Session 1 – A Study in Revelation; Apocalyptic: Mark Lanier, 01/07/24

Lesson 1 Revelation
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[00:00:00] I'm so delighted you're here this morning. We're starting a brand-new series, and this is a series on the Book of Revelation. If you had been with us last fall, we did a series on the first 11 chapters of Genesis, so we're kind of completing the bookends of the Bible. I'm convinced that in some ways, Revelation is one of the richest areas of study we can have.

I'm also convinced that it's one that is, uh, uh, uh, seen in so many different perspectives that we [00:01:00] need to always keep in mind that to some degree, this more than any other part of the Bible is one where you're never gonna find two people who quite read it the same way and agree on what it says. So I decided to teach it the way that that fella back there believes.

No. I decided to, to, to teach it-- I'm going to be teaching this from my understanding of the book. If you don't agree with me, that's fine. And if the Lord doesn't agree with me and He decides to come back another way, I'm gonna change my view to fit with His. Amen. Uh, but that doesn't change the fact that after studying this book, I guess I started trying to diligently understand the Book of Revelation in 1979.[00:02:00]

That's when I took my first course on apocalyptic literature, and I've studied it, and I've read it, and I've taught it, and I've written on it. But it's been some time, and I haven't done it as diligently in this class as I plan on exploring it with you today. Now, this is our first class of the year.

Between now and the last time I taught, I've had a chance to be a number of different places, including this morning in Florida. I just got in, and I left part of my material that I was gonna show you, um, behind. So there's that. Um, we, we went to, uh, Disney because our daughter Sarah decided to run what's called the Dopey [00:03:00] Challenge.

You may be wondering what the Dopey Challenge is. The Dopey Challenge is you run on Thursday five kilometers, a 5K race. That's 3.1 something miles. Not that big a deal for a spry graduate student like Sarah. So that's Thursday. And then Friday, you wake up and you run a 10K. Now you're at six and a quarter miles or so.

And then Saturday, yesterday, she woke up and she ran a half marathon. That's 13 miles. Then this morning she gets up and she runs a full marathon. That's 26 miles. And that's why they call it the Dopey Challenge. Now, we do not wanna be dopey in our approach to this book. We want to be excited, we wanna be happy, but we [00:04:00] wanna be sharp and we wanna be focused.

This is not baby food. This is not, um, something that, that, that you, you, you, you just sort of look at here and there. I urge you to try to be here each week. I urge you, if you're not, to try to catch it on the internet, because in so many ways this builds on itself. Now, having said all of that, here we go. A week and a half before Christmas, I found myself walking down the streets of Oxford, England, one of my favorite towns in the world.

If for no other reason than it has my favorite bookstore in the world, Blackwell's Bookstore. Blackwell's has been around for well over 100 years. It's an amazing bookstore. I think it's been around actually for like 160 or 70 years [00:05:00] And when you go inside Blackwell's, you're confronted with this Welcome to Blackwell's sign, and it tells you where in the s- the shop you're gonna find various sections of books.

Like on the second floor, you'll find books on antiques, books on architecture, books on art. You can go to the first floor, find children's books. You can find books on pregnancy and childcare, poetry, young adult fiction. You'll find these books, uh, all over the place. If you go to the n- um, where is it? The Norrington Room.

The Norrington Room has everything from accounting and anthropology and archeology down to r- philosophy and religion, uh, theology. This is one of my favorite rooms to go to. And they sort the books, and you can find the [00:06:00] books based upon what section you're looking for. Make sense? I, I don't know how many of you were my classmates at Coronado High School in Lubbock, Texas, the Hub of the Plains, but we had this crazy thing in our library

That, for those of you who don't know, David and others, that is what we call early Google

And early Google would tell us where to find a book. And Coronado High School divided the books based upon the Dewey Decimal System, named after Melvil Dewey The Dewey Decimal System, as it currently [00:07:00] is incarnate, has for the zeros, general knowledge. For the 100s, philosophy and psychology. The 200s, religion.

The 300s, social sciences, languages, science, technology, art and recreation, literature, history, and geography. That is different, by the way, than the system that's used at the Library of Congress. It is different than the one Charles put into place. Charles Mickey's right back there, first director of our library.

Charles put in place the Library of Congress catalog system at the theological library down the street. But all of these systems recognize that there are different kinds of writing Even within literature, there are different kinds of writing. [00:08:00] We call them literary genres. For example, there's the genre of Western literature.

Larry McMurtry, Zane Grey. You've got these people who write Westerns. There's the romance genre. There's, uh, some people, like our, one of our own authors in this, uh, uh, class who's published 90-plus books, has danced across different genres. Maybe you read the Lee Child series, Jack Reacher Maybe you read other types of books.

There's a whole genre of fantasy writing, like The Chronicles of Narnia or Harry Potter or Tolkien [00:09:00] and The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings. You have all of these different genres of literature that are out there, and they read differently one than the other. If you're reading Harry Potter or Tolkien, you're not surprised to find a wizard with a, an ability to do magical incantations and spells.

But if you're reading Larry McMurtry, Lonesome Dove, it would seem kind of odd for Woodrow Call to turn to Augustus McCrae and whip up some chili through some incantation and spell and waving a magic wand. Doesn't fit. Different type of literature, different genre, different ideas. I [00:10:00] was thinking about this over Christmas, obviously.

I mean, I'm gonna be teaching it, and lo and behold, what's being replayed in the comic strips? But Peppermint Patty, over the Christmas break, had to read a book. She'd never read a book before. She got all upset. She spent days and days and days worried about it, trying to figure out how to read a book.

"Snoopy, I have to read a book this week. Do you have something good?" "It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out." "I don't care much for mysteries." "It's not a mystery. It's a Gothic." Genre of literature. By the way, if you're wondering how it turned out, she did wind up passing because she read.

She didn't read a, a book. There's nothing wrong with reading cereal boxes. Some of the best stories I've ever read were on cereal boxes, and you don't have to turn any pages. I predict that someday a cereal box will win the Pulitzer Prize [00:11:00] She read a cereal box instead. We read different types of literature.

Now, this becomes very important because as we've said before, the Bible, even though it's a book in the sense of cover to cover, it's really a collection of books. The Bible is like a library. And it may not hit us so readily when we just have a copy and we might have it at, at home on a shelf or on a, a, a, a coffee table or a bedside table or whatever.

It might not occur to us as readily as it would have in the days of Jesus. Because in the days of Jesus, the Bible was a collection of scrolls, so it was more obviously a [00:12:00] collection of books. Some of the scrolls would have several books all on one scroll. But we know even the New Testament had portions that were written on scrolls, while other portions were likely written on parchments or, or the ancient equivalent of paper for the shorter letter type stuff.

But you can look at the Gospel of Luke, and you can look at Acts of the Apostles, two books written by the same author, and the reason they're two books is because each would take up the measure of a full scroll. The maximum utility of a scroll was about twenty-five feet, so when you ran out of twenty-five feet, you, you didn't just keep glue sticking on some more pages to make the scroll bigger.

Wouldn't roll up, wouldn't [00:13:00] function or any of the rest. So Luke finishes his scroll and starts the next one for Acts. But these were-- the, the Bible began as a collection of scrolls. In fact, if you're translating the Old Testament where it talks about they found the book of the law, that word translated book is the Hebrew word for scroll

When you read the word book in the Bible, you're actually reading an English translation that more appropriately, literally is scrolls. It wasn't until post-biblical writing that books really came into fashion. And a lot of scholarship believes that what propelled books into such a ready acceptance was the church because of a desire to [00:14:00] have a collection of scriptures where you didn't have to roll through twenty-five feet to find that passage in Luke you're worried about.

But where you could simply flip pages in what they called then a codex and more readily study What you will find when you look at the Bible is not a book to be read in one way by those of us who live in the 21st century in the Western world. Instead, you're gonna find a collection of books with a great diversity of how they were written.

Don't get me wrong, all divinely written and inspired by God. But remember what Paul said about God. [00:15:00] Paul referenced the whole world around us. You can look at clouds, you can look at the sky, you can look at the stars, you can look at the water, you can look at all of the things around us, trees and hills, people and animals.

And Paul said this in writing to the church in Rome. Paul said, "God's invisible attributes," those are attributes of God that are invisible And he names two. Namely, his eternal power and his godly or divine nature. They've been clearly perceived, even though they're invisible, clearly perceived ever since he created this world because they're present in the [00:16:00] things that have been made.

So if you think about the complexity and the diversity of this world

it's not surprising that the God who has created such diversity and complexity will do the same with Scripture. His expression in Scripture is one that's gonna be very diverse And it's really kinda cool Now, if we could go back in time two thousand, twenty-one hundred, twenty-two hundred, twenty-three hundred years, and we could go to Alexandria, Egypt, we would find what at the time was probably the world's largest library, i.e.

collection of scrolls In [00:17:00] fact, it was in Alexandria, Egypt, that the now mostly Greek-speaking Mediterranean world needed a copy of the Jewish scrolls that make up what we call the Old Testament. And so the librarians in Alexandria, Egypt, had the Jewish community translate into Greek those ancient Jewish scrolls, and that became what we call today the Septuagint or the Greek Old Testament.

But if you had gone there, I don't think they used the Library of Congress system, but you would have found a wide variety of different genres of writing. You would have found in ancient times history writings, [00:18:00] writings that explain history You would have found writings that had what they would consider epics, epic stories.

They weren't as worried about it being accurate as they were telling a good story and explaining some things. You would have found stories that, or books, scrolls that were filled with poetry. And different-- poetry meant something different in Greece than it meant in Palestine. So books of poetry with different forms and expressions of what that means.

You'd have found some how-to books. Here's how you wanna live in this community. Here's how you're gonna do this. Here's how you're gonna do that. They had how-to books. They had books of teaching. These are books designed to help you learn things about life you need to learn. [00:19:00] They had books of law, not just the law of Egypt, the law of Rome, laws of various city-states in Greece, modern Greece, laws of, of various, uh, uh, countries around the Levant, the ancient Middle East.

They would have books of wisdom that would impart to you good, basic ideas of how to live. They would have books of songs, songbooks And I would suggest to you the Bible as a library has either books or sections within books of all of that

But they also would have had a section of writings called [00:20:00] apocalyptic And that's what I want us to talk about today So this is really not just a study in the Book of Revelation, but today's class, beyond a study in the Book of Revelation, is a study of the apocalyptic genre, because we've got to understand the context of Revelation before we understand the Book of Revelation.

So if we wanna know about the apocalypt- uh, uh, apocalyptic genre of literature, here's the agenda that we'll use for it today. First We're gonna talk about just an overview of what apocalyptic writing is. And then second, I'm gonna give you some various insights into various apocalyptic books. And then third, Dale Hearn is [00:21:00] back with us, so we cannot skimp on points for home.

Though he's always diligent to watch when he's, uh, away in Pennsylvania. He sends, uh, emails telling me where I messed up every week And generally it's get a haircut

So let's, uh, let's look at those. Let's start with, uh, the, uh... Whoops, get up there. There you go. Uh, let's start with the apocalyptic overview. Now, everybody, by and large, maybe you're saying, "Well, that's not me." Okay, not everybody. One of the biggest absolute statements is you can never make an absolute statement.

Everybody loves a good secret, likes to be in on a good secret

Had a friend in [00:22:00] ninth grade, we decided we'd do a secret alphabet where we'd take English letters and come up with these secret signs so that we could make notes, write, do whatever we needed to do, and nobody else would know. It starts young. Everybody loves a good secret, and it's no different. You know, in ancient Greece, they had this whole set of religions that scholars today call mystery religions because they use that word musterion.

They use that word mystery. And these religions date back 600 years before Jesus, and they, they were religions where if you wanted in on the religion, you had to get in on the secrets. And some of the secrets would be like, um... Oh, they especially had a lot of them that dealt with the gods of the [00:23:00] underworld because those are the gods with power over life and death.

If you wanted to be saved by the gods of the underworld under some of these mystery religions, you'd have these secret rites, the secret sacrifices you'd do. But they were real psst, psst, psst, psst secret. You don't let the world know this stuff. You do not want salvation overrun with riffraff. You want only the cream of the crop.

So you get an invite into the secret society. You learn the secret handshake. You learn the secret sacrifice. You get the secret perks. And they had entirely they had these religious groups just cropping up for centuries based on that. The early church, one of the biggest heresies of the first 300 years of the church

was when the church started becoming [00:24:00] Hellenized, Greekified, we might say, and this idea of secret religion started permeating the idea of the church. We call this Gnosticism, off of the Greek word gnosis, which means to know And, and the idea was that if you wanna really know the secrets of Christianity, then you can join our little subgroup 'cause we got secrets nobody else knows.

We understand the divine heavenlies the way no one else does. We understand Jesus the way nobody else does. And this was such a huge heresy because it, it devolved into two separate kind of groups in a way, and one of the groups denied that Jesus was ever truly physically God incarnate[00:25:00]

One of the other groups denied that Jesus was a direct son of God or, or God in its, uh, in, in God's fullness. Instead teaching that there were all of these intermediary gods along the way, or angels. There were lots of different permutations of this, but this was the idea of secrecy and in on the inner secrets.

Now, this was not unique to Greece. This was not unique to early Christianity's heresy. You will find in biblical-era Judaism the same idea of secrets and mysteries, although most of those sought to be explained. They weren't for an exclusive club as much [00:26:00] as they were a way to teach and a way to answer life's problems and, and things of this nature We never realized how many there were, we being the thinking, uh, um, the, the, the, the world of people studying this stuff, I should say, um, until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

This is, uh, um, an actual ruin of the, the, the Essene community out there by Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were prepared. But among the Dead Sea Scrolls that were discovered in the late 1940s and ongoing after that, there was a wealth of material that was, quote, "apocalyptic." Now at this point, we need to define what I mean by apocalyptic Apocalyptic is the idea.

First of all, it's kind of a fuzzy word that gets [00:27:00] used, misused, abused by lots of different people in lots of different fashions. So recognizing that it's kind of a slippery word, let's just say that apocalyptic, when speaking of antiquity, ancient apocalyptic... By the way, it's an, it's an adjective, not a noun.

Apocaly-- so we don't say apocalyptic as we'll say apocalyptic literature. But when speaking of antiquity, it can refer to a type of writing, which is what we'll be talking about. It can refer to a religion, an apocalyptic religion. But it doesn't always mean the end of time. So when we speak of apocalyptic literature, we're not always speaking of the end of time.

Now, having said that, there's an entire genre of material out there. There is a, a wealth of writings, ancient writings that are this type of literature, [00:28:00] apocalyptic literature. And apocalyptic literature, if I were to try and explain it in my way of thinking, it's the idea that you discern divine secrets by dreams or visions or an angelic explanation.

But the apocalyptic literature means how we are going to learn things that aren't apparent about the divine or the divine's plans or the divine's creation. And so we're going to learn that through dreams or through visions or maybe an angel explaining it. But it's this unveiling in a typically a prose fashion, a narrative type fashion [00:29:00] of divine secrets.

And, and that is apocalyptic Now, let me adjust this. The apocalyptic material can deal with the past, so we can get divine secrets about what has happened, or we can have divine secrets about what's happening right now Or we can understand divine insight into the future. All of that can be found in apocalyptic literature in one place or another So with this idea of discerning divine secrets by dreams, by visions, by angelic ex-explanation, let me give you some of the features that are [00:30:00] typically, but not always, found in these apocalyptic writings First, they are rich in symbolism These are not It's not just bluntness of, "Hey, this is the past.

Boom." Like you might read it in a history book. Instead, it'll have a divine insight that's not so obvious about the past, and it'll be told through symbols. The same about the present. In a lot of apocalyptic material, Rome, the empire of Rome, is called Babylon. That's the symbol for Rome Y- it'll talk about the, the future, but it, it [00:31:00] won't just say, "Hey, uh, today I'm gonna eat lunch at Tony's Pizza Oven."

It, it will, it will do it in symbolism, typically. Now, a lot of people, when you start saying, 'cause, hey, I'm gonna tell you, Revelation is apocalyptic writing, and a lot of people say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. We cannot ever say anything in the Bible is symbolic, because if the Bible is symbolic here, how do we know the resurrection wasn't symbolic as well?"

Well, we know that because it says it wasn't symbolic. It says that he physically was resurrected. Stick your fingers in him. It's not part of apocalyptic literature in the Gospels. You don't suddenly have a verse of symbolism stuck into a very clearly literal narrative. [00:32:00] We should not panic over the idea that God has at his creative disposal for us a wealth of ways to communicate.

Please understand Reading the Chronicles of Narnia and knowing that those are symbolic and allegorical, which they clearly are. Knowing that does not mean that we're gonna d-- well, then World War II maybe didn't happen, because if something's symbolic, then... No, he wrote them during World War II. World War II did happen.

But those are clearly symbolic. The parables of Jesus, they don't have to be factual events or, well, there must not be a resurrection, 'cause how do we know that wasn't just a [00:33:00] parable? Because it's not a parable. See, we've got to be good students who read God's Word in context. We honor God and His Word when we read it in context.

The writer of Hebrews says y- y- you know, y- you don't wanna just sustain your Christian walk in milk. You'd like to grow past the milk stage. We were with our ten-month-old granddaughter, Zoe, and I got to hold Zoe on my lap for breakfast. She was not enjoying, when she's on my lap, anything other than edible food.

I have not nor would I ever have been able to nurse a child. I cannot provide mother's milk. But [00:34:00] she can demolish scrambled eggs and have a real good time doing it, and I can't wait until she's old enough for me to give her Texas barbecue We honor God's Word when we read it as grown-ups, when we read it as students, when we read it in context.

So, for example, another book of the Bible that is apocalyptic is the Book of Daniel. This, if you wanna take it literally, is Daniel chapter seven. Here's what it says. "I saw in my vision," apocalyptic. It's communication through a vision, a dream, an angel. "And behold, the four winds of heaven," they're up there, "were stirring up the Great Sea."

Here's the Great Sea. So you got the north wind, south wind, [00:35:00] east wind, west wind. You got four winds stirring up the Great Sea, okay? Continues. "And four great beasts come up out of the sea, different from one another." Let's look at them. "The first was like a lion and had eagle's wings. Then as I looked, its wings were plucked off, and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man, and the mind of a man was given to it."

All right? Second, behold another beast, a second one. It was like a bear. It was raised up on one side, it had three ribs in its mouth between its teeth, and it was told, "Get up and devour flesh." Then you got your third one. After this, I looked and behold another. It was like a [00:36:00] leopard with four wings, uno, dos, tres, cuatro, of a bird on its back, and the beast had uno, dos, tres, cuatro heads, and dominion was given to it.

Then you got the fourth one. After this, in the night visions, and behold, fourth beast, terrifying and dreadful, exceedingly strong. It had iron teeth. That's old iron tooth there. It had iron teeth. It devoured and broke in pieces and stamped what was left with its feet. It was different from all the beasts that were before it, and it had 10 horns.

Count them. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine... 10? No, that's a tooth. Wait, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine This artist was really bad. [00:37:00] But you get the idea

Now, we need to know there's a difference between prophecy and apocalyptic literature. Prophecy is a thus saith the Lord, and it's a prophetic statement, maybe about the present, maybe about the future. Apocalyptic is this other genre. However, the two often overlap. So you're gonna find Revelation, for example, is a book of apocalyptic, but it's also a book of prophecy.

But by and large, they, they, they use different approaches. They are written in different forms. Most apocalyptic is written in much more prose. A lot of prophecy borders on poetry, even if it's not poetry itself. But all of this, the features, it's rich in symbolism. Let me give you another feature. They used numbers [00:38:00] differently.

Numerology. And I had brought with me to place on the Elmo, or IPEVO, I had brought with me a wonderful example from the book First Enoch Where the writer says, talking about these fallen angels, and it says, "They want to live forever. They wanna live 500 years." Well, I mean, which is it? Well, five hundred years was an expression that meant forever.

It was a number, and we will talk about how numbers had symbolic meanings beyond their literal mathematical meaning as we go through this. You'll see it in other places too. It says there were thousands upon thousands upon millions upon millions of angels, more than you could count. But yet it gave a count if you wanna do the [00:39:00] math.

It just means those numbers give an idea of what's going on. So you've got rich in numbers. You've also typically got, not always, warring angels and demons. And so if you go back and you read, for example, in Fourth Ezra, also called Second Esdras, you can go back and read about the big battle that's gonna take place between the angels and the demons.

You start reading First Enoch, and at the start of First Enoch, the first several chapters talk about the fallen angels and the big fight because God's gotta engage Gabriel and Michael, and they're gonna have a big war. And this is all before the flood, when the fallen angels are finding women attractive and giving birth to giants, which was the understanding that the writers of that book had about what Genesis six meant.

So you've got warring [00:40:00] angels and demons typically in these books. You typically will have some things that talk about the end times or the new age that'll be coming. And you'll find a host of, of things that talk about the battle at the end of the age, the judgment at the end of the age, and, and, and doing it in symbols and doing it with numbers and doing it with all of these different things, and ushering in the new Jerusalem, which you'll read about in Revelation, an apocalyptic book.

But you'll read about the new-- You can go back, if you're ever curious You can go back to 1 Enoch, and you can read about where the tree of life is, 'cause God reveals it to him. It's a secret known by heaven. One of the re-- there are a bunch of Enoch books, by the way. One of the reasons why, Enoch was the fella in the Old Testament genealogy.

It says that, you know, m- [00:41:00] you got Adam, he lives, he dies. You got s- you know, his, uh, Cain and Abel, blah, blah, but then Seth, who lives and dies. You get on down, you get to Enoch. He lives, has kids, but he doesn't die. He was not, for God took him. So the thinking in the Jews' mindset, thousands of years later, is, "Hey, he got taken by God.

He would've been shown the divine secrets. Maybe he came back and told us about some of them." So you have the end times and the new age. Again, these aren't always present, but these are to reveal divine secrets. And so that's what you've got here. And while they're not all present, it all sort of feels the same, and that's your apocalyptic review.[00:42:00]

Now, let's go to the next. Let's talk about some of the apocalyptic books. There would have been a big shelf for us if we had put these up on a shelf, and we can put them into various buckets. I'm not-- uh, you can do three buckets, five buckets, seven buckets, nine buckets, two buckets. I'm just gonna look at them in two senses.

I want us to talk about those that are in the Bible And I want us to talk about those that are in a group of writings that are called the pseudepigraphal writings. This comes pseudo is fake. Epigraphal means we don't really know who wrote these. This is not the apocrypha that's in the Catholic Bible and not in the Protestant Bible.

These are other works that were present at the time the Bible was being written and put together. [00:43:00] But they don't belong in scripture

by most thought. Biblical apocalyptic literature. The obvious one is Daniel that we were already talking about A second one would be Revelation. In fact, Revelation begins... Oh, get Daniel back up there. Revelation begins with Apocalypsis Jesu Christi. Apocalypsis, that's A, that's P, that's O, that's K or C, A, L, a U can be a Y.

That's a P-S-I-S. The first word in the entire book is the word we get [00:44:00] apocalyptic from That is apocalyptic literature. The first, the, it's translated Revelation, a revealing of the divine vision. But it's a collection of seven visions. So you've got the Book of Revelation. Then there are some other apocalyptic parts in the Bible.

Some you'll find in Zechariah. Oh, look at Zechariah. I took one of the visions of Zechariah out for you and put it up here. Zechariah 1:18 through 21. "I lifted my eyes, I saw," the vision, "behold, four horns. I said to the angel who talked with me, 'What are these?' Angel said, 'These are the horns that have scattered Judah, Israel, and Jerusalem.'"

Trust me, Israel, Judah, and Jerusalem were not scattered by a horn that came [00:45:00] down and started doing this. That's not to be taken literally. It's a symbol of the powers that scattered these nations. "Then the Lord showed me four craftsmen. And I said, 'What are these coming to do?'" So we got the past, we've got the future.

He said, "These are the horns that scattered Judah so that no one raised his head, and these have come to terrify them", the four craftsmen, "to cast down the horns of the nation who lifted up their horns against the land of Judah to scatter it." A horn was very typically associated with a ruling power.

Kings back then would frequently wear helmets with horns. Not just Vikings, like real kings. So some of Zechariah is apocalyptic. Some of Isaiah some believe are apocalyptic. It meets their definition. Some of Ezekiel. But those are the biblical works. The pseudepigraphal works are very different [00:46:00] in some ways, but also very instructive.

I've referenced you already The Book of Enoch. We will look at it some more. I'll tell you that if you wanna read about some of the Book of Enoch, you can read in your Bible because the Letter of Jude quotes from The Book of Enoch. By the way, the Book of Enoch was missing from the church for over 1,000 years.

It was discovered in the 1700s translated into Ethiopian. Since, they've found some more versions of it, um, including, uh, uh, some presence in, in, in more normal places. But by, by more normal that you associate with a lot of these manuscripts. But if you look at Jude verses 14 and 15

It says, "It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from [00:47:00] Adam, prophesied, saying, quote, 'Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness they've committed in such an ungodly way, and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him.'"

That's a quote from this Book of Enoch. Now you might be saying, "Well, does that mean it's biblical?" Well, heavens no. The Bible quotes from Herod. The Bible quotes from Pilate

But this was an Ethiopian manuscript that we found that gave us... And, and the book, it's really cool. So the first few chapters are kinda introductory. Chapter 6 through 19 has this elaborate account of how the angels fell. Then you've got the universe explained with the center of Earth and hell. You'll find, uh, the tree of life and where it is.

Then it talks about the future kingdom [00:48:00] of God. And then chapters 45 to 57, the Son of Man comes. Uses the Son of Man over and over and over, and he comes as the Messiah. The Son of Man's the anci- uh, uh, from before time. He exi- sits on the throne of God. Um, chapters 58 through 71, the glories of the conquering Messiah.

And then there's a whole bunch of stuff at the end that's just kinda like what's everything we meant to put in here but didn't. Um, you got the Book of Enoch. We will look at it more Paul was familiar with it. That's apparent from reading the writings of Paul. It was well known in the New Testament. It's kinda like the Chronicles of Narnia.

I'll bet if I asked for hands to be raised, most of you would know something about it. I could use that as an illustration in my sermon, or if I was writing Jude, I could say, "Hey, it's like Aslan said, blah, blah, blah." Doesn't mean I think Aslan was a lion walking around talking. It's something you would all get, and the [00:49:00] readers of Jude got it.

Uh, there's over a dozen of these o- ancient Jewish books. There's Fourth Ezra. Uh, I don't have time to get into that, but it's a series of seven visions, just like Revelation. It's a powerful testimony of God Most High, as it addresses questions of why are the wicked prospering? And it offers a view of the end time with the Messiah and how he'll come back and judge the living and the dead.

You've got the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Apocalypse of Baruch. You've got a ton more. You've also got apocalyptic literature written by the early church. You've got over a dozen. You've got Hermas, or The Shepherd of Hermas, it's also called, which is a collection of visions. You've got the Apocalypse of Peter.

This was a type of literature. It was a writing form And so we will be studying [00:50:00] Revelation as one of those writing forms to try to better understand it. Spoiler alert, the key to understanding Revelation, in my opinion, is first understanding Daniel. The two go hand in hand. God's given us a great key to it in Daniel.

So here are your points for home. Number one, there are treasures in God's Word

I'm talking cool, deep, marvelous treasures. God doesn't want them held as secrets. They're there for us to study and to grow. Now, please don't ever miss the obvious in God's Word. There is a God. He made you. He's called you by name. You're a fallen person, but He's bought you through the finished work of Christ on the cross, who is resurrected from the [00:51:00] dead, the first, and we are buried with Him and raised with Him, and we have eternal life in Him.

Those you can't miss But scripture even beyond that, Paul says to Timothy, his child of the faith who traveled with him and did mission work with him Paul says to Timothy, s- and I love the King James here, "Study to show yourself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth."

There is a joy to studying scripture in depth beyond mother's milk. Don't ever get away from the fundamental truths because they guide our understanding. This isn't a [00:52:00] secret club that makes us super spiritual. This is just a chance to understand God better, and in the process, understand our life better

Point for home number two. You think about the intricacies of DNA in a world of a universe that's so big we can't see the end of it And remember that God's invisible attributes, His eternal power, His divine nature have been clearly perceived in all of these things? Oh, the breadth and depth of our God Wow.

And he's got so many ways he's shown us this, including scripture. So we're not afraid. By the Holy Spirit, we seek knowledge and understanding to enrich us in Christ in our life. [00:53:00] And then last point for home, God loves you, and that is no secret, and you don't need an angel to tell you. You know it because Jesus Christ died for you.

There's not a person in here, not a person watching he didn't die for

And so this is how we'll begin our study in Revelation. In two weeks, we will talk about the basic structure of the book and understanding it in light of Daniel. But right now, would you pray with me? Lord, we thank you that you've given us this time together this morning. We thank you for the riches of your Word.

Forgive us when we've shied away From seeking the, the, the, the deep ri-riches you've offered us there. We want to know you better. We want to understand you and our world better. We want insight that gives us courage to face the day, [00:54:00] that gives us strength for the challenges ahead. That gives us glorious confidence and hope for the deliverance that you bring That sustains us, that shapes us and molds us And that brings us closer to you.

We pray all of this through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen