Welcome to EBible Fellowship's Bible study in the book of Revelation. This will be study #12 of Revelation, chapter 1, and we are continuing from our last study as we were discussing the shut door of Heaven. We have been looking at the number 'seven,' and we saw how God arranged things so that from the time He shut the door in the days of Noah when the flood came, after a 'seven' day period, in which Noah had to get the animals and his family and himself into the ark, then God shut the door on the seventeenth day of the second month.

That 'seven' thousand years from that date in 4990 B.C. did take us to the year 2011 A.D., and after an exact 23-year Great Tribulation period of 8,400 days, we found that on the very last day of that Great Tribulation, May 21, 2011, that the underlying Hebrew calendar date was the seventeenth day of the second Hebrew month. Now that would be just impossible to say it truthfully, and it would be impossible for anyone to try to manipulate, or to cause it to work out in that way - that the Great Tribulation would end on that particular day.

But, as we concluded in our last study, we were looking in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 13, and I will begin by reading this again, starting at verses 24-25:

Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able. When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door...

There God is indicating that on the Day of Judgment there will be a 'shut door,' and that is exactly what we have learned, that May 21, 2011 was the end of the Great Tribulation and the beginning point of the Day of Judgment. And so we taught in the days leading up to May 21 that it would be the day that God shuts the door to Heaven, and we have taught in the days since then, very consistently, that that was the day that God shut the door to Heaven. We have not changed that teaching. We have consistently taught this for several years now, for years leading up to May 21, 2011 and, now, for whatever time it has been since that date - that God shut the door.

It was an invisible door that no one could ever see when it was open, and it is an invisible door that no man can see once it is closed. But God tells us and He reveals it to us from His word, the Bible, and that is how we 'see' it, or know it, or understand it. Of course, we cannot know it from our physical eyes. Well, some people say, "You cannot prove that! You cannot prove that God shut the door to Heaven, that there is no more salvation! That is just something you are saying to try and cover up that nothing happened."

Well, people can say that, and they do. But the child of God realizes that there are many things the Bible teaches that we cannot see with our physical eyes. For instance, the Bible teaches that all men are dead in sin, that we have a spiritually dead soul. Can anyone see that with their physical eyes, if you follow the reasoning of people that say, "Well, you cannot prove that Judgment Day was on May 21?" We cannot prove it by sight, but we certainly can prove it by turning to many Scriptures.

It is the same thing - we cannot prove that man has a dead soul. You cannot see a man's dead soul, but all we can to is go to the Bible, and we can point out how God says that men are dead in trespasses and sins. And there it is! We do not see it with our eyes. We see it through what the Bible says, and we believe God.

Or how about God's judgment on the churches? God has taught us for several years now that the church age is over, that the Holy Spirit came out of the midst of the congregations, and that Satan entered in. Now God's Spirit could never be seen visibly when it was in the midst of the church, and Satan is also a fallen angel, a spirit being, and you cannot see him. You cannot prove through sight that he is in the churches. This is why the churches do not believe it. They look around and they 'see' all is well! "Our pastor preached a good sermon. Look, we have a new version of the Bible in our pews. We have more people joining and giving is up this year. All is well!" They do not see that, no, it is a terrible desolation, that God has abandoned them and shut the door of Heaven to the churches, and He did that way back in 1988; for the 23 years of the Great Tribulation, and now after, the churches do not recognize that. They refuse to acknowledge it. They deny it vehemently that God would forsake them.

Yet the child of God understands, not by looking at the church. You cannot prove anything by looking outwardly at the churches or even what they are teaching; there has always been some false gospels and false doctrine. What we look at is inwardly, to the Bible. And from the Bible, can we prove that the church age is over? Yes, absolutely. God has multiplied all sorts of passages to prove, as Biblical evidence, that He ended the church age and His Spirit no longer resides in their midst, but Satan had entered in during the Great Tribulation to rule as the man of sin.

Now we are after that period, but the churches are still a desolation, and we know these things, not because we can prove it with our physical eyes, but because the Bible proves it.

Now why is it that a person can be absolutely convinced that God has brought judgment on the churches, that the church age is over, and that they are not to go back to the church? They understand this full well, even though they cannot see any of that. Some of the church buildings are very beautiful, while the Bible says that the Great Tribulation is a time when one stone shall not be left upon another. "Oh, but that is spiritual language, you see."

And the Bible says, "Woe unto them that give suck," and many horrible things are written about the end of the church age - such terrible language that it is a time when women eat their own young. "Oh, yes, but you have to realize," the believer who understands these things tells people, "God wrote the Bible as a parable and you have to look for the deeper spiritual meaning. None of these things are literally going to happen: the church building will not fall down, the women will not cry because they cannot give suck to their children, and the mothers are not going to cannibalize their own children. All that is figurative language to describe how awful a situation it is once God removes Himself from the churches and ends the church age."

Well, how can a person, a believer, understand that all those things are spiritual and they can only be proved from the Bible? You cannot prove a thing from your physical sight or by looking outwardly at the congregations, and, yet, when God takes the exact same cup (and He refers to this in Jeremiah, chapter 25), and He says that first He will give the cup of wrath to the city called by His name, and then following that, He will take the identical, same cup and hand it over to the nations of the world and force them to drink, they will not go unpunished. If He has already punished the ones called by His name, the ones He has an intimate relationship with, the church, certainly the people of the world (that God has no such relationship with) will not go unpunished. They will drink the same cup.

And, yet, when it is pointed out from the Bible, "Here is where we went wrong. Here is where we need to make correction: it was a spiritual judgment; it was a judgment, in truth, but it was spiritual, just like when God judged the churches, just like when Christ was drinking of the cup in the Garden of Gethsemane; that also was a spiritual judgment. So, you see, we now have an answer for why things did not happen physically, as we had thought!"

God is following the same pattern that He had established from the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, when He had told Adam and Eve "in the day ye eat thereof, ye shall die." Then after eating, they did not fall down dead physically. As a matter of fact, Adam lived to be 930 years old before he physically died. But what happened was they died spiritually in that day, but God did not say that. He was not specific. He did not say to Adam and Eve, "In the day you eat thereof, you will die spiritually in your soul." He only said, "You will die."

And, likewise, God was not specific concerning the Day of Judgment. We misunderstood. We thought, "Well, the world does not understand spiritual things." (It must be that we thought something like this.) "We understand God brought a spiritual judgment on the churches, maybe because the churches ought to understand spiritual things like that."

But we just assumed that God will bring a complete physical judgment on the world so that they can 'see' His wrath, maybe due to the fact that the world operates in the physical realm, in carnality, and they do not understand spiritual things.

Well, that was our error! God has continued bringing the same kind of judgment we read about in the most major judgments that are found in the Bible, a spiritual judgment of the shutting of the door to Heaven. No, you cannot see it with your eyes. You cannot prove it by looking outwardly at the world. We do not see any difference in the world, just like you would not see any difference in the church after God shut the door there.

There will, undoubtedly, be an increase of wicked and madness in the world over the course of time, but, for the most part, you cannot 'see' it or prove it. We only know it from the word of God, the Bible. But is that not sufficient? Why is it sufficient to know we have spiritually dead souls, from the Bible? Why is it sufficient to know the church age is over, from the Bible, and no other way?

And yet, it is not sufficient, somehow, (say some) that it cannot be proven that the Day of Judgment did come on the very day that God broadcast to the world? Well, since when is the Bible not sufficient, and Scriptures not able to confirm these kinds of things, to confirm a judgment? Most certainly the Bible is sufficient! It is all that is necessary to prove that God brought about the Day of Judgment exactly as He said He would do, and He shut the door to Heaven, precisely as He declared would happen.

But, you know, there is something else that God has written about that would happen once He shut the door to Heaven, and that is 'disputation.' Let us continue to read here in Luke 13, verses 25-28:

When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence ye are: Then shall ye begin to say, We have eaten and drunk in thy presence, and thou hast taught in our streets. But he shall say, I tell you, I know you not whence ye are; depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets, in the kingdom of God, and you yourselves thrust out.

Now, here, God is indicating that when the door shuts on the Day of Judgment, there will be many seeking to enter in, and they will not be able to, and there will be 'communication' between God and them. They are going to try and convince God to open the door, and God is adamantly going to keep it shut. He will not open. The Bible says, "What God has shut, no man can open." It is an impossibility once the door shuts, and God has shut it.

But, men, being men - being sinners - and always wanting to be contrary to God's decrees and to His will, now they are going to seek to enter into that door. They are going to argue with God and try to convince God to open up the door, but God will not.

We find that it has been the case since May 21, 2011, as God's people have shared these things and taught from the word of God that God has done these things as He said He would and shut the door to Heaven, that there has arisen much contention. People have gotten very angry and very upset with the true believers who bring this information, who are continuing to act as faithful doorkeepers, and are only telling everyone exactly what the case is.

It is not as if we shut the door. It is not as if that is under our control, or our choice. It is the will of God, and all we can do is testify and share what God has done, and He has sent word to the doorkeepers that the door is to be shut and not to be opened: "You are not to bid people any longer to enter in or to seek me, that they might enter in. You may tell them (and this is still a wonderful privilege) that they can come to me and beseech me if, perhaps, I may already have saved them while the door was open in the days before May 21, 2011. Or you may tell people that they may approach me (as we read in the Gospel accounts when the Lord Jesus was drinking of the cup of God's wrath), as Christ approached God, saying, 'All things are possible with thee, Father. May this cup pass from me.'"

Therefore, we can encourage people to go to God and beseech them that the cup might pass from them, or we can pray for others for that very thing. But we are not to encourage people, even in the slightest way, that the door is still open, or can be reopened. It is shut, and it will never be opened, according to the Bible. Certainly, no man can open it and, definitely, not lowly doorkeepers! That is beyond our ability to perform. We cannot do it. We can only witness to what God has done.

And notice that many will be "gnashing teeth" when this door shuts: "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when ye shall see Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob..."

The word 'see' would mean 'seeing' in the Scriptures, or knowing these things, according as believers report them, and individuals hear this report, it is as if they are seeing Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the Kingdom of God because those three represent the Elect people. All of the Elect are in God's Kingdom - they have all been saved! Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God, everyone whose names have been written in the Lamb's Book of Life is present in the Kingdom of God, and it is as though the people outside of the door are seeing this as the Elect left on Earth (those that are alive and remain unto the coming of the Day of Christ upon the completion of the Day of Judgment) are sharing these things with them, and that is how they are seeing it. In response, they are weeping and gnashing their teeth.

Now God gives us some insight into exactly what He means by 'gnashing of teeth' in the book of Acts, in chapter 7, when Stephen was able to share the Gospel, to share the word of God, before the Jews, and it says in Acts 7 verses 51-53:

Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye. Which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted? and they have slain them which shewed before of the coming of the Just One; of whom ye have been now the betrayers and murderers: Who have received the law by the disposition of angels, and have not kept it.

They listened to Stephen as he gave an account of Israel's history, all the way up to the point when God moved Stephen to convict the Israelites themselves, to pronounce God's judgment upon them, that they have always resisted the Holy Ghost. Once they began hearing things that were not pleasing to them, that were not flattering to them at all, that were hard and difficult things to hear, then we see their response in Acts 7 verse 54-58, once Stephen began to witness these kinds of things:

When they heard these things, they were cut to the heart, and they gnashed on him with their teeth. But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, And cast him out of the city, and stoned him: and the witnesses laid down their clothes at a young man's feet, whose name was Saul.

They got so furiously angry with Stephen that they were cut to the heart by the word of God; God's word penetrated to them in a way that was very uncomfortable to them, and it evoked an anger and such a fury that they "gnashed on him with their teeth." They were probably calling him heretic and they were calling him every ugly thing they could think of. They were more than likely saying (as the scribes and Pharisees said of Jesus) that he was of Beelzebub. Certainly, they would have been accusing Stephen of being from "another kind of gospel," to put it in modern terms, a man that did not understand the truth and an enemy of the God of Israel, they would have said, and someone who was against the law of Moses.

None of that was true. Stephen was a devout child of God, and God moved in him to say these very words to these people at that point in history, and they responded by 'gnashing' on them with their teeth. That is the response God says that will be in view once the door is shut: there will be "weeping and gnashing of teeth," and, certainly, we have seen this in these days after that tribulation, as people have angrily responded.

They are so blinded by the idea that there is no more salvation. They hate this teaching. They do not want to check these things out in the Bible. They do not care that the Bible teaches spiritual judgments. They do not care that the Biblical calendar of history is still in place and locked in, and, therefore, still testifying that May 21, 2011 was, indeed, the Day of Judgment. They do not care what we might find in the Scriptures. They have "stopped their ears," (some of them) and in anger and fury, they are gnashing their teeth against any that dare associate themselves with that kind of teaching.

Now, of course, it is true, thankfully, that just as Saul was present when this was happening in Israel long ago, as they stoned Stephen to death, and he was there consenting unto what they were doing to him, we are also thankful that now, at this time, even amongst some that are angry and are upset at this particular teaching, there may be true believers, God's Elect, that perhaps have gotten themselves involved with the wrong crowd; and so by that means, they are unwittingly participating in this kind of gnashing of teeth against the truth of His word. But, certainly it is possible for some to be confused, to be in doubt, to not know what is going on, and even to say some things themselves that they might regret later.

We have to be patient with people and wait for God to open up the eyes of His Elect, according to His timetable for each individual, and that may be different, just as with the end of the church age information. Some understood it immediately.

I remember, myself, after hearing it, it took a couple of weeks before, by God's grace, He opened my eyes and I understood what He was doing. But prior to that, when I first heard it, I also was a little angry with the one bringing that news and disturbed by that information; so it is very possible for someone to be disturbed or to have an initial reaction of anger, and yet, later, after checking it out, they come to realize, "Oh, my, God is doing this. He has shut the door to Heaven."