very unusual book, the reason we saved it to the end is it just takes explanation. It's not intuitive. It's not obvious.

The Rules of Revelation

So what we're going to do chiefly today is I want to walk you through kind of the basic rules of Revelation rather than just tell you what it means. Although I'll offer you some thoughts in that direction. I want to try to give you the couple of tools—the keys you need on your key ring if you're gonna make sense of this book.

First thing to know, and I think that might be a helpful place to start, is that Revelation is confusing for a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is that it's actually a braiding of three different genres. When we say genre, a genre is a style of writing. You would read a poem different than you would read an AP news bulletin, right, because they're different genres.

The genre of Revelation is that it doesn't have one genre. It really has three genres. And the rules are overlapping and they're somewhat confusing. The way that you might, at what moment, which set of rules you're going to use can be a little bit confusing.

The first thing that I would say to you is that Revelation, and maybe the least known, is that Revelation is an epistle. It's a letter. And we've said several times, do you remember what is the particular characteristic of an epistle, of a letter, that we must always bear in mind? It's true in Romans, it's true in Galatians, it's true in Revelation.

Gil?

Occasional.

Occasional. Bonus points for Gil. Meaning it responds to an occasion. Probably the biggest mistake—one of the top two mistakes that people make when they approach Revelation—is they forget it's an epistle and they don't consider that it was written to a particular occasion. It was written to an audience.

Just like Romans was written to the church at Rome and Thessalonians was written to the church at Thessalonica who were real people facing real challenges, Revelation was written to a particular audience facing real things. What tends to be the case, very many interpreters of Revelation say, "Yeah, yeah, so what about that? It was written to The United States Of America in 1987. It was written to The United States Of America in 2023 and it's really about Saddam Hussein." Whatever. We'll just leapfrog two thousand years of history and say, what does it mean right here, right now? And you'll never know what it means right here, right now unless you learn what did it mean right there, right then. It was written to a particular group of people who were facing real circumstances and we have to understand what was going on.

So it's an epistle, it's occasional, and it helps us to think about the original audience as we figure out what it also means for us.

Number two: What's the second genre? It's an epistle, what else is it? Prophecy. When we come to prophecy, we also have a problem with prophecy because we have this mistaken understanding that all prophecy is prediction. That the word prophecy is basically a synonym for prediction. And that's not true. The prophets did foretell things that are yet to come, and there is that to be sure in Revelation. There's plenty of stuff that has a future or at least had a future fulfillment. But prophets also are talking to a particular audience right now saying, "Hey, hey, knock it off." So the prophetic nature of Revelation is both predictive—it foretells and it forthtells. It was predicting some things for the future, but it was also saying some things for the present—again, for the present of the original audience.

So it's an epistle, meant something to somebody. It's a prophecy, has all those attributes of prophecy. And then the third thing—and the thing that we know the best because it's literally the name of the book—what's the third genre? Apocalypse. And the word apocalypse literally means revelation. It means the unveiling. It means there's some secret thing that you don't know and I'm gonna lift the lid and uncover it or reveal it, unveil it so that you'll know what it is.

This is what completely fries our brains because we don't know what to do with apocalypse. Because if apocalyptic literature has any single attribute, it's that it's weird. So when we come to this book, we have to think, okay, what are the rules of apocalyptic literature? Who is the original audience? What's the prophetic nature of it? That's a lot that you have to bear.

The Rules of Apocalyptic Literature

Let's do the rules of apocalypse real quick. What's the number one rule of apocalyptic literature? It's not literal. If Tim LaHaye is anywhere in the world listening to me right now, it's not supposed to be taken literally. How many of you were raised on kind of a Left Behind Tim LaHaye kind of vibe? Many, many people have been deeply influenced by a particular hermeneutic, a particular set of rules of how we read this book. And the fundamental thing that I think those guys just missed is they're far too literal. It's not meant to be taken literal. It's metaphorical language, it's figurative, it's image based. You could say it's encoded. But it's not literal. I know some of you are like, "Oh, so you're not a Christian." No. That is not the case. But I'm telling you it's not literal. It's true. It's meaningful. It's real. We should attend to it. But it is not literal.

Number two: The second thing that I think is crucially important if you're going to make sense of Revelation is that there is an answer key. There is a secret decoder ring. These lists of images and all this vivid fantastical weirdness—there is a point where you can go back and you can cross reference. Here's the image. What's the meaning of the image? And that decoder ring is what? It is the Old Testament.

If you read Revelation and you don't have an open Old Testament next to you, you're probably going to get lots and lots and lots of stuff wrong. But if you are steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures, and you recognize, "Oh, oh, I know what he's alluding to. I know exactly what he's talking about," and you can go find the original place that he is lifting that imagery from, and then take not just the words, but the meaning of the words in the Old Testament and plug that in, now you're way, way, way more likely to make sense of this book. It's not literal. The answer key, the secret decoder ring is the Old Testament.

Understanding Revelation's Structure

Revelation is not one straight chronology from chapter one to chapter twenty-two. We have a tendency to think that if you're reading a novel, the stuff that happens in chapter seventeen probably happens after chapter sixteen. That's a reasonable assumption, but it's mistaken in this case.

John is drawing very heavily on Old Testament prophetic and apocalyptic writings—chiefly Daniel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and maybe the Psalms. But those prophetic apocalyptic books are not giving you a straight chronology. There is repetition, or what we would call recapitulation, where they will cover a time period and then go back to the beginning and cover the same time period again. Then they go back to the beginning and the next set of chapters covers that same time period.

There's a great deal of disagreement about how many times John recapitulates himself, where he stops, and where he starts. I'm going to offer you a framing on the back page—not today—but we'll look at that in a little bit. I'll show you an example that I think should be convincing. If you disagree with me and think it's straight chronology, I'm going to ask you to explain Revelation 12. I think it's the most obvious place where we hit reset on the clock again. But it's okay if we disagree about these things. I have lots of people that I disagree with, and you may disagree with me. You can disagree with each other. We can love each other, we can be kind to each other, and that's totally fine. I'll do my best to tell you what I think is accurate, the best way to read this. But I could be wrong about any number of things. This is a magnificently complicated book.

God's Revelation Through John's Voice

Yes, this is God revealing this to John, and John is telling us what he saw. That's accurate. John isn't making this up. But that's true in all sixty-six books of the Bible. What Paul says in Romans is what God has revealed to him, but it's communicated in the voice and style and language of Paul. What God reveals in Zephaniah is a revelation from the Lord to Zephaniah, but Zephaniah records it in his voice, language, and style. The same thing is true of Revelation.

God gave John a vision, similar to how we have dreams. Sometimes we have dreams and think, "I don't know how in the world I came up with that because I never would have thought of any of those things if I were awake." There's something weird about it—who is the script writer of my dreams? Of course the answer is me, but it's still weird because I never would have thought of that. There's the event of the vision you're having in the dream. I'm not saying all your dreams are divinely inspired. It's an analogy.

There's the vision of your dream, and then you turn to someone and say, "I had the craziest dream," and you try to describe it. Your description of that dream is necessarily your words. John had a vision, but he wasn't given a dictation. He had a vision, and then he says, "Alright, let me try to explain this to you." He tells us what he saw. He's telling us what he saw, what God revealed to him, but he's using his own words, his own language, his own knowledge. He's absolutely relying on his incredibly rich, deep, and comprehensive understanding of the Old Testament.

John knows the meanings of his own words because he is drawing on this deep well of understanding of the Hebrew scriptures.

Finding Parallels in Scripture

For understanding apocalyptic scriptures and this theme, a good book in the Old Testament would be Isaiah or the minor prophets. Micah is a great example where they definitely use strange imagery—like likening people to a lion, an ox, a sheep.

We're not those things and yet we're supposed to take some symbolism from those. Chris is asking: are there other books if Revelation is the ultimate apocalyptic vision, are there other books that are maybe a little bit shallower end of the pool? Could you learn apocalyptic?

I'd say Zechariah, which we just finished, is filled with this very symbolic language. Isaiah and Daniel—well, I'd say Daniel might be a good place to start. The first six chapters of Daniel are very much the shallow end of the pool, and then chapter seven on, it's like, welcome to the freak show. Everything just gets so weird.

But I think reading and understanding Daniel—and John's gonna rely heavily on Daniel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah. So any of those books, I think, would be kind of what Galatians is to Romans. I think those books are in some way a mini—well, Zechariah is more like a mini Revelation, sort of. But he mines Isaiah, Daniel, and the Psalms very heavily.

Alright, so let's go back up to the top. We'll look at a couple of texts. Let me show you some things. It's not literal. I gave you an example of this in 5:8.

The Answer Key

Overwhelmingly, the answer key is going to be the Old Testament, but from time to time, the answer key is in the text itself. He'll do these things where he will say:

Each one had a harp, and they were holding golden bowls full of incense — Revelation 5:8

And you're like, well, I don't know what that means. And then his next line is: "which are the prayers of the saints?" You're like, okay, great. You just explained yourself.

He will often use this very simple formula: X is Y. When he says X is Y, X is always the image and Y is always the explanation of the image. So he'll say the golden bowls full of incense are the prayers of the saints. The white linens that they're dressed in is the righteous deeds of the saints. The lake of fire is the second death. When you watch him do X is Y, he's saying here's the image, here's what it means.

He does it over and over again, but not nearly as often as we wish he would. Usually he's going to be like, go look it up—he'll give you a hint about what he's talking about. But sometimes you'll get that straight thing, and usually it's weird. What he's admitting there is that it's symbolic language.

Not only does he admit that it's symbolic language, not only does he use the Old Testament in those ways, but he will often combine images in such a way that defy you taking him literally. He will mash images together, and you're like, well how could that be? And the answer is, it can't be, because I wasn't trying to communicate it literally.

The City in a Dress

Maybe the classic example of this is going to be at the very end of the book. We're going to see the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. Right? It's a city. And you might wonder, well how does a city descend? Like what does that look like? Is it like Manhattan has been uprooted and is coming down, can kind of see the pipes sticking out of the bottoms of the city?

Then right as you're like, well there literally is going to be this city coming down and there will be skyscrapers and some land mass, then he's like, yeah, you still think that? Well, how about this? What does he do to jack up your literal vision of a city? He puts it in a dress. The city is coming down like a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. And so now your vision of Manhattan is wrapped in lace, and you're like, I don't even know what's going on here.

That's what's supposed to happen. He's saying, don't take me literally. He's communicating something true, something real, but he's doing so with images. We're going to watch him do that. As you go through the book, be mindful of the times that you just kind of forget that it's metaphor, it's image—you start being overly literal and think, okay, stop, stop, stop. Go find the answer key. What's the passage to which he is referring?

Don't Get Stuck in the Debates

People get so invested in what they believe Revelation is. A lot of churches have split and a lot of people have forgotten who they are arguing over what Revelation means. And we're not gonna do that.

I think that's made a lot of leaders afraid to quote Revelation, because it just almost comes with a rail host up. You say, we're gonna deal with Revelation next week, and up goes the wall. Because we've all got our favorite little hobby horses and things.

But this is one of the things where, again, as I said, we can disagree. There may be something that's really important to you. I'm sure I have already in this room stepped on things that are very important to you.

And that's okay. And maybe you're right and I'm wrong. But if you think that's the case, let's figure it out. Let's bring evidence. Let's try to understand the text.

Here's an image. This is a very vivid image in Revelation 14:8. John depicts judgment. There's a lot of judgment in the book of Revelation. He depicts judgment with this image:

the smoke of their torment rises forever and ever

If you don't know that you're not supposed to take it literally, you read that and you may not even consider what it means because you think you already know what it means. It just means what it says. They're words. But if you remember the rule that it's images that he's drawing from the Old Testament, you're going to have to think: okay, where in the Old Testament do I see smoke rising? Is that ever the case? Is that an image? Because if I can find anywhere in the Old Testament that you see smoke rising, and you go look at that, and you understand the context and the meaning of the image in that case, then that's going to help you make sense of it by the time you get to Revelation 14.

Now I can see nobody is looking at me, which means you're reading, which means you're cheating. But if you didn't know that, does anybody know where do we see a column of smoke rising in the Old Testament? I'll tell you, there are two places where that happens, and they're both describing the same sort of event. I'm afraid to guess. Okay, that's good. You don't even have to guess because I wrote it down.

Isaiah 34 and the Destruction of Edom

The primary place he's drawing from is Isaiah 34. So you just turn in your Bible, you go back to Isaiah 34. Isaiah 34, God is describing the obliteration of Edom. By the way, there's an entire book in your Old Testament that is entirely about the destruction of Edom. There's a book that's like Edom is dead. Do you remember what it is? It's Obadiah. If you read Obadiah, Obadiah is about Edom getting wiped out. But Isaiah 34 is also about Edom getting wiped out. And in Isaiah 34, which John loves, he says:

Edom's streams will be turned into pitch, her dust into burning sulfur. Her land will become blazing pitch. It will not be quenched night and day. Its smoke will rise forever. From generation to generation, it will lie desolate. No one will ever pass through it again.

When John writes Revelation 14, there is a 100% chance that he was alluding to Isaiah 34. And so if you want to understand what he meant in Revelation 14, you've got to go understand what Isaiah meant in 34. And you bring not only the words. When you pull the words out, when you pull a plant out, the words come and the roots come with it. When you grab the words, you're getting the meaning of those words. John is grabbing the meaning of the judgment against Edom, and he's implanting that in Revelation 14.

And in case you want to be really kind of crazy about it, when Isaiah wrote Isaiah 34, and he talked about their smoke rising forever, he was making an allusion to something that had already happened earlier. Remember I'm saying Isaiah is like training ground? Isaiah was playing the same game that John is playing, and he was alluding to something else. So can you think of an even earlier column of smoke that rises up? Sodom. And now we really have gotten to the end of this line.

Genesis 19: The Archetype of Judgment

If you go back to Genesis 19, this is the archetypical picture of judgment. If there's any picture of judgment in the Bible, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is ground zero. It gets alluded to over and over again. At the very end of that judgment, Genesis 19, the description is designed to remind you of something. It's supposed to remind you of Genesis 19. Let me read it:

The Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah from the Lord out of the heavens. And thus He overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot's wife looked back and she became a pillar of salt. Early the next morning, Abraham got up and returned to the place where he had stood before the Lord. He looked down toward Sodom and Gomorrah, toward all the land of the plain, and he saw dense smoke rising from the land like smoke from a furnace. — Genesis 19:24-28

That is ground zero for the image that gets picked up in Isaiah 34 and then carried forward into Revelation 14, and, for being honest, also into Revelation 19. All of those places are pearls on a string saying the exact same thing. That's just how the book works. They're dead. They're dead. They're dead. They're dead. It's an image that means something. And John is grabbing the Old Testament words, the Old Testament meaning, and applying it into this context. And if you don't know how to speak Old Testament, you could misconstrue what it is that he's saying.

That's the game that you want to play when you're reading every line. There are as many Old Testament allusions as there are verses. What is he saying? What is he drawing from? What did it mean there? That is the most important question you can ask. If you're instead reading Revelation through the lens of the New York Times, if you're instead reading Revelation through the lens of your exact historical moment, if this day is your answer key, you're going to get it wrong. You have to read it in light of the Old Testament or you don't have a chance.

Let me do one more. This is gonna be weirder. Go to Revelation 12. Revelation 12, I would suggest to you, is probably the most obvious and inarguable break in the chronology. So I'm trying to explain to you, it's not literal. The Old Testament is the answer key. Now we're gonna shift from that. We won't leave those behind, but I'm gonna add to it the added complexity that the timeline keeps getting reset over and over and over again.

So just listen to me reading here, Revelation 12:1-5.

A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet, and a crown of 12 stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven, an enormous red dragon with seven heads and 10 horns and seven crowns on his heads. His tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth so that he might devour her child the moment it was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter. — Revelation 12:1-5

Now, so much is going on in that passage, and we'll walk through it image by image, and I'll show you what to do with it. But just distill it down in a sentence, as tight as you can. What is that about? Say it loud, Gil. Birth of Christ. It is about the birth of Christ. Can you guys get behind that? This is John's birth narrative. We know Matthew's birth narrative, we know Luke's birth narrative. John doesn't have a birth narrative. John begins like, "In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God," and he never has Jesus in a manger. John's Gospel never does that. He saves his birth narrative for Revelation 12, this is it.

I always thought that all of our little manger scenes—do you guys have a creche at your house? You've got like, you know, there's little Jesus and a bunch of shepherds and some wise men, even though they're not gonna get there for a couple years. And then a lamb and a goat and a dragon. Right? You should all have a dragon waiting there to eat this kid as soon as he's born because that's John's birth narrative.

Now, it is John's birth narrative. It is the birth of Christ. One second, I'm come right back to you, Marty. But what I want you to ask is, if he's born in chapter 12, what the heck happened in chapters eleven and ten and nine and eight and seven and six and five and four? You see what I'm saying? This is an unmistakable moment where in the middle of the book, in chapter 12, he's going back to the beginning of the timeline. It's not a straight chronology. It can't be a straight chronology. You understand what I'm saying?

So this is not the only time he's going to do this, but it's probably the most unmistakable time where John says, I'm not doing this in one straight chronology. Because chapter 12, the baby is born. If you wrote a biography about yourself and we didn't get to your birth till chapter 12, you'd be like, what was all that? Okay. Marty?

My point is that it is certainly the birth of Jesus, but it even goes well before that with the fall of Satan. Yes, okay. And so he's gonna shove so much in here. And yes, so it's not a simple straight chronology. So you got that? Bob? It does. How about Joseph's dream and the nation of Israel? Okay, so Bob, you're too smart, so hang on. You're getting ahead of us.

So it is the birth narrative of Christ. There we go. But it is the birth narrative of Christ with so many images. And now we're gonna try to figure out what those images represent.

So this woman that's going to give birth to him, rough guess, who is the woman? Okay, Mary. Good guess. Wrong, you literalists. Okay? It's not Mary. We think it's Mary because we're like, who else is it going to be? I mean, it's his mom. Okay, but he's saying something else. So let's learn about the woman. This woman is, and I quote, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and a crown of 12 stars on her head. What? The 12 stars of the tribes of Israel. Oh, wait, who said that? Robin. Okay. The 12 stars of Israel, but I'm not quite sure about the sun. Okay. Robin is saying the 12 stars are the 12 tribes of Israel. I don't know how she knows that, but we'll find out. And she doesn't know what to do with the sun and the moon. What's up with that? So, Kelly? They remind you of Joseph's dream. It does remind you of Joseph's dream because it's talking about Joseph's dream. Okay? It's Genesis, so when you read that phrase, and you're like, sun, moon, stars, John, what are you talking about? Genesis 37, right? And this I'm quite certain is where Bob was going as well. So if you go back to Genesis 37, this is how you have to read this book. It's why it's a laborious process. You go back to Genesis 37 and listen to what he's going to say.

Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more. He said to them, "Listen to this dream I had. We were binding sheaves of grain out in the field, and suddenly my sheaf rose up and stood upright, while your sheaves gathered around mine and bowed down to it." — Genesis 37:5-7

What do you think that dream means? I'm just so bad idea. And his brothers knew exactly what it meant. Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us? And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said. And then in verse 9:

"Listen," he said, "I had another dream and this time the sun and the moon and 11 stars were bowing down to me." — Genesis 37:9

And when he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebuked him and said, "What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you?" And his brothers were jealous of him, but his father kept the matter in mind.

So, Robin, if the 11 stars, but really the 12 because Joseph counts, are the tribes of Israel, who are the sun and the moon? It's Jacob. It would be Rachel or—well, there you go. Right? We've multiple moons, it appears. Right? Because it is the mother and the father of this family, which is to say, the sun and the moon and the 12 stars, what is it? What are they? As an aggregate whole, what is it? The patriarchs. It's Israel, right? It's the patriarchs, it's the 12 tribes plus their parents, it's the whole thing, this is Israel. So the mother of Jesus, here back in Revelation, when it says:

A great and wondrous sign appeared in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars on her head. — Revelation 12:1

It's not Mary, it's Israel. Okay? Because it's not literal, it's a picture. Jesus is being born. He's being born of Israel, not just Mary. There's more going on here. He is God's obedient son. That's what John is beginning to say. And then he's going to keep going with a bunch of other weird stuff.

She was pregnant, she cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. — Revelation 12:2

Then we have another sign. Now we have an enormous red dragon with seven heads and 10 horns and seven crowns on his head. So let's stop there. When you read that, what does that mean? Don't worry about what it means. First ask the question, to what is John alluding? Who has these heads and crowns and all these horns? Where do we go? What is it? You got it, Taylor? You know? Daniel, what chapter? It's Daniel 7. And so when you read that, and then again, it's going to take you forever to get through Revelation. Now you're like, hang on a second Daniel, or hang on a second John, I gotta go look at what you're talking about. And in Daniel 7, he's going to describe this.

The Four Beasts of Daniel

Let's see, I probably should have looked this up myself. We'll start here with the four beasts. We'll go to Daniel 7:19:

"Then I wanted to know the meaning of the fourth beast, which was different from all the others and most terrifying with its iron teeth and its bronze claws, the beast that crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever was left. I also wanted to know about the 10 horns on its head and about the other horn that came up, before which three of them fell, the horn that looked more imposing than the others and had eyes and a mouth that spoke boastfully." — Daniel 7:19-20

And he goes into this whole fantastic passage describing this hideous beast with all these heads and horns and crowns. He had described it earlier in chapter seven, around verses seven and eight, and then he's going to unpack it. John is saying that as soon as Jesus was born of Israel—not of Mary, he's not denying Mary's birth, he's just not talking about it—as soon as this nation that we've been long waiting for to bring forth its Messiah, when it finally did, right there was all evil. And in fact, the primary reference of that dragon is not to Babylon or anybody else, it's primarily a reference to Pharaoh because Pharaoh himself was called a dragon. He is that great dragon that lies by the Nile in Ezekiel. So he's alluding to Ezekiel's use of Pharaoh. He's using Daniel's description essentially of the Babylonian-Roman wickedness that's yet to come. And John's saying, yeah, all of it, all of it. The evil empires that have governed the world in New York City and London, and Cairo, and Babylon, and Babel, they're all the same—that same wicked thing.

You might think, okay, well it's not Pharaoh, it's actually Nero. Or you might say it's Herod. You might say it's any of these. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, same difference. The whole thing, this wicked, multi-headed, evil thing, it was ready there to kill him. But it failed. And that's really the point of this.

As soon as he's born, look at it, as soon as he's born, another sign appeared. This enormous red dragon with seven heads, ten horns, seven crowns on its head. And it says, by the way, one more thing: his tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. What's that? It's not Isaiah, but it's a good guess. It's not Ezekiel. It's still Daniel, actually. It's Daniel eight. If you go to Daniel eight, that's an allusion to Daniel eight.

Out of them came another horn which started small but grew in power to the South and to the East and toward the beautiful land. It grew until it reached the host of heaven, and it threw some of the story house down to earth and trampled on them. — Daniel 8:9

He's picking up all of this, the meaning of these images from Daniel seven, from Daniel eight, from Genesis 37. And the whole picture is coming together. He's not making stuff up. They're all meaningful. You have to go back and look and see what they are.

And then here's what happens. His tail swoops a third of stars out of the sky, flings them into the earth, and the dragon stood in front of the woman. Look at what he compresses here.

The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth so that he might devour her child the moment he was born. — Revelation 12:4

Can you imagine, ladies, giving birth and there's something in the room waiting to kill your child the moment that he comes, and then he misses, waiting to devour the child the moment it was born.

She gave birth to a son, a male child who will rule the nations with an iron scepter. — Revelation 12:5

Though you don't have it here, you need to actually leave the paper and go into a real Bible. Look what happens next. Her child was snatched up to God and to His throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God.

Jesus has taken the entire life of Christ. They're there, they kill all the babies born in Bethlehem, they're trying to find Him, but He just slips the noose and is taken to heaven. He takes Jesus' thirty years of life, His three years of ministry, His death, His resurrection, and He compresses it into: and He was snatched up to heaven. There's a lot of compression going on in that story. But his point is that Satan came after him to destroy him, and he failed. That's the point of the story.

When the Messiah came, when Israel brought forth a nation, He not only did He escape the sword, but He is the fulfillment of another, yet another Old Testament passage, which is what He says here in verse five. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will, and I quote, rule all the nations with an iron scepter. What is he talking about right there? Psalm two. Psalm two. Not only does he not get defeated, but Psalm two is about the total conquest of the king. He has come to be king, and he will reign, he will win. He doesn't just not lose, but he wins and becomes king of all things.

Now, it's Palm Sunday, and so I gotta stop talking. This is what is gonna happen in the book of Revelation. Over and over, every verse you've got to stop and say, what are you talking about? What did it mean there? Because what it meant there is what it means here. Next week is Easter. We're not going to look at it.

The week after that, we're going to come back, we're going to flip the page. We'll talk about what is it all reduced down to, how do we walk through these things. If we can get it done in a week, we'll get it done. If not, we'll stretch it out two more weeks. We'll see.

But you might read Revelation over the next couple of weeks. It'll be baffling, but read it, have some images, ask the question, what's the Old Testament? Palm Sunday starts in one minute. Thanks for coming.