- Jul 15Week 28The Book of Revelation, Part 38
Presently, the Scriptures only give us sketchy details about our life after the resurrection and in the kingdom of God that is coming to earth. They’re awesome sketches, and we’re promised that the reality is going to be much better than our present minds can even conceive. He has only given us these brief sketches now because we do not need all the details about how wonderful it is going to be. However, we need to have clear marching orders for what we’re here to do. This is what we must focus on now: doing the job we’re here to do.
To review, in Isaiah 40 we’re told to prepare the way for Him by building a highway. This highway is God’s higher way. It is His higher way to do all that we are doing—government, education, family, business, media, and everything else—God’s way. We are to prepare for the construction of a new social order, which is much better than anything we have now and is a bridge to the age to come.
Our calling now is to seek God for His wisdom and strength to do everything His way. His ways are revealed in His Word, and obedience to His call begins by searching out His ways. A major purpose of this study is to know His ways, and how we should begin applying them now to prepare for His coming kingdom. The books of Daniel and Revelation give us a good outline for this.
As covered, every seed that has been sown in mankind must be allowed to come to maturity, and then be reaped, before the kingdom comes. This will show all of creation the results of trying to run this world without God. When this ultimate drama has played out, no one should ever be deceived again by the folly of not living according to God’s ways. The history of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil will be obvious to all, and so will the fruit of the Tree of Life.
The mature fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is the “man of sin,” who declares himself to be God but is the personification of the sin of man and is antichrist, or the opposite of Christ’s nature. However, this counterfeit of Christ will be honored and enshrined by men, and it is prophesied that the whole world will follow after it for a time.
The Scriptures declare that this distortion of Christ and His nature will release some of the most diabolical evil the earth has seen. Again, this is the ultimate maturity of the sin of man. This “beast” will rage against the Lord’s people, who are both the spiritual and physical seeds of Abraham through whom the true Christ came to the earth and in whom He now dwells.
What man is building often seems good, but is a substitute for the city God is building, and it will fully reveal its true nature in the end. Yet, there are some obvious blessings from God on the church that man has built for Him. How is this? We know that many of God’s people are in this counterfeit church, and He will bless His people as much as He can wherever they are, just as He did Egypt and other nations where they were carried into captivity. However, there is a time recorded in Revelation 18:4 when He says, “Come out of her, My people.”
Is the good that is being accomplished by something we’re a part of the “good” of the Tree of Knowledge, or is it from the Tree of Life? Man’s good can be very different from God’s. The good from the Tree of knowledge results in us worshipping ourselves—mankind—in place of our Creator and only leads to death. The Tree of Life results in eternal life.
In one of the most important biblical metaphors, Egypt is a type of this present evil age, and Pharaoh is a type of Satan, who seeks to keep God’s people in bondage. Moses is a type of Christ, who was sent to set God’s people free, as Moses explained in Deuteronomy 18:15. There is a time when God will call His people to come out of the domain of Satan, and He will send great power to do it. This power will not totally destroy this world, just as He did not totally destroy Egypt through Moses, though it was severely damaged. More importantly, He destroyed all of the gods of Egypt, just as He will destroy all of the false gods of this world.
This clash at the end of this age is called the “great time of trouble,” because just as Egypt was so wrecked by Pharaoh’s attempt to hold on to his slaves and keep God’s people in bondage, so will this world suffer similar upheaval and destruction by Satan’s attempt to hold on to his present power.
Satan does have power over God’s people, gaining it in virtually the same way that Pharaoh did. God’s people sought haven in Pharaoh’s domain when the famine came upon the earth, just as Christians have today in many ways sought relief from this world instead of God. This will always lead to bondage.
This leads us to questions, such as, “Didn’t God set up Jacob and his family to take haven in Egypt to preserve them?” Yes, and we see that He often intervened in the fate of His people in Scripture to establish and preserve His biblical types and prophetic models. This was all so we could better understand these times, as we’re told in 1 Corinthians 10:1-11. Many of these are further explained in the book of Revelation, as we will see.