Church/ Philadelphia/ Philadelphians Overcomers

Let No Man Take Thy Crown

Church Future, Rev 3:11 May 15, 1998

The futuristic author Ray Bradbury once wrote, “I don’t write about the future, I try to prevent it.” For those of us who understand Revelation those words have a ridiculous ring to them. No one can prevent the future; and even if we could, why would we want to?

The future is written in stone, etched deeply into the granite words of Revelation. By studying Revelation we can witness the outcome. A rebellious, unholy world is burned with fire, judged by natural disasters and supernatural judgments from heaven. The saints are saved and the world is redeemed from the clutches of Satan and his henchmen. Good is separated from evil, the wicked are destroyed and the righteous are preserved forever. The end is perfect, fair, just and full of God’s mercy and love. Once you understand Revelation you can’t wait for the future to unfold. Each time a Christian opens his or her Bible they have an infallible guide to the future right under their nose in the form of the book of Revelation. The sad part is that most Christians have been sold a bill o’ goods that Revelation is too hard to understand, too scary, too controversial. They are told to leave its contents for the experts to decipher and debate. Revelation is meant for everyone. When studied methodically in the light of the rest of the Bible, Revelation is not that hard to understand; it is scary only to unbelievers; it is controversial only to ignorant naysayers.

Once a believer understands Revelation it becomes an exciting faith builder that impregnates them with hope and encourages them to live a godly life in this present evil world. This, in fact, is the object of studying it, that by understanding and keeping the words in Revelation we will live godly lives of faith and be accounted worthy to escape all the judgments that are recorded in its pages. But our reasons for studying Revelation are not all selfish. We also study the book of Revelation because, as Christians, we want to serve the Lord in these last days before Christ’s return. To serve the Lord well we must know where the battle is and how to fight it. One of the enemy’s grand strategies is to confuse and deceive believers so they expend all their energies fighting the wrong battles. Any military strategist knows that if he can get the opposing army fighting a diversionary skirmish then the real battle will go uncontested. Revelation is important in this regard. It shows Christians where the real battle is and what is at stake. It is a sad truth, however, that many who apparently have a heart to serve the Lord are, and remain, at cross-purposes with God and Christ due to their lack of understanding of Revelation. To fight the end-times battles of the Lord the Christian must know God’s plan from beginning to end. Revelation is, the picture window of God’s household giving the Christian a clear, unobstructed view of the end of God’s redemption plan.

Through this prophetic window, we not only see God’s plan but we also see His purposes and His ultimate goals. People often go wrong because they are deceived into thinking that God’s plan of redemption, as revealed in Revelation, should be exactly the way man would go about it. They attach meanings that aren’t there. They impose human notions of goodness on its interpretation that are not given in it. We must approach Revelation by trying to shake off our human presumptions and natural misconceptions about the way God ought to be. We have to take Isaiah’s advice who said, God’s ways are nothing like our ways. (Is. 55.8,9) We have to study Revelation knowing that its story is greater than anything we could conjure up in our fertile imaginations. It is God’s plan and we must be educated by Him concerning it. We have to come to Revelation ready to take it at face value, without imposing our ideas on it. Those who refuse to humbly receive Revelation in this manner are destined to fall into some man-made way of fulfilling God’s will that sounds like love and light but is fraught with deception. This is why it can be deadly to be ignorant of Revelation and why we have to spend time and effort studying its contents. Christians who are ignorant of Revelation can easily end up like Ray Bradbury, albeit unwittingly, but nevertheless working to prevent the future. If we are not checked by Scripture we will automatically gravitate to humanistic, unscriptural positions and end up working for causes and ministries whose goals are contrary to God’s declared plan of redemption. Those believers who are knowledgeable of Revelation ought to be frustrated by the majority of Christians who continue to buy into the notion that we are supposed to build a better world so that Christ can return. Revelation teaches us just the opposite. The world to which Christ returns is anything but good and righteous. Jesus himself directed this rhetorical question at His disciples, “When the Son of man returns will he find faith on the earth?”. He knew, and Revelation confirms it, that He will not find the earth filled with men of faith. His primary instructions to the Church for dealing with the world was that she should offer salvation to the lost. He has asked her to issue an invitation for the saved to come into the Church and leave the world behind. He did not preach, nor did He expect His followers to preach, that the Christian Church is to make the world a tidy, sanitary place fit for Christian family life. Jesus said if the world hated me it will hate you also. Revelation confirms Christ’s instructions that we are to watch, wait, and pray for our redemption which is coming, not from the Church’s efforts, but from heaven. Our redemption cannot come in the form of a new political ideology or by some Christian reform movement supposedly dedicated to God. If that were the plan then God would have to rewrite the Bible. In fact, Revelation makes it abundantly clear that the Church will not, and cannot, bring salvation to the earth by anything it does. We must wait for it in the form of God’s judgment and Christ’s triumphant return to earth that has been softened for his return by scorching by fire and God’s wrath.

Revelation teaches us that the world must be purged of sin by fiery judgment. This cannot be avoided or diverted. We see in Revelation that Christ will return to earth on a white horse, backed by His army of saints, to wrest control of the earth from the unholy trinity of Satan, the Antichrist and the False Prophet. Most of the world will be in cahoots with them. Over 90 percent of the world’s population will be obliterated by the judgments that fall during the seven-year period of the Tribulation. Most Christians will miss the Rapture because they presumed that they could live with one foot in the world and one foot in Christ and still be accounted worthy to escape the horrifying judgments of the end. Millions upon millions of these people, who are among the ignorant Christians today, will find the faith necessary to stand by their testimony for Jesus during the Tribulation, but they will have to forfeit their lives during the persecutions of the Beast and the Dragon. The Tribulation will be a reign of terror; a bloodbath as never before will ensue. The Antichrist and Satan will sacrifice the whole world in a last-ditch, desperate attempt to defeat God. This is not a pretty scene, but it is the world to which Christ will return. It does not take much discernment to figure out that it is not God’s will or His plan for man, whether it be the Church or not, to make the world a clean, righteous, holy, and decontaminated place fit for Christ’s luxurious arrival. Christ returns with a vengeance, a sword in His mouth, and fire in His eyes.

Revelation answers the question, when will this all take place and how should we prepare for it? We know that no man knows the time of the Rapture, not the angels, not even Jesus, only the Father knows, and He’s not telling. The reason for this is to keep end-times saints strong in the spirit, not strong in the world, but strong in faith and in hope for the resurrection, able to resist the temptations of the world. (1 Jn. 3.1-3) The Rapture will definitely precede the Tribulation. We conclude this for two reasons. First, we know what triggers the Tribulation and when it begins. When The Antichrist “confirms the covenant” with many nations and reestablishes the sacrifice in the Jewish temple in Jerusalem under Judaic Law then the seven-year clock of the Tribulation begins ticking down to Christ’s return from heaven. If the Rapture were to happen after the beginning of the Tribulation the element of surprise would be gone. Everyone would know that the Rapture would happen within seven years before Christ’s return. The Rapture, as an agent to purify the believer, would have no significance. The second reason is that before Christ opened the first seal in heaven to “kick-off” the Tribulation we see a multitude of redeemed saints sitting around the throne of God worshiping the Lamb. If no one was resurrected, if the Rapture had not yet occurred, then we must wonder, who are these people and how did they get there? It only makes sense that these are Raptured saints. Therefore, the Rapture certainly happens before the Tribulation, as a thief in the night, just as Jesus apprizes us, without warning as the parable of the ten virgins in Matthew 25 depicts. Revelation, then, helps us to get ready for the Rapture, not the Tribulation. We know what is coming and we know it is God’s will that we avoid it (Rev. 3.10). Though we do not know the day or the hour, we can know the approximate time. Christ gave us signs of the end. (Matt. 24, Mark 13, Luke 21) Jesus also rebuked the Pharisees and the Sadducees for not being able to read “the signs of the times”. (Matt. 16.3)

The signs that the end is drawing near are many. Jesus gave many of them to us in His Olivet Discourse. The main signs are; (1) Israel becoming a state again; (Matt. 24.32, Luke 21.29, Mark 13.28)(2) the growth of unity around the world and particularly among European nations; (3) the rise of many false Christs, occult fascination and the advent of bogus religions; (4) the two world wars of this century (“nation will rise against nation”); (5) the increase of earthquakes in diverse places around the globe; (6) increase of travel and knowledge making this world a “global village”; (7) the breakdown of societies and governments; and (8) the general ungodliness and atheism of cultures everywhere. All these things, mounting with ever increasing force day by day, tell the student of Revelation to “look up for their redemption draweth nigh”. In the end, our study of Revelation will be fruitless if we do not take the advice of the third verse of the book which states, “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.”

All of our labor and our knowledge will be for naught if we do not truly believe in the words that we have learned. We must not be only a hearer of the Word, we must be a doer of the Word. It is imperative that we take to heart things learned in Revelation. The words must become “engrafted” in our hearts, so that they become a natural part of our life. One day a group of people came to Jesus to tell Him that His mother and brothers were outside trying to get through the crowd to see Him. Instead of parting the crowd and going to see them or making way for them to see Him He made this reply. “My mother and my brethren are these which hear the word of God, and do it.” Luke 8.21 It is imperative that we are faithful to the words of Revelation. To believe in the words does not merely mean to acknowledge their truth. It means to, as the Amplified Bible puts it, rely on, trust in and adhere to, the words. If we hope to attain the promised blessing for keeping the words of Revelation then we must keep them in the sense that a man keeps his word. We must live as if we believe the Rapture could happen this very moment and that it is required that we live spotless lives in the spirit in order to be Raptured. We must act on the belief that this world cannot be saved and that it will be judged. We must forsake our humanly notions of perfection and walk humbly in the spirit. The Christian call to reform and sanitize this world, no matter how righteous it sounds from the pulpit, must become repugnant. We must be willing to be rejected and be weak in worldly power.

To concede to this we have to forsake the “high fallutin’” Christian church as well. They just don’t get it, and they won’t until the Tribulation is in full swing and the Rapture has passed. The letter to the Philadelphia Church in Revelation, chapter three is the one directed to those who are willing to study, learn and keep the words of the last book of the Bible. In this short, but heartening, epistle Christ reassures the end-times saints that He knows that they are weak and have little strength. Unlike all but one of the other churches which Christ wrote to in Revelation, our Savior has nothing against this group of faithful believers. They have loved the truth and not denied His name. They have not been worldly-wise and did not seek to have influence over political events. They loved His Word and strove to keep His commandments to love one another as He has loved us. Their immediate reward is to get the blessing promised in verse three of chapter one, which is, to be Raptured. “Because thou hast kept the word of my patience, I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth.” They will also be vindicated in paradise. Jesus promises, “Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.” We who keep the words of Revelation will not be vindicated in this life. Our faith will be its own reward for now. But after the great drama of redemption has played out and the Rapture and Tribulation are history we shall wear our crowns in heaven. Jesus gave the believers of Philadelphia, the Church of Brotherly Love, this loving advice. We give it to those who have studied Revelation with us. “Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown.” Rev. 3:11✞