Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship's Bible study in the Book of Revelation. Tonight is study #36 of Revelation, chapter 11, and we are going to read Revelation 11:18-19:
And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou shouldest give reward unto thy servants the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth. And the temple of God was opened in heaven, and there was seen in his temple the ark of his testament: and there were lightnings, and voices, and thunderings, and an earthquake, and great hail.
I will stop reading there. In our last study we were looking at verse 18: “And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come.” We looked a little bit at the reference to the nations being angry and this was the case leading up to May 21, 2011. There was an increasingly angry response to the message of May 21, 2011 as Judgment Day. Part of it was due to the message being so long in the public eye; they had been seeing it for months and some may have been seeing it for longer than that. Plus, the message was increasing and they could not avoid it. This brought anger to the people of the world. First of all, they do not like that message to begin with, but it was, repeatedly, before their eyes: on their way to work, on their way home from work, on the weekend at their sporting event, or in the evening when they were out on the town. They could not avoid it and they got angrier and angrier.
Then Judgment Day came and when it was perceived by their eyes and their other physical senses that nothing had happened, they then expressed their anger in ridicule, mockery and reviling of those that had dared to bring this message of judgment to them. We looked at the warning God gives in Ephesians 4:26:
Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath:
This seems to have a deeper spiritual meaning in regard to not being caught in “anger.” We are not God and we are not the judge of anyone; we are not to have wrath, as God has wrath toward some. God tells us to forgive and forebear, so when people are indulging in anger and wrath toward others it is definitely a sinful thing.
If the sun goes down upon your anger, spiritually, that would mean there is no more light of the Gospel and that is what happened immediately after the Tribulation, and you would have been caught in that sin. This is really the case with all unsaved people. Of course, not all were angry; everyone has their particular sin, but everyone was “caught” in their sin – the sin that they loved and the sin that gave them such pleasure. They enjoyed their sin and they could not stand the idea of being without the sin they preferred to God and to doing things God’s way. All the unsaved were caught in their sins and in the condition of being a sinner. We are all sinners, but God made a way for escape for certain sinners, His elect, that cleansed them from their sins and made them righteous in His sight through the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But for these others that number in the billions, they had no Savior. Therefore, they remained in their sins and their condition remained “filthy.” They are unjust, so they remained “filthy and unjust” still, but those that were righteous will remain righteous still, in Christ.
So this seems to be the direction this verse is going in: “And the nations were angry, and thy wrath is come.” God’s wrath is come. After thousands of years, the wrath came. Yes, God did bring judgments many times during those thousands of years, but it was not the final judgment and not the ultimate judgment of ending salvation for mankind. Of course, at the completion of this final judgment will be the destruction and annihilation of all the wicked; they will cease to exist for evermore and this judgment is one the Bible had warned about all through history. Those other judgments, like the judgment of the worldwide flood, were pictures of this final judgment. The judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah was a picture of the final judgment. Many times when God would bring judgment on a city, it typified or pictured the final judgment, like the destruction of Jericho or the city of Ai, and so forth.
But there is only one final judgment and God warned about that day throughout the Bible, a day when He would pour out His wrath on the world and that is why, in Matthew 3:7, when John the Baptist asked, “Who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” This is also why, in Zephaniah 2, we read that God encouraged sinners to seek Him and beseech Him for mercy before the decree passed and before He exercised His wrath and poured out His anger – before the day of JEHOVAH’S anger comes.
Now we are there – we are in the day of JEHOVAH’S anger. This is why the passage found in Zephaniah 2:1-3, was such a great admonition and encouragement to go to God with tremendous urgency and to boldly go to the throne of grace. That tremendous urgency is found so many places in the Bible, such as 2Corinthians 5:20:
Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God.
Do you see the plea God is making through His people that are His ambassadors and messengers of His Word? They carry the Word of God and through them, God is urging the listener and urging the reader of the Bible and urging those that would cross the path of His messengers to be reconciled to God: “Will you come to the throne of grace? Will you come to me? Will you cry out for mercy?” Then God gives many passages to demonstrate how people ought to approach Him, like blind Bartimaeus: “Oh, thou son of David, have mercy upon me!”
You know, today EBible Fellowship is considered cruel by many. We are considered cold and heartless and, I suppose, they think that of me, especially. We lack love. We lack kindness and goodness because we are telling people that the Bible says the door is shut and there is no more salvation. I wonder how many of these people have been following EBible Fellowship over the last 15 years or so. In the years leading up to May 21, 2011, EBible Fellowship taught weekly and we would go to these verses, like this one here in 2 Corinthians 5:20: “Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God.” We would also go to Zephaniah and I remember teaching from Zephaniah 2 in the day of salvation before the decree did come forth. We were pleading with people – and not that it was me pleading, but it was, as it says in 2Corinthians 5:20, “as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.” I am sure it was the working of God’s Spirit in me and in others of His people who were being “stirred up” by Him to present the Gospel message of salvation with a great sense of urgency. So, week, after week, after week, we went to these passages, like blind Bartimaeus crying to the Lord Jesus and we went to the account of the publican beating upon his breast and crying, “God be merciful to me a sinner.” We went to Psalm 51, where David is crying out, “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me,” and many like passages. We encouraged people, to the point that some people despised that kind of teaching; they were critical of us for putting such an enormous emphasis on the mercy of God. We were the ones, along with many others of God’s people, encouraging people to go to God and cry out to Him for all it is worth and do not let anyone tell you to stop. Do not let anyone try to convince you to stop crying for mercy. Let God be the one that responds to you and not man. We continued that emphasis, again, and again, and again. If asked, we can show you the audio files and you can listen to them. It was over the course of years. For years we were being used by God to beseech people on His behalf to be reconciled to Him and the closer we got to May 21, 2011, the more urgent and desperate those pleas were.
Now, of course, since May 21, 2011, you do not hear any of that. You do not hear that. There is an overwhelming emphasis on the door being shut. There is no more salvation. God is not actively saving anyone since that day. Why? What has changed in us? What has turned us? I suppose since some accuse us of lacking compassion now, they would have to admit that we were exhibiting great compassion before. What has happened to change us? Has some “life event” turned us bitter? Have we gone from lovers of men to haters of men in such a short time? Why is it we now have “no mercy” and we have become so cruel and before some would have said we were “overly compassionate” and overly concerned that people go to God.
You see, it is no change in us. It was a change in God’s program. God is the one who determines His salvation program and His program for judgment. God is the one that determines truth and He is the one that establishes “times and seasons.” He is the one that changes things from having Israel as His representatives to having the churches as His representatives; He is also the one that went from having His churches as His representatives to using only His people outside of the churches and no longer using the churches. And He is the one that went from a “day of salvation,” a prolonged day that lasted for centuries, to the end of salvation for the prolonged period of judgment that will continue for 1,600 days from May 21, 2011.
God is the one that opens doors; God is the one that shuts doors. And what God has opened, no man can shut. At the time that God was saving that great multitude out of Great Tribulation, some people were telling us to be quiet, but we did not listen. None of God’s people would listen because God had opened that great and effectual door whereby He was bringing many people into heaven. He would not permit His people to cease because of what men thought of us beseeching others on His behalf. He would not have us to be respecters of persons or pleasers of men, but to do the will of God, which at that point in time was to show people their great need to go to God while He may be found.
But, now God has shut the door and no man can open it. No man can open up the door by running to a verse like 2 Corinthians 5, or over to blind Bartimaeus, or over to the publican, and then saying, “See this verse! Now open the door to heaven.” But God will not listen because these verses have no further application in Judgment Day, the day of His wrath. It has no application whatsoever and no matter how desperately people try to open the door to heaven for themselves or for others, they cannot, because it is under the control of Almighty God. He has determined the door is shut and we are “nobodies” and we are “nothing.” We are not the ones in control of “times and seasons.” We are not the ones to determine to open the door in a way that the great multitude could come in and we are not the ones that shut that door. We are only the doorkeepers and we receive our direction from the Word of God, the Bible. Just like the owner of a large hotel downtown hires doorkeepers and he tells them, “Here is your plan for the day. Here is what I want you to do. Today nobody gets in unless they are a resident of the hotel – make sure you keep that door shut.” That is the direction from the owner.
We get our directions from the Bible and God has shown us that on that day (and many people do not want to hear about that day), May 21, 2011, God shut the door, exactly seven thousand years from the flood; exactly at the end of a 23-year Great Tribulation; exactly on the 8,400th day which had underlying it the seventeenth day of the second month of the Hebrew calendar, matching the exact day 7,000 years earlier when the door of the ark was shut. God shut the door to heaven on May 21, 2011, and God will never open it again. We share this information at EBible Fellowship and we just want to be faithful and speak what is true to the Bible. When God shows us something that is true to the Bible, we will declare it and declare it with all of our heart. God says that whatever we do, we are to “do it heartily, as to the Lord.”
Now, of course, many want us to shut up. Many do not want us to prophesy and by that I mean how the Bible uses it, to declare the Word of God. As it was said to one of God’s prophets in the Old Testament: “Prophesy not here. Go to Bethel and prophesy.” That is the nature of man; they do not want to hear it; they do not want to hear what God has declared.
Well, I am sorry if the things coming forth from the Bible in the Day of Judgment are not pleasing to you. I am sorry if the idea that God has ended His salvation program is just abhorrent to you and maybe you have come to despise me, as a result. I am sorry about that, but, really, the difficulty you are having with these things is not with me and it is not with EBible Fellowship, but with the Bible. Therefore, you are having a problem with God. God is the one who has opened up these things and revealed them to His people. God is the one who had these things trumpeted to all the world for a prolonged period of time leading up to Judgment Day. God is the one who, in the days prior to May 21, 2011, had us to tell people that they had up to that point – May 21, 2011 – to seek the Lord. That was the time when He might be found, not afterwards. We were very clear to let people know that. They only had up until that date. God followed through and He did exactly what He said He would do on the day that He told the world He would do it.