Misunderstanding and Misusing Revelation

ahead on the land and the book. Dr. Charlie Dyer is our host. He's an Old Testament scholar, former pastor, and a respected Middle East expert. I'm John Geiger, and, you know, Israel, of course, has been on all of our minds these past months. Many of us have been struggling with questions of what to think and feel. And in the midst of all this, God's heart for the Jewish people remains unchanged. He is faithful to his chosen people. Right, Charlie?

staff provide insight into Jewish life and culture. They can help prepare you to share with your friends the peace of Messiah they so desperately need. If you would like one of these insightful books for yourself or is a gift for someone else, visit Life in Messiah org and click on the Moody Radio button to find out how you can receive your copy. That's life in messiah.org.

for storming the towns. They kept the actual attack plans a closely guarded secret known only to a select few. The fighters themselves were only told about the mission two hours before the attack, and only the squad leaders knew the specific targets before each of those groups set out. The attack itself was well planned. They gathered intelligence on the towns from the Palestinians. Israel allowed in from Gaza

to work. The attack coincided with the end of the second holiday, when many soldiers were away from their posts and back home on leave. The attack began with a barrage of over 2200 rockets fired against Israel soldiers on motorized hang gliders then flew into Israel to secure the perimeter, while elite fighters stormed the border wall and used explosives

and bulldozers to punch through at multiple points. A commando unit attacked the army's southern headquarters and jammed communications to prevent personnel from sounding the alarm, and then the groups of terrorists rushed to pre assigned communities to capture and kill as many people as possible. Israel had placed too much faith in electronic surveillance, which caused them to reduce

the number of soldiers on duty. The last time Israel was so completely fooled, John was 50 years ago, at the start of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the results were about as catastrophic.

from the river to the sea. Well, that message, by the way, is talking about the establishment of a single state of Palestine that would extend from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, in effect wiping out the state of Israel. Jewish students are being intimidated on campuses, with some receiving anonymous death threats. The same things happening in the cities of our country with people being assaulted, with synagogues being defaced. Incidents of antisemitism rose nearly 400% since

the start of the war. And all of this is what's worrying both us Jews and Jews living in Europe. So what can someone listening right now do to help? I'd like to offer two suggestions. First contact. Your elected representatives and I mean local and state and national. You can do it by email, by letter or by phone call, but let them know. There's no place for anti Semitism

in our country. Encourage them to take a public stand against anti Semitism and to make sure our country is doing everything it can to protect all our Jewish citizens. And then second, watch in your community for rallies or gatherings in support of Israel and take the time. Go and show your support. Genesis 12 three is still operative. God said, I will bless those who bless you and

the one who curses you, I will curse. So do what you can to bless Israel and the Jewish people, and then be praying for the peace of Jerusalem.

her and Barack's victory over the forces of Sisera. In verses 28 to 30, she describes the mother of Sisera watching out the window for her son to come home, having attacked the Jewish people, and the mother wonders why it's taking so long for him to return, and her attendants try to comfort her. They tell her, well, they're just dividing the spoil. And then it says, 1 or 2 maidens for every warrior, plus some other loot they can bring home. Yet plunder and systematic rape were just

par for the course for those invaders. And that pretty much pictures what Hamas was doing. Another example comes from the criticism being leveled against Israel. You know, they were telling the people in Gaza City to flee south to get out of the fighting. Well, I couldn't help but think of Jeremiah. In fact, Jeremiah was bitterly criticized for giving the same advice to the people of Jerusalem and his day. In Jeremiah 21, he's told to tell the people,

this is what the Lord says. See, I'm setting before you the way of life and the way of death. Whoever stays in this city will die by the sword, famine or plague, but whoever goes out and surrenders will live. He'll escape with his life. That call to flee was for the benefit of the people. And that's what Israel's been trying to do as well, and also being criticized for it. And then I thought about the taking of hostages. Yet Naaman the Syrian, the commander who had leprosy, we

had a servant girl who told him about Elisha. But second Kings five two tells us how she ended up in Syria. Invaders had attacked Israel and taken away captive this young girl. So rape and looting and the capture of innocent civilians and on the opposite end, encouraging civilians trapped in a war zone to escape. Well, those were the realities in Old Testament times. And we're seeing those same scenes being replayed again today.

anyone's guess. Right now. Israel is still fighting the war, and they're also going to be struggling financially once the war is over to rebuild the areas impacted and revive their economy. Yad Vashem wasn't established until five years after the founding of the State of Israel, so it might not take as long to establish this memorial, though it will certainly take some time to plan where it ought to be located and how it ought to be designed

and how it ought to operate. And in many ways, it might be good to allow just a little time for healing to take place. But I do look for Israel to prepare something in the not too distant future, to keep the victims and the heroes from being forgotten.

John Geiger. Could we switch gears for just a quick second here and talk about sharing Jesus with a Jewish friend? What do I mean by that? You've probably heard it said before. One opposition to becoming a Christian is the sense that a Jewish person has that they're going to lose their Jewish identity somehow. You know, I was born a Jew. I'm going to die a Jew. I could never become a Gentile Christian. What's the answer to that? West Tabor is with life in Messiah.

loses their ethnicity. Upon trusting Yeshua. We do gain new citizenship in God's kingdom, but Messianic Jews often say believing in Yeshua, the one who perfectly fulfills God's promises to Israel as Messiah and Redeemer makes me feel all the more Jewish.

which get this just surpassed 1 million downloads. Jeff and his wife have three grown sons live in little Rock, Arkansas, and we welcome him back to the land of the book. Good to connect, Jeff.

And he wrote the book of revelation. And so he wrote it really as a way to say, this is the last thing I'm going to say to you before I come back. So it really combines John, a beautiful, really combination of not only Intel about the end times, but also about God himself.

a time we call the tribulation period. Concurrently with that, though, there's also a lot of grace that's poured out as well. So it is sort of a wake up call, I think, for us to see who our God is. In fact, in the very first chapter of revelation, Jesus portrays himself as one who has eyes of blazing fire and feet of burnished bronze and just speaks of his coming in judgment. And so he's both loving, gracious, but also righteous and holy.

to eternal punishment. You know, there's there's a lot of pushback against hell being, you know, a lake of fire that burns forever, though Scripture declares it to be so, they find this portrayal of God to be inconsistent with the teachings of love and forgiveness found elsewhere in the Bible. Now, we've touched on some of this, but how should people view revelation in light of all this?

forsaken me? And yet we have the beauty of love, grace, forgiveness, holiness, wrath, and justice all kind of coming to this intersection at the cross at Calvary. And so I would say to people, you know, you really do want God to be a just God. You want him to be a God that

ultimately punishes sin. Because I think John is within all people, a desire for evil just to go away and for there not to be any more injustice, any more murder, any more rape, any more sex trafficking, all these evils that one day God promises he will actually do away with. But he can't do that unless he is a God of vengeance and of wrath. And so that's the beauty of God is that he deals with evil, but at the same time he gives us his grace and mercy.

before God's wrath came down. So the pattern in Scripture is sort of God is rescues as his own before he pours out his wrath, but he does not necessarily save us from man's wrath. So the pre-trib use, as it happens before the mid-term review says, in the middle of that period of time that three and a half years in bow and Antichrist and acts the mark of the beast, that right then is where the church is raptured.

They see God's wrath beginning there and then. The post Trib view says that the rapture occurs at the very end of the tribulation period, that seven year time where Jesus returns to snatch his bride up, take her to heaven. They turn right back around and come straight back down to earth at the second coming of Christ at Armageddon. So three very distinct views. Obviously only one view can be right. And this is an issue that we certainly

don't want to divide the body of Christ over. However, if it's important enough to study and if it means that we get delivered from God's wrath, it certainly is something that every believer should investigate.

not prevent us from having great fellowship together. And also just there are things about the end times that all three of those views agree on, which is Jesus will come back at his second coming and then set up his millennial kingdom on the earth. So there are many points of agreement that we have is just on the timing of the rapture that we disagreed.

And what happens is he really dovetails into Satan's desire to establish a global governance system in the world, and for him to be ruling through that, and that, in essence, is Satan's way of placing his man of sin in a place where he can be worshiped, i.e. worship Satan as well. And so it's just Satan's long held desire to be worshipped by the world and to rule over the world. And he'll do that through the man Antichrist.

is until we get to revelation chapter 20. So based on just a normal plain interpretation of revelation 20, I take it to be a literal 1000 years.

unprecedented even 20, 30 years ago. But now with things like Amazon one, where they're scanning the the palm print of your hand and reading the vein structure behind it, there's a system, technologically speaking, in place now that can transact that economic transaction just through reading your palm. So I don't think Amazon wants the mark of the beast. But there is the. Technology there. But the second aspect of that, John, is the idea of a digital economy.

In other words, in order for revelation 1316 or 18, which says that no man can buy or sell without the mark of the beast, meaning you can't pay your mortgage, you can't pay online, you can't buy a stick of gum, you can't buy food without this mark. Digitally speaking, it has to be a digital economy. And so there has to be some sort of way to transact online without

actually exchanging paper or cards or anything like that. And of course, there are over 114 countries in the world right now that are on their way to implementing a digital economy, including the United States of America. So the scary thing about that is, is that once that happens, every transaction becomes traceable, becomes trackable, it becomes programmable and expendable. So in essence, becomes a control issue over everyone's money

down to the penny. And Antichrist will have to have that in order to have that mark of the beast.

its hand in your pocketbook. And so it's being rolled out right now. It's being tested. Our current president wants there to be a central digital currency bank, where all money just flows through the same digital bank, as it were. And so yeah, we're rapidly moving towards that right now.

it really got his attention. So I think the number one thing we need to do is believers is to look at Jesus as described in revelation chapter one.

Charlie Dyer. This segment, it's about you, your thoughts, your questions about the Bible as you crack open that ultimate book of wisdom and maybe ponder a verse of Scripture that leaves you scratching your head, you can always get your question to us when you email us at The Land and the Book at Moody Edu Charlie, many of us wonder what the future holds for Israel, and while some things are uncertain, the Bible gives us an outline of what will happen in the last days.

host Michael Rudnick and me, Charlie Dyer. These encouraging and informative videos will help you better understand God's future plans and how we can be actively waiting to get access to this video series. Visit Life in Messiah org and click on the Moody Radio button to sign up. That's life in Messiah org.

Now cherubim are part of the angelic order, and they appear to be the angels who are closest to God and who guard the presence and his holiness. In fact, according to Ezekiel 2816, Satan was originally a guardian cherub until he was judged for his sin. The other descriptions we have of cherubim are are the golden representations of the cherubim that were placed on the mercy seat over the ark of the covenant, and in the Holy of

Holies in Solomon's Temple. These descriptions are less detailed than Ezekiel's, but we're told in Exodus 2520 that they have their wings spread upward, overshadowing the mercy seat. Now, obviously we don't have any actual pictures of cherubim, though they did appear numerous times in the Bible. One thing we do know, though, they don't look like those little chubby babies we sometimes call cherubs.

The New Jerusalem does come down to earth at the end of the millennium, but it is in existence now. And I take it that that's where the dwelling places are that Jesus is preparing for us.

He also believes Daniel couldn't have been written until the second century, based on the kind of language used and the prophecies that it makes. I'm not sure how to counter these assertions. Can you help?

a few of them. His argument against the Pentateuch, based on an old, now discredited theory often called the documentary hypothesis, which says the Pentateuch was constructed from four or more different sources, often called J, E, D, and P, and finally stitched together during or after the Babylonian exile. Now, a book called The Documentary Hypothesis and the composition of the Pentateuch by a Jewish scholar named Humberto Kazuto presents

a clear and compelling critique of the GDP theory. Another book was written. It's titled Before Abraham. M was by two professors at UC Berkeley, and the discovery of two amulets at Katif, home by Jerusalem, also causes a problem. In fact, let me talk about that just a second. These two amulets are from the First Temple period, and they contain quotations from numbers. Chapter six, the ironic benediction, which supposedly is part of the document which wasn't written

until the exile. And yet, here's some amulets found before the exile, quoting something that supposedly hasn't yet been written. Now, the Greek loanwords in Daniel, they're actually musical instruments, and a scholar named Edwin Yamauchi has shown that musical instruments were imported and exported throughout the Middle East long before

the time of Daniel. The reality that Daniel identified Belshazzar as ruling in Babylon was actually lost by the second century in the writings of others, but here in the past century or so, documents from Babylon were uncovered showing Daniel was correct. But the real problem the friend has is the issue of predictive prophecy. Can God predict the future,

including the rise of Persia, Greece and Rome? And if he can, there's no problem with those countries being named, since that's exactly what God is claiming to do in those passages. Now, the bottom line is that every objection raised by your friend has a solid answer. A good book to recommend as evidence that demands a verdict by Josh McDowell. You might want to buy a copy to share with him and also get a copy for yourself. It's really good.

and ever. But Second Timothy is Paul's swan song. Before his execution, wasn't Paul more concerned about his heart attitude toward the Lord?

from death. Now, second Timothy four Paul knows he's soon going to be executed, and he says in four six, the time has come for my departure. And though God stood by him during his first defense before Caesar, Paul knew the order for his execution would eventually be given. So in verse 18, he is saying that God will deliver him through death and bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom. When teaching this, the best approach is to talk through the two stories and have the people note

the similarities and differences. You know, both accounts are a believers remaining faithful during times of persecution, but then you can note that the three friends were rescued from death while Paul found deliverance through death. In both cases, God provided deliverance. But that doesn't mean his followers won't experience death or martyrdom. I'm not sure if that's the lesson they're trying to give in the literature, but it's the lesson I see when you compare those two passages.

bearing on an earlier stage of the Hebrew text. They were consulted, as were in any list. Some other ancient sources as well. I remember from my time in seminary that there were times when the Septuagint translation and the Dead Sea Scrolls seemed to suggest a different reading for

a passage other than the traditional mass text. It didn't happen too often, but those are the places where the translators would explore all the different ancient sources to try to determine which seems to match best what the original author wrote. Now, unfortunately, it's difficult to discover those variations in our English translations, and the NIV. They'll usually appear as a footnote under the text and will say something like or. And then they'll have an alternate reading in italics.

But you don't know if the alternative readings from the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Master Attic text, or some other ancient source. To find that, you really need to know how to read the textual apparatus in the biblical Hebraic. And let me tell you, that's not an easy task. And frankly, it's not worth the effort because most of what we have is very accurate.

remarkable thing. It will change me forever.

of all the messages that he has for me. I'm just so excited to have a whole new world open up to me.

of again before we actually sat down to eat. You know, in addition to the standard no shouting, no reaching out and grabbing for food and make sure you finish what's on your plate. There were other Thanksgiving specific rules. Make sure you eat the Lima beans in addition to the turkey dressing and mashed potatoes. Only dip your vegetables, not your fingers, in the salt cellar or the salt dish by your plate, and perhaps the most repeated and the hardest to obey. Don't just try to scoop out the

maraschino cherries from the ambrosia salad. It was a great meal in spite of all the rules for the kids. Now, as we grow up, the specific rules change. But the overall concept still remains the same. There are still some do's and don'ts we're expected to observe on Thanksgiving, and God has specific do's and don'ts for his children as they approach him in Thanksgiving. So this coming week, as we head into Thanksgiving, let's go back over the house rules set up by God in Psalm 95 to help

us remember how to act. The psalmist begins in the first two verses of that psalm by reminding us why we're gathering together. Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving, and extol him with music and song. The psalmist uses two different words to encourage us to gather before the Lord,

whom he describes as the rock of our salvation. Like a solid, immovable peak rising from the valley floor, God is the place we can flee to avoid the devastating floods of life when they sweep. By now, I like the expression, let us come before him with thanksgiving, and before him is literally his face picturing God's presence. And the word for thanks is the Hebrew word toda. It's the Jewish expression used today to say thank you to someone. We're to stand before the very presence of God, look

to him and say thank you. But why are we to thank God? Well, verse three says we're to do so because of who he is. For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods. God is to be praised and thanked because he is great when it says, God is the great King above all gods. The writer isn't suggesting there are actually other gods. What he's saying is that while other nations might worship idols, the God of Israel was infinitely superior to any supposed rival.

But we're not just to be thankful for who God is, we're also to be thankful because of what God has done. In his hand are the depths of the earth, and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. From the ocean depths to the highest mountain peak. God created and controls all the earth. In verses six and seven, the psalmist changes his theme just slightly. We're not just gathering to thank God for who he is and what

he's done. We're also gathering to worship him for his care and protection over us. Come, let us bow down and worship. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker, for he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. There are three main verbs in these verses that point to us humbling ourselves or getting low before God. The word for worship means to bow down, and it's used with the second word for bowing down, along with another word that

means to kneel. When we recognize God's greatness and his care for us, it causes us to bow in humble submission. We're like sheep under the protection of the ultimate good and great Shepherd. Now, while the first half of this psalm has all the positive instructions, the do's of our thanksgiving, if you will, the remainder of the Psalm switches and focuses on the don'ts of our relationship during this Thanksgiving season. In the remaining verses, the psalmist focuses on the bad

example of Israel in the wilderness today. If you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did at Maraba and as you did that day at Massah in the desert, the psalmist takes his readers back to Exodus 17, when Israel camped at RAF Edem. Here's a summary of that chapter. There's no water. So they quarreled with Moses and said, give us water to drink. And they grumbled against Moses. After this incident, the place was

called Massa and Maraba. Testing and quarreling. If you truly acknowledge God as being both great and good, and being the Shepherd who cares for you, then guard against putting God to the test, or arguing with him and complaining about what you see as the places where he's failed you. By not meeting all your demands. In the final three verses, the writer switches perspective instead of one human exhorting another human. Come. Let us. God himself begins to speak and his message

is one of warning. This is the. Don't scoop out the maraschino cherries from the ambrosia part of the psalm. The command is simple and direct. Do not harden your hearts. God explains how this worked itself out in the lives of those in the wilderness. They were a people whose hearts go astray and who have not known my ways. The people drifted off course morally and spiritually because they didn't come to know intimately God's ways. The word God uses for ways is Derek, which is used to describe

a roadway or a pathway. They failed to pay close attention to the pathway of righteousness God had laid out for them in His word. As a result, the path they chose for themselves led them astray, and the consequences for the nation were devastating. So I declared on oath of my anger, they shall never enter my rest. An entire generation died off in the wilderness, never able to enter the place of blessing promised to them by God. So what's the point of Psalm 95 for us as

we get ready to gather this coming Thursday? I can summarize it in three brief commands celebrate, submit, or suffer the consequences. The majority of the Psalm is a reminder for us to sing, shout joyfully, and come into God's presence with thanksgiving. This is a day to remember who God is and all he has done for us. But with great privilege also comes great responsibility. We're also to willingly submit, bow down, and kneel before our sovereign King.

To remember he's the good Shepherd, and we're the sheep of his hand. But if we refuse to submit and instead harden our hearts, complain about his actions, and put him to the test, then we can expect to see the other side of our God. Those who shake their fist at God and refuse to bend the knee will discover that God will eventually abandon them to the consequences of their own choices. Those who deliberately choose to follow their path, rather than submitting to his will, not enter

into his place of rest. So what's the secret to a restful, blessed Thanksgiving? Celebrate, submit and choose to follow the Lord. Oh yeah, and make sure not to scoop out the maraschino cherries from the ambrosia salad. Have a great Thanksgiving.