Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship's Bible study in the Book of Revelation.  Tonight is study #21 of Revelation, chapter 11, and we are going to read Revelation 11:11-12:

And after three days and an half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them. And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them.

We are continuing to look slowly and carefully at the things we read in God’s Word, verse by verse.   We are not trying to avoid any passage or any Scripture in the Bible.  We are attempting to take into consideration all God has to say.  This is why we are going, verse by verse, through the Book of Revelation and it is why we have gone, verse by verse, in previous studies in places that discuss the end of the world and Judgment Day.  We want to learn everything we possibly can that may relate and we do not want to miss anything.  We are trying to follow God’s methodology of comparing Scripture with Scripture, in order to come to right conclusions and, so far, God has been gracious to us in opening up the information from His Word to our understanding and we have been able to go (thus far) in our study in the Book of Revelation up to chapter 11. 

This is probably the only verse-by-verse Bible study of this Book being performed and it is being done by God’s people – those that have come out of the churches.  Yes, there are probably studies being done within the churches by their theologians, but, I am sorry to say, those studies mean nothing because God has left the churches and congregations and He is working outside of the churches with His people.  That is where the Lord’s people are found and that is where the Lord’s people will be doing a proper Bible study.  You cannot perform a proper Bible study in a corporate church, as a pastor or theologian of the church, when God has decreed that the church age is over and that all His people were to come out of the churches.  How can any faithful Bible study be done in a rebellious setting?  If anyone had stayed behind they would be giving evidence that they were never saved and, actually, it is a “done deal.”  It is finished and God has ended the church age; He has bound all those that remained in the churches as tares and, in this Day of Judgment, He has cast them (spiritually) into the fire of His wrath. 

You cannot expect there to be any legitimate Bible study coming forth from the churches, so it is outside the churches that we look for a ministry or individuals that are honestly and Biblically, according to God’s methods of coming to truth, studying these things.  And then we look to see if anyone is studying these things by carefully going through the Bible in order to find truth and discover what God has done.  Even if a ministry or an individual has a different idea of what God did on May 21, 2011 and what He is doing in this period, then they still should be performing proper Bible study to explain their position.  They should be going through a Book in the Bible, like the Book of Revelation, which deals with the Great Tribulation and the end of the world, and then they should be showing from the Bible what happened on May 21, 2011, instead of just saying, “Nothing happened.” 

You know, some people say, “Well something happened (on May 21, 2011), but we do not know what it was.”  That is just “double talk” to say that nothing happened.  If you believe nothing happened, then just say nothing happened; do not try to cover that up by saying, “Oh, yes, something wonderful and glorious happened and some grand event did take place.  We cannot deny that, but we just do not know what it is.”  That is ridiculous – they knew what it was previous to May 21.  They had said that May 21, 2011 was Judgment Day and the Bible guarantees it and locks it in, but now they do not know what it was?  They just do not want to say what they believe, which is that they believe it was “nothing.”  So they would have to explain what they think that date means and where we are in relationship to the Great Tribulation because if you believe God is judging the churches and that judgment occurs simultaneously with that Great Tribulation, then where are we, in time, concerning that Great Tribulation?  When did the Great Tribulation begin?  When did it end and when did these things take place?

We have not seen any in-depth studies that address this at all – not to any degree.  There have been a couple of verses that have been put forth, like John 9:4…and this is ironic because John 9:4 teaches exactly what EBible Fellowship teaches and that is that there was a “day of salvation” and Christ works while it is day, but the night comes when He will not work.  This is exactly what we are teaching.  Or, they might refer to a couple of other passages, but there is no thoroughness, no diligence and no deep study performed of Daniel, Jeremiah 50 and 51, Isaiah,  Revelation, Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21 or Ezekiel – all of these Books that must be studied.  Therefore, we can know this: when people say that God is saving today, that statement is not based on careful Bible study, in any way.  That statement is a “default statement,” because they cannot explain what happened on May 21, 2011.  They have no idea where we are in regard to the Great Tribulation.  They are not doing in-depth Bible study in any way, shape or form.  They just fall back on a couple of verses that (apparently) teach ongoing salvation, without taking into consideration the vast amount of other Scriptures that disannul that idea.  The Scriptures are saying that when the Bible pinpointed May 21, 2011 as the Day of Judgment, this was exactly what it meant.  When the Biblical calendar of history fell so perfectly into place and laid out the Great Tribulation and the dates for that 23-year period and the date for the beginning of Judgment Day and all of these dates fell on important feast days, and so forth, God was locking in that day and no one has been able to disprove it; no one has been able to show error regarding it.  And this is the problem. 

This is the problem the true believer encounters with those that are insisting there is still salvation.  All we have to go on is “their insistence” but they have not done careful Bible study and they do not present any evidence disproving any of the things that EBible Fellowship is teaching.  They simply say, “God must save,” and they say it with firm assurance and authority.  I can find all sorts of people that will slam their fist down on a table and with firm assurance and authority and tell me that there is “speaking in tongues” today, or I can find all sorts of people that, with firm assurance, would declare that one can be saved by making a decision for Christ; I can find multitudes of people that would say with great assurance that the church age is not over and God is still working in the churches.  What do “firm insistence” and “absolute assurance” and slamming one’s fist down on a table mean?  It means nothing.  It proves nothing.  It just means that people are set in that doctrine and they will hold to that doctrine and they are sure of it, and they are sure that we are wrong.

The difference is that EBible Fellowship has spent hundreds and hundreds of hours since May 21, 2011, studying these things, verse by verse, carefully looking up each word in a verse and allowing the Bible to direct us.  On the other hand, there are no Bible studies of any significance and done in depth, to show that these things are not so and that God is still saving.  This is a big difference and it is what the child of God listens for – he listens for the voice of Christ; he does not know any other voice.  And the voice of Christ is heard when we go to the Bible and, if we keep going to the Bible and we keep comparing Scripture with Scripture, making sure our conclusions harmonize with the entire Bible, then the “voice” of Christ is heard; there is consistency; there is confirmation in study after study; there is a gathering assurance that the child of God finds – yes, God does speak of shutting the door in the day of judgment in Luke 13; yes, the seven thousand year period from the flood has not changed and it still falls on May 21, 2011; and, yes, May 21, 2011 has the underlying Hebrew calendar date of 2/17, which is exactly the day that God shut the ark in the days of Noah, and that has not changed. 

Another example is when we speak of a “spiritual judgment” taking place on May 21, 2011.  We search the Bible, and we find that it was true that there was a spiritual judgment in the Garden of Eden when God said, “In the day ye eat thereof, ye shall surely die.”  But man did not die physically, but spiritually, in his soul; God did not spell it out by saying, “When I say in the day ye shall eat thereof, ye shall surely die, what I mean is that you will die spiritually.”  He simply said they would die.  Then it is up to the searchers of the Scriptures to discover in what way Adam and Eve would die.  Then we see that they did not die physically; after, all Adam lived for hundreds of years after that point, but they died in their soul existence. 

Then we read of the “cup of God’s wrath” in Jeremiah 25 and how He gives it to the city called by His name.  Following that, He takes the identical cup (not a different cup) and gives that cup of His wrath to the nations of the world.  What have we learned about the judgment on the churches?  It was spiritual.  There was no literal tearing down of stones so that there was not left one stone upon another, but it was a spiritual reference; the Spirit of God departed out of the churches, making them a spiritual wasteland and a desolation.  That is the cup of wrath that God gave to them.  It was the same cup that the Lord Jesus Christ was given in the Garden of Gethsemane, when He said, “May this cup pass from me.”  Yet, there was no nothing visible or outwardly observable with the “cup of wrath” the Lord Jesus drank.   It was a spiritual punishment He endured, a spiritual cup of wrath, just like the cup given to the churches.  Actually, God teaches us in these two major instances.  When God brought judgment on the Lord Jesus in that tableau, as He demonstrated what He had done from the foundation of the world, it was not a minor thing.  At the end of the church age when God judged the churches, which was almost two billion people in number, this was not a minor thing.  God is teaching us that the “cup of wrath,” when it was given (whether it be given to the Lord Jesus or to the churches), was spiritual in nature.  And then you take that same cup – it is not a different cup – and Jeremiah is told to give it to the nations, and that is what happened on May 21, 2011: the cup that was first given to the churches was given to the unsaved people of the world, and they have been drinking from it ever since.  The same judgment on the churches is now the judgment on the world.  It is the removal of God’s Spirit in salvation and the shutting of the door of heaven.  It is an identical judgment.  This is what is going on today and this is the day we are living in, and everything fits together and everything begins to make sense – all the Scriptures harmonize and the proclamation of May 21, 2011 as Judgment Day (the Bible guarantees it) was correct.  We were off in a couple of details that we have since corrected, such as the timing of the Rapture and the five-month period.  We have learned more about them and we have corrected them as we have continued to study the Bible.  But, if people are not studying these things and I guess there could be some people who are, but I do know one thing: they are not making it public.  We have not seen anything.  There is a silence drawn over the issue.  People do not even want to talk about the end times, let alone study it.  They want to get away from that subject: “Let us talk about positive things!  Let us talk about the good things the Bible talks about.”  There has been no in-depth Bible study regarding these things from those that oppose what EBible Fellowship has been teaching.

Well, let us go back to Revelation 11.  Again, we saw that after “three and one half days,” the “two witnesses” stood upon their feet and that is language to indicate the sending forth of the truth of the Bible, which happened during the second part of the Great Tribulation.  Then it says, “Great fear fell upon them which saw them,” and that is a reference to the great multitude, as God opened their eyes.  As the Word of God went forth and as the message of Judgment Day went out to the nations of the world, not everyone saw it in the sense that certain ones “saw” it.  God’s elect would have had their eyes opened up to the fact that God was concluding His salvation plan and that this was a serious declaration coming from the Bible and it was going to happen.  God used that declaration of Judgment Day to bring these people to “fear.”  Remember, we read in Luke 1:50 that His mercy is on them that fear Him.  “Great fear fell upon them which saw them;”  they saw the “two witnesses” as they stood on their feet; that is, they heard the Gospel and as it reached their ears, God gave them belief of the truth and He put “fear” in their hearts when He saved them and had mercy upon them.

Then it says in Revelation 11:12:

And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them.

This verse is a good example of why we must read the Bible slowly and carefully and look at each word, and we “slow it down.”  Sometimes when we read the Bible, it is sort of like a running train, but when we slow it down and put it in slow motion, we are able to catch much more detail.  We slow things down when we look up words and phrases to see how they are used elsewhere in the Bible and we follow where that takes us to other Scriptures; this begins to define what God has in view, so that the information we gather is not coming from our minds, but it is coming from God.

Here, it says, “And they heard a great voice from heaven,” and this would be the ones upon whom great fear fell.  Let us first look at this idea of a “great voice from heaven.”  This is not going to be that difficult because at the beginning of the Book of Revelation we read in Revelation 1:10-11:

I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day, and heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet,

This matches what we are reading in Revelation 11:12, where it says, “And they heard a great voice from heaven.”  The Apostle John is on the island of Patmos when God began to give him this Book of Revelation and he also “heard behind me a great voice, as of a trumpet.”  In the next verse we learn whose voice he heard:

Saying, I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last: and, What thou seest, write in a book, and send it unto the seven churches…

The “great voice, as of a trumpet” belongs to the Lord Jesus Christ.  He is the Alpha and the Omega.  He is the beginning and the end, the first and the last.  He is the Author of the Bible, so the “great voice” in Revelation 11:12 is the voice of Christ and Christ is the Word made flesh.  He is the embodiment of the Word of God, as it says in John 1:1: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  Then John 1:14 says, “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”  So the voice of Christ is like a trumpet and Christ is the Word of God.  Therefore, the Word of God, the Bible, is a “great voice, like a trumpet,” and that is why when the Lord opened up information that had been previously hidden, as He unsealed the Scriptures at the time of the end, it revealed a timeline for the Great Tribulation and the Day of Judgment and He qualified and equipped His people as watchman that would go forth blowing the trumpet to warn the people.  Basically, this language is saying that God’s people would share the things they learned from the Bible – the Bible is the “great voice, as of a trumpet,” when the true believers shared the teaching that came forth from the Bible.  They blew the trumpet and warned the inhabitants of the earth: Judgment Day is coming and the door will be shut.  It was foretold and the world was warned that no one would be saved after May 21, 2011.  We had thought there would be a five month period (and there is), but we were incorrect because we took it literally; the five months represents the duration of Judgment Day, as we have since learned.  But it was told to the people that God will shut the door and no one will be saved after that, even though time would continue for a short period after May 21, 2011.  So now we are making correction and that time period, which is spiritually identified as “five months” is very likely an actual 1,600 days.

We will continue in our study of the Book of Revelation when we get together next time.