would please open in the Bible. We're going to be looking this morning at Revelation chapter 1 verses 4 through 11 on page 1028 in the Pew Bible. You'll also find it in the bulletin on page 9. Please stand. A reading from the book of Revelation, chapter 1, verses 4 through 11. John, to the seven churches that are in Asia, grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth. to Him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by His blood and made us a kingdom. Priests, to His King and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Behold, He is coming with the clouds and every eye will see Him. Even those who pierced Him and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of Him. Even so, Amen. I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus. I was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day. And I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches, to Ephesus, and to Smyrna, and to Pergamum, and to Thyatira, and to Sardis, and to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea. The word of the Lord. Gracious Heavenly Father please send your spirit upon us the same spirit that moved your servant John to record these words to record this. remarkable vision. May that same sovereign and gracious spirit pry open our ears and our eyes and our hearts so that we might hear and see and believe what he teaches by your spirit. Make it so we pray in Jesus's holy name. Amen. Amen. Amen. Please be seated. Please do keep your Bible open in front of you. I'm actually going to begin with a little bit of an overview of the whole book of Revelation. And I want you to know that this little section is extremely important because it will really set in place some of the keys to how we will look at the rest of Chapter 1, how we will look at Chapters 2 and 3, and maybe how we will look at the whole book of Revelation. There are four basic views on Revelation. I'm pulling mine from a commentary by Greg Beal on the book of Revelation. But you can find them, just Google it, four basic views on Revelation. And you'll find basically these four views. There are nuances and subtle differences that you can probably multiply that by two or three and come up with many more views. But these are the four basic views on the book of Revelation. And to help visualize this, I'm going to ask you to keep sort of a constant grid in mind. Let's imagine that here at this small communion table, which is where Rick Carruth will be during communion. He'll be handing out the bread and wine from this small table. That's going to represent the time of Christ's earthly ministry, the time of his death and resurrection, the time of his ascension in a chronological grid. This center table, where I will be for communion today, will represent the place of John, the writer of the book of Revelation. Let's imagine him here in the middle part of the room. And then here at the far right, where Bill Kent will be serving communion from, that will represent us. All right? So over here is where Jesus, his birth, his life, his death, his resurrection, in the middle here is going to represent the writer of the book of Revelation, John. And the far right over here, my right, will represent us, our place in this big chronological grid. All right. Here are the four basic views. I'm going to try to use this little grid to help us visualize this. The first view I'm going to mention is called the preterist. Preterist. Preterist comes from a word which means past, right? So the preterist viewpoint, there are two kinds. There's full and partial preterism. A partial preterist believes that some of the things we read about in the book of Revelation, some of them and some of the most important parts of the book of Revelation have happened in the past between Jesus and John. A lot of the different things that happened that are described in the book of Revelation have happened in the past for you and me, and those are important and that will help set the stage for one interpretation of the Book of Revelation. That's partial preterism. There is another school of thought called full preterism, and I'd say if you meet a full preterist, go to the other side of the street, because full preterists say that all of the Book of Revelation has been completely fulfilled. And those are pretty rare these days, certainly among evangelicals. You won't bump into many full preterists, but you will bump into a lot of partial preterists, including a man named R.C. Sproul. R.C. Sproul was a partial preterist, and he wrote a commentary which explains how he understood a great deal of the book of Revelation, with some significant exceptions, has already been fulfilled. That's one viewpoint. The second viewpoint I want to mention is called the futurist viewpoint. And the futurist viewpoint would be Jesus over here, John here, and us over here. And the futurist viewpoint would be basically from us forward. from us into the future. So the viewpoint of the futurist is that we're surrounded by all these chronological keys and clues to the coming of Christ and the fulfillment of Revelation, all the images in Revelation. And that in our day and age, specifically, we're surrounded by all these clues of Christ's imminent return. The Futurist Viewpoint was popularized by John Nelson Darby. He was an interesting theologian back in the 19th century. Dwight L. Moody. There's a Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. He popularized the Futurist Viewpoint. A man here in Dallas, Cyrus Schofield, who wrote the famous Schofield Study Bible, which I used in seminary because I desperately needed a Bible that was put together by people who believed in the Bible. And so I used Schofield's study Bible to get me through seminary. Cyrus Schofield was a futurist. He believed that much of Revelation was being fulfilled in his day and in our day and going into the future, looking towards the imminent return of Christ. And that is the basic viewpoint of the school of theology called dispensationalism. And Dallas Theological Seminary, which I admire and respect a great deal. I've got many friends there. I love DTS. DTS is a place which for generations has focused on dispensational theology and a dispensational interpretation of Revelation. There are very popular books. You might have read a book or heard of a book called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey. That book came out when I was a young Christian and I gobbled it up. and read it. There have been movies based on this interpretation of Christ's imminent return and this interpretation of Revelation. I would say Dallas is a little bit of a global capital for dispensational theology. We sort of send it all over the world, and it has been profoundly influential, especially among evangelicals, and especially among evangelicals who believe in the authority of the Bible. Like me, lots of people found the Schofield Study Bible, and by reading it and studying it, have wound up at one time or another with a viewpoint that might be called futurist. And that's one way of reading the Book of Revelation. There's a third way, which is actually not very common today. It's called the historicist viewpoint. It's not very popular today, but there was a man named Joachim of Fiore, who lived in the Middle Ages, who was a very, very influential Bible commentator and theologian, and he came up with the idea that the book of Revelation is basically describing the period of time between Jesus and us into the future. So it's a long extended viewpoint of unfolding chronology, the imminent return of Christ in this ongoing chronology that's all around us. And you can usually spot the historicists because they will often have Ways of dividing church history. Martin, sorry, Joachim of Fiore divided things into the period, the era of the father, the era of the son, or the age of the son, and the age of the spirit. And he understood all of church history that way. And it became a very prominent, very influential way of looking at the whole ministry of Christ. As a matter of fact, Pope Francis just recently quoted Joachim of Fiore and sort of commended his way of thinking about the unfolding work of God in the church and in history. That's a recent application of a very old way of looking at Christ's return and the way Christ reigns over history between now and His return. There are some very, very famous and influential people that we love and we respect very much. Martin Luther and John Calvin. You know, the one book of the Bible John Calvin did not write a commentary on was Revelation. And I think there are lots of reasons for that. Martin Luther at one time did not have a high regard for Revelation, but came to have a high regard for Revelation. And both Martin Luther and John Calvin understood, at least in part, that the unfolding of church history was a demonstration of what Revelation is talking about. And so that the Antichrist character that shows up in the book of Revelation, they both believed was the Pope. And the Westminster Confession, which we love and which we use to this day, the unamended version that was originally adopted specifically said that the Pope was the Antichrist. You won't find that in the edition of the Westminster Assembly in the back of your Trinity Hymnal because we changed it. We changed it. This was hundreds of years ago. The leaders of our church decided that maybe the pope was an Antichrist-like figure, but they no longer believed that he could be identified as the Antichrist. And so they took that out of the Westminster standards. But both Martin Luther and John Calvin had this idea that Revelation described all of the unfolding of church history. and it was a way of understanding what Revelation was describing. Well, there's a fourth way, and it shouldn't probably be very surprising that I would put myself in the fourth category. Sometimes that's what a speaker or preacher will do. The one he wants to emphasize he puts last, so I'm going to put this one last. It's called the idealist. way of looking, viewing revelation. There have actually been any number of commentators and theologians who've embraced the idealist viewpoint. One in particular that I'm fond of is a Bible commentator named William Hendrickson, who wrote a book called More Than Conquerors, which was very, very influential on Reformed preachers and teachers. William Hendrickson wrote a book describing the idealist way of understanding the unfolding of all things in the book of Revelation. My theology professor, who Hayden's taking classes from this semester, Greg Beal, calls himself an idealist, except Beale, in true Beale-like fashion, describes himself as an eclectic, redemptive, historical idealist. So he adds a couple of adjectives. But it's the same basic idea. And let me tell you how this works using our grid. that the idealist understands the unfolding history described in Revelation as an ongoing cycle over and over and over and over and over again between Jesus' ascension into heaven, and it included John, and it includes you and me, and it goes all the way to the point that Jesus returns. So it's not a linear model. It is this secular, cyclical way of thinking about the book of Revelation. And I have to tell you that I've come to very much appreciate that way of looking at the book of Revelation. I'll tell you why. Number one, it makes sense of the reality that I see around me. You know, if the book of Revelation only describes from us forward, What does that say about this period of time? Was this simply a book of the Bible that was added on that looked into the distant future, 2,000 years into the future, and said, hang on, church, just wait it out. One day this will matter to you. I don't think so. And I'll show you why as we go through this passage. Chapter 1 makes it sort of plain that that's not the pastoral spirit behind Revelation. That's one reason. Another reason is, It makes too little of the church's role. Dispensationalism, for instance, has had to come up with a model which has basically two plans of salvation. They're related, they overlap, but they're separate. And that point of view is that the first dispensation, which involves the people of Israel and the Jewish people that that kind of overlaps and there's this bracketed section which is the church and God is still dealing with the people of Israel in a separate and distinct way and the church is over here, we're sort of going to be raptured out of a lot of what's described in the book of Revelation and so that a lot of the suffering, a lot of the struggles will not actually apply to the church. and that there's this coming reign of Christ, during which time many Jewish people will be converted, but the church will be sort of out of the picture. And they point to some little possible hints at that in the book of Revelation. I would disagree with them, but they would point at those things. the viewpoint of idealism makes sense to me of that whole period of time for all God's people, whatever their ethnicity, whatever their background, that we're all going through this ongoing cycle so that the struggles of the early apostles was a part of that struggle. John's experience was part of that struggle. And all the period between John and us, all part of this ongoing cyclical struggle where God's people, the church, is right in the middle of it. And here at the very end, and until the day that Jesus returns, you and I are still in that ongoing cycle. Now, you can look at those four and decide which one makes sense to you. But I will tell you that as we go through the rest of our study of Revelation 1, I'm going to be sort of pushing in that direction and that idea of thinking of Revelation being a book that was applicable in the time of the apostles, even though it was written after that time, It was still describing reality. And at the time of John's writing, it described reality for him and the unfolding experience of struggles and persecutions and hardship, this ongoing battle between good and evil. Jesus has won at the cross, but there's this ongoing cleanup operation is a way of describing it. And that John lived through that, and you and I are living through that. So rather than looking backwards at church history and finding popes or Hitler or the Roman Empire and saying, all of those are uniquely fulfilling aspects of the Book of Revelation, we look at all those things and say, yes, that was part of this ongoing cycle. And Hitler and anybody else you want to put into the mix, all these historical characters fit into this cycle. Not a chronology with like a date book where we check things off and try to figure out the exact day that Jesus will come, because the Bible tells us no one knows exactly when Jesus will come. So a book that's designed to give us a date book where we can check off the return of Christ goes against the purpose of the Bible. What the book of Revelation is meant to do is to tell us how to live while we wait on Jesus' return. It's not to pull out our calendars and try to figure out the exact date and adjust our behaviors accordingly. It's telling us to live in the midst of this ongoing cycle of hardship, this ongoing cycle of struggle. In the midst of that, to keep our eyes on Jesus. And Revelation chapter 1 lays that out in a very important way. And I'll tell you, if you ever do your own study of the book of Revelation, make sure you camp out on Revelation chapter 1 and really pay close attention to what John says at the beginning of the book. If you'll get Revelation 1 clear in your head, you'll be very well placed to then study the rest of the book. If you don't have Revelation clear in your head, well, buckle your seatbelts because you could go off in a million bad directions. Alright, so those are the four basic views of Revelation and why it's so important to pay close attention here in Revelation 1. Now, I've called this morning's sermon, Intended for the Church. Last Sunday was intended to bless. It was built around Revelation 1, verse 3. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy. Blessed are those who hear and who keep what is written in it. The book of Revelation is not meant to terrify us. It is intended to bless us. The very act of reading it is a blessing. And to live it out is a blessing. Well, how do you live out something that's way over here? How did these people live it out? How could the people He wrote it to live it out if it's way over here? There's something to be lived out at every day, at every point in this unfolding revelation of who Jesus is, what Jesus has come to do. So, intended for the church. Let me just draw your attention to the plain words. Who is this book intended for? Well, John tells us. Revelation chapter 1 verse 4. John to the seven churches that are in Asia. Seven churches. Look down at verse... at the end of the passage down in verse 11. The Lord says to John, look at verse 10, I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches. And then he names them, to Ephesus, and to Smyrna, and to Pergamum, and to Thyatira, and to Sardis, and to Philadelphia, and to Laodicea. These were real churches. You can actually visit their ruins. I had a friend of mine a few years ago who visited the ruins of the church in Ephesus. It comes first in the list. And by the way, it was the church in Asia that John was especially close to. The island of Patmos is just off the coast of Turkey, modern-day Turkey. And Ephesus was a church that he had a special bond with, a church, by the way, that had been planted by Paul, John knew Ephesus. And so that's the first church in the list. But all these churches actually form a kind of an oval. It was a well-known trade route. It was a well-known way for people to be moving. These were not weird, isolated, unknown places. These were all real churches in real places where real people could go. And my friend who visited there not long ago brought me back a little piece of rock that she said she had bought that was a fragment of the temple in Ephesus. I didn't ask her how she got it, but she brought me this little fragment just to underscore these are real places. And John wrote the book of Revelation to the churches. That's what they were intended for. It is not written out in some inexact way, some abstract way, just sort of shot out into the atmosphere. This was a letter It's a revelation apocalypse, but it's within a letter that John wrote to seven churches that were well known. And that's very significant. The book of Revelation was not written in some abstract theological sense. It was written to real people at real churches in real places. Now, there's some very important clues about these seven churches. One, and this is very significant, the number seven is an important number in the book of Revelation. You'll see seven several times. You'll see references to seven trumpets, seven bowls. You'll see references to all kinds of things, including, you'll notice in chapter four, seven spirits. This idea of seven, seven, seven, seven. Well, my teacher and man that I very much respect, G.K. Gregg Beal wrote this, John addresses the seven churches. His choice of the number seven is no accident. Seven is the favorite number of revelation. Biblically, it signifies completion or fullness and is originally derived from the seven days of creation. He says, the significance of the number seven here is that the seven churches represent the fullness of the church. So John wrote to seven real churches, and he's going to go on in chapters two and three to write specifically words of instruction to those seven churches, but these seven churches represent the whole church. The fullness of the church. I actually appreciate that it's addressed to churches. Churches. It was written to groups of people, well, like us. With our own history, our own struggles, our own issues. We're each different. And we are a little tiny part of this big thing called the church. Well, Jesus is revealing this to John so that John can deliver it not through a megaphone to the whole worldwide church in the first instance, but to all the little individual churches like us. What we're doing right now today, which is sadly very rare in 21st century American evangelicalism, you very seldom will hear a preaching through the whole book of Revelation. But what we're doing today is actually what was intended, that we should read it and pay attention to it and walk through it and try to figure out, as we're led by the Spirit, what is John telling us? So it's very, very important, this idea of seven and how it applies to the entire church. You look at the end of all the individual letters in chapters two and three to all these individual churches. If you look at the end of each one of the letters, they all end by saying not the seven churches or not the you individually, but to all the churches. So John's writing a letter that includes us. It's also a church under tribulation. You know, the word tribulation is one of those words that you hear a lot in some dispensational circles, the tribulation and what it means. It's interesting that this book is written to the churches under tribulation. There's a school of thought that say that churches don't live through that period of time. But as a matter of fact, John writes to churches under tribulation. Look at verse 1 where John writes, the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. Look down at verse 3. Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy and blessed are those who hear it and keep what is written in it for the time is near. Look down at verse 7. John writes, Behold, He is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see Him, even those who pierced Him. And all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of Him. Even so, Amen. Behold, He is coming. And then finally, look down at verse 9. And this is extremely important to understand the book of Revelation. I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation. and the kingdom and the patient endurance. So what John is saying is, here he is in the middle, the cross, the resurrection, the ascension of Christ was before him. You and I are after him. He is writing to the churches and he is saying to them and to us, the universal church, he is saying, I am your partner, I am your brother in this ongoing tribulation. It was true in his day. He was a partner in it. He experienced it. The things he's describing in this book were things that were relevant to him, that were meant to give a certain intentional teaching to him, and which he shared to the church in his day. And it's meant to give intentional teaching and encouragement to the church in our day. So it's addressed to the churches who are in tribulation. If you don't feel under tribulation at the moment, it's just because we're not looking around very much, or we're at that unusual point in the cycle where the tribulation is less intense. But we live in a world that is in tribulation. And the fact is, we're partners in it. Whether it's hitting us personally at the moment or not, if you're in the Church of Jesus Christ, and there are Christians suffering as there are in North Korea today, we are in tribulation. So the book of Revelation is intended for those who are going through that cyclical tribulation. And there's another thing. We've got to be very clear on this. What exactly is the church? What are the churches? Is it a building? We call this building a church. I call it a church regularly. But is that what a church really fundamentally is? They're having a huge ceremony right now in Paris where they're reopening a church. And what they mean is the Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was burned down in 2019 or severely damaged by fire in 2019, they're having a grand celebration. President-elect Trump is there. Mrs. Biden is there. The whole world is gathered to celebrate the reopening of this building. We're celebrating the reopening of a building. But is that what John is talking about? As a matter of fact, when John was writing this book, churches didn't generally have their own buildings. They generally met in people's houses. They were maybe just beginning in a few places to set aside special places for churches to meet. But the primary meaning of the church, in John's meaning, is not a building, even though that's very often what we mean. But it's not primarily a building. That's not what John is talking about. Maybe he's talking about an institution. I used to be a member of a church that had a big office in New York City, 815 2nd Avenue, and you could go and the walls were lined with pictures of big grand pubas wearing elaborate religious ceremonial garb. And there are people who think of the church in institutional terms. There are whole denominations that define the church institutionally, that there is no space between the institution and the church. But of course, in the day when John wrote what he wrote, he primarily wrote to churches. Individual fellowships of Christians that met. There wasn't an institutional church in the same sense that the World Council of Churches means in 2024. That didn't exist. So he's not writing to an institution. It was a mission organization more than an institution. It existed to take the gospel to other people. And the leadership was very thin. I think the Presbyterian Church gets it about as well as anybody. It's a very thin leadership level. It's not thick with multiple levels like a like the Roman Catholic hierarchy can sometimes appear. It wasn't like that. It was a thin structure. So he's not talking about an institution primarily. He's not even talking about a group of people who do something together regularly, although Christians do. But they do it in all sorts of different ways. One of the interesting things of church history in the apostolic period is how very different churches were. Every time they uncover some document about liturgy or some doctrine about theology, they'll discover, oh wait, that applied in that church, that individual church, but the church over here had a different way of looking at it. So it's all information. So at the time, John couldn't even be specifically talking about a group of people that were doing all exactly the same thing. They didn't have that luxury. They lived miles apart. They were separated not only by space, but by time. And people didn't travel the way they do today. It is not a definition. The church is not something easily defined by simply doing all exactly the same things. So what does church mean? Well, John tells us. And interestingly, the definition John gives us has nothing to do with what you and I do. How does John describe the church? Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth. He begins by talking about a vision of the Trinity. The seven spirits representing not seven little individual spirits, but the fullness of the Spirit. The Father, the Son, the seven spirits representing the fullness who are there at the throne. And then notice what he says next. And this is the definition of the church. to Him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by His blood and made us a kingdom, priests to His God and Father. To Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. John's definition of the church is doxological. He defines the church in terms of our responding to what Jesus has done. Jesus creates the church. Jesus defines the church. The life of the Triune God at the middle of the church defines the church. It's not a building. If you have a building, great. Rejoice in it. Use it for mission. If you have a small, humble building, great. Use it. Worship the Lord there. If you have no building and find yourself meeting in a cave, Guess what? The Lord is as much there and very possibly much more there than in a marble cathedral with all the VIPs in the world gathered on the roof. Now, that has no more claim to God's presence, no more claim to being the church than the humblest gathering of God's people huddled in a grove of trees in Asia. Now, the church is not defined by building. The church is not defined by our all doing exactly the same things. It's not defined by some sort of institution, a human institution. The church is defined, as John understands it, as the Bible describes it, in terms of Christ. Jesus being in the middle of our life together is what makes us the church. And I'll tell you this about the reopening of the cathedral in Paris. I'm praying for them. Nothing would make me happier than to know that at the middle of this great cathedral, in the middle of a great city, there was a witness to Jesus patiently enduring tribulation and pointing towards Christ. Because that is what the church is called to do. It's not about beautiful choirs. It's not about beautiful architecture. Those things are OK. Thank God for them. But that's not the point of a church. The point of a church is what John is writing to us about. He's going to tell us what the point of a church is. He's going to tell us how we patiently endure hardship and suffering. He's actually going to tell us what it looks like and how to do it. It's intended for the church. I want to emphasize the fact it's intended for the church now. If you look at the very end of Revelation, let me get you to look over to the very end of Revelation. Go all the way over to the very end of the book of Revelation. You'll see that John, who began the book by addressing it to the churches, concludes the book by, again, addressing it to the churches, by underscoring the fact that what he has to say is actually for the church at the beginning in Revelation 1 and the churches all the way through the book, all the way down to the very end of all things, it's all addressed to the church. It's all addressed to God's covenant people. It's all addressed to you and me and all those wherever people are. And you can read it in the words that John uses. He uses the word church. But he also uses the words that describe the relationship of love that Jesus shows towards his people. It describes the relationship of compassion that he shows towards his people, the wiping away of their tears. the meeting us in our times of stress, in our times of struggling. He comes to us and He meets us and He loves us. And the whole book of Revelation is like that. It's all addressed to His church and to the churches that make up His church. It applies to us here now. And in a moment we're going to gather around this little table Rick at that one, me at the middle, and Bill over here on the side. We will share Holy Communion together. And this is one of the great privileges of the church, of each individual church. The great church and the churches, we gather around the table. We may do it in slightly different ways. We do it in English. There are people in the world who will be worshiping the Lord using all kinds of languages. It's not about our doing exactly the same thing. It's about the one who we worship, the one who has shown his love to us. And we get to participate in that. And that's what we'll be sharing around this table. We'll be reflecting on what Jesus Christ has done. His blood that has taken away our sins. His love which He has poured out upon us. Fulfilling the work of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Dealing with our sin. Dealing with our brokenness. Taking away our judgment and giving us His righteousness. Well, as we gather in just a second around this table, I hope we'll have that very much in our minds. And I hope over the season of Advent, as we prepare for Christmas, as we prepare for Jesus' second coming, that we will share that love for each other, that oneness that comes from Jesus. And then as we go forward in mission and ministry, as Metrocrest does what God calls us to do, our goal is to do it together, to be patiently enduring with our brother John, with all the saints of the ages, with Jesus Christ, our great high priest, leading the way as we do the work that he entrusts to us.