Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship's Bible study in the Book of Revelation.  Tonight is study #3 of Revelation, chapter 10, and we are going to be reading Revelation 10:2-3:

And he had in his hand a little book open: and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices.

I will stop reading there.  This refers to the “mighty messenger” that came down from heaven.  We saw from our description in verse 1 that this is none other than Jesus Christ and “he had in his hand a little book open.”  The “little book,” we also saw, is a reference to the Bible.  We saw that it should have been literally translated as, “a little book having been open.”  It indicates a prior action by Christ; He is the one that took the seven seals off the Bible at the time of the end, in order for God to bring greater understanding and truth to His people that are living at the time of the end.

So now Jesus is appearing in the context of the “second woe” and the sixth trumpet.  As we saw, the “three woes” have to do with Judgment Day, which began on May 21, 2011.  God has just gone through quite a lot of detail, in chapter 9, with the locusts and the 200 million, which is describing His wrath being poured out at that time and throughout the entire period of the prolonged Judgment Day, and there is a good possibility the duration is 1,600 days.

Then chapter 9 ended and we get to our current chapter and it is almost a sort of “intermission,” we might think.  God had been talking about the “three woes” and He was getting into the “second woe,” and the “second woe” He will pick up again in chapter 11, and then He will say in Revelation 11:14: “The second woe is past; and, behold, the third woe cometh quickly.”  Then what is chapter 10?  Is it a break?  Is it an intermission or a time to regroup?  No – it is a very important chapter in which God indicates that in the Day of Judgment (which we are in right now) He will come and bring further revelation to His people, and that is why it says, “the little book having been open” is in the hand of Christ.  The information that had been sealed up began to come forth at the time of the Great Tribulation and the Great Tribulation continued for twenty three years. 

We witnessed with our own eyes God’s process for bringing forth truth.  He did not open the Book and then make every doctrine and understanding come forth immediately, all at once, and there it is and now everyone knows it instantly.  Rather, it was over the course of years that God brought forth His “treasures” and His wonderful teaching.  Every truth is a wonderful thing, no matter what the truth is, and God brought forth the truth that we are saved by the “faith of Christ,” and He showed through His Word that it is Jesus’ faith and not man’s faith.  You know, that was previously never thoroughly known and taught in church history.  It was not until the time of the Great Tribulation. 

God also brought forth the doctrine of the end of the church age, the doctrine of annihilation, the doctrine of Christ dying and making payment for sin from the foundation of the world and the doctrine that the cross in 33 A.D. was a tableau.  God also brought forth the information of “time,” wherein we were able to lay out the Biblical calendar of history and pinpoint, with precise detail, the end of the church age, the beginning of the Great Tribulation, the grievous period of the first 2,300 evening mornings, the beginning of the “latter rain” when God began to send forth the Gospel outside the churches to recover the remnant of His people, the period of the “latter rain” being about seventeen years in length, the conclusion of the Great Tribulation and the end of the “latter rain,” and then Judgment Day.  God brought forth all of this information and much more – many truths accompanied these things. 

So, as we have entered into the time period of “those days after that tribulation” and into those days which the Bible calls Judgment Day, God has continued to bring more and more understanding of the written Word.  It is so much information that He has reserved and stored up for the Great Tribulation and this current time of Judgment Day that it is almost as if it is a “another covenant.”  That is how He actually speaks of it in Hebrews 8:8: “For finding fault with them, he saith, Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, when I will make a new covenant…”  The “them” that is referred to in Hebrews 8:8 is the Old Testament and the New Testament, but, of course, the fault is not with the Bible, but it is with our weak and frail ability to comprehend and understand the Bible.  So God determined to bring about a time of understanding and a time of “unsealing” His Word and He (through His Spirit) is making sure the proper understanding is taking root and that His people are grasping these things.  This is continuing today and this is why Christ is making this appearance, in Revelation 10, and it is why He has the “little book” in His hand that was “having been open.”  He is letting us know that the process of understanding divine revelation is not finished. 

So He comes and He has the Book and He “set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth.”  We know that everything in the Bible has great significance, so we wonder what the significance is of Christ setting His feet upon the sea and the earth.  Why does God tell us that?  It is not just an incidental statement; of course it would have great meaning.   We know that God is the creator of the earth and the sea and sometimes He points that out, but normally He includes the heaven – He would speak of the heaven, the earth and the sea.  He does that in a few places, but, here, the heaven is not mentioned: “He set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth.”

First, let us do what we normally would do to understand anything in the Bible.  We look up the words.  What does the “sea” represent?  What does the “earth” represent?  When we do that, there are some very helpful verses.  It says in Isaiah 57:20-21:

But the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.

So this is a very good possibility.  Christ is putting his foot upon the “sea,” and it is as though the “wicked” are beneath His foot.  But, what about the earth?   In Isaiah 34, which is also a chapter that focuses on judgment, it says in Isaiah 34:1:

Come near, ye nations, to hear; and hearken, ye people: let the earth hear, and all that is therein; the world, and all things that come forth of it.

Here, we find God addressing the nations: “Come near, ye nations, to hear; and hearken, ye people.”  He wants the people of the world to hear, and then He says, “Let the earth hear,” and this is basically a restatement of the first part of the verse.  The “earth” represents the people of the earth and we can see why God would make this sort of identification, because man comes from the “dust of the ground.”  We are of the “earth,” so, certainly, the “earth” can be used by God as a figure to represent men. 

This means that both the “sea” and the “earth” can be a type and figure of people and, in this case, it would be the unsaved people of the world.  Remember what we had learned: May 21, 2011, was a time of great victory for the Lord Jesus Christ and the kingdom of God.  It was a time when Satan was defeated and when the armies of Satan were defeated.  So, here, Christ is making His appearance, as it were, in the Day of Judgment and He is appearing in glory and victory and He has the Bible in His hand, an “open book” at that time.  He sets His right foot upon the sea and His left foot upon the earth because all the wicked people of the world are now under His feet.  Remember what God says in 1 Corinthians 15:24-28:

Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For he hath put all things under his feet. But when he saith all things are put under him, it is manifest that he is excepted, which did put all things under him. And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.

We can see through these verses in 1 Corinthians 15 that to be “under his feet” means that you have been conquered or subdued.  Christ must reign until He puts all enemies under His feet.  We saw earlier in the Book of Revelation that the Lord Jesus has been ruling since the date God warned the world about – May 21, 2011 – and He has been ruling with “a rod of iron.”  He has been ruling over the wicked people of the world; they are in submission to Him.  It does not matter if they know that, or not, because the spiritual reality is the important thing.  They are under His dominion, so He is appearing in this vivid illustration in Revelation 10 to teach us that:

“He set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth.”

Let us move on to Revelation 10:3-4:

And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices. And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.

Here, we find Jesus crying with a loud voice and that cry is likened to “as when a lion roareth: and when he had cried, seven thunders uttered their voices.”  It is quite a verse which indicates that this “mighty messenger,” the Lord Jesus Christ has the Word of God open in His hand and He is set above all the wicked of the earth and, at that time, He cries with “a loud voice, as when a lion roareth.”

Now we know that the Lord Jesus is typified as a lion.  He is called “the Lion of the tribe of Judah.”  We also know that when God speaks it is related to a lion’s roar.  We find a couple of verses you are probably familiar with, starting in Amos 3:7:

Surely the Lord JEHOVAH will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.

It starts off with this very comforting verse that assures us that the same God (who is the same yesterday, today and for ever) forewarned Noah of the flood and the same God forewarned Lot of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the same God forewarned Abraham of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the same God sent Jonah to forewarn the people of Nineveh, and this same God certainly will not do something as great as the final destruction of the world without first forewarning and revealing “his secret unto his servants the prophets.”  It is very comforting that God has given us this type of statement and we ought to expect that in the time of the end there would be information coming forth from the Bible revealing the time and the season, and so forth, and that is exactly what God did.

Let us read a few more verses here, in Amos 3:4-8:

Will a lion roar in the forest, when he hath no prey? will a young lion cry out of his den, if he have taken nothing? Can a bird fall in a snare upon the earth, where no gin is for him? shall one take up a snare from the earth, and have taken nothing at all? Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and JEHOVAH hath not done it? Surely the Lord JEHOVAH will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets. The lion hath roared, who will not fear? the Lord JEHOVAH hath spoken, who can but prophesy?

I hope you see the connection God makes between the lion’s roar and the fact that “JEHOVAH hath spoken, who can but prophesy?”  God likens the lion’s roar to the Words that come out of His mouth.

People fear when they hear the roar of a lion.  Of course, I have never had that experience in a jungle setting somewhere, but some men have, and you can be sure that when they hear the lion’s roar there is great fear.  Likewise, when God speaks, “who can but prophesy?”  We can also see how this is tied into the “blowing of the trumpet” and the reason God gave His people advance notification of the Day of Judgment; it was so they could perform their role of watchmen and “blow the trumpet to warn the people,” if the people were in their right minds, but sad to say, the unsaved people of the world are not.  They are “mad.”  They have no true understanding of what ought to be feared and what should not be feared.  God is certainly one to be feared.  God gave His people the task to fulfill the watchman’s role and to blow the trumpet and share the information that was coming forth from the Word of God.

Notice in Amos 3:8 that when the lion roars it is connected to God speaking and “Who can but prophesy?”  In our chapter in Revelation 10, we find that Christ (the lion) roars and toward the end of the chapter, it says in Revelation 10:11:

And he said unto me, Thou must prophesy again before many peoples, and nations, and tongues, and kings.

You see, God indicates in Amos that when He speaks, “Who can but prophesy?”  He is saying, “You, my people, will prophesy when I speak,” and Revelation 10:11 says, “Thou must prophesy again.”  It is connected to the lion’s roar.  It is connected to God speaking and in Revelation 10.  It is also connected to Judgment Day, the present time in which we live.

Let us go back to our verse in Revelation 10:3:

And cried with a loud voice, as when a lion roareth…

Let us go to Jeremiah 25, that very helpful chapter where God lays out His judgment program as a series of “cups.”  First, He gives the “cup of wrath” to the people called by His name when judgment began at the house of God; then He will take the “cup” from them and give it to the nations of the world.  That would happen at the end of the Great Tribulation and the time of transition to judgment on the entire world.  We find in Jeremiah 25:29:

For, lo, I begin to bring evil on the city which is called by my name, and should ye be utterly unpunished?...

Now let us stop a second.  First of all, God is recognizing that He has brought judgment on the churches (the city called by His name), but He is speaking to the rest of the people of the world.  That is why He says, “Should ye be utterly unpunished.”  It goes on to say in Jeremiah 25:29:

… Ye shall not be unpunished: for I will call for a sword upon all the inhabitants of the earth, saith the LORD of hosts.

This is that day of transition from judgment exclusively on the churches and now expanded to include all the unsaved individuals in the world.  That day of transition took place on May 21, 2011.

Then it says in Jeremiah 25:30:

Therefore prophesy thou against them all these words…

Now notice, again, that God is commanding that we prophesy and it is to prophesy against the inhabitants of the earth.  This is another verse that indicates that we are not to keep silent and not to conceal these things, but to publish it.

Therefore prophesy thou against them all these words, and say unto them, JEHOVAH shall roar from on high, and utter his voice from his holy habitation; he shall mightily roar upon his habitation; he shall give a shout, as they that tread the grapes, against all the inhabitants of the earth.

We have so many bits of information that fit so perfectly with the things that are happening today that it is hard to know where to start.  First of all, again, in Jeremiah 25:30 it says, “Therefore prophesy thou against them all these words,” and that is tied with JEHOVAH roaring: “JEHOVAH shall roar from on high, and utter his voice.”  Just as in Amos 3:8, it links the word the lion’s roar to the voice of God and it links “prophesying” (as it says in Revelation 10, “Thou must prophesy again,”) and here in Amos, God says, “Therefore prophesy thou against them.”  He is uttering his voice “from his holy habitation,” and that would be His body of believers.  As He guides His people into truth and moves them to proclaim these things, it is the Word of God, and when we compare spiritual with spiritual, it is the Holy Ghost that speaketh, and that is JEHOVAH’S “roar.”

Notice also that it says: “He shall give a shout, as they that tread the grapes.”  Remember Revelation 14:20 where the Lord Jesus is treading the winepress and the blood comes out of the winepress “unto sixteen hundred furlongs.”  It represents this entire period of Judgment Day – 1,600 days in which God is “roaring” and uttering His voice and He commands His people to prophesy.