Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Revelation. Tonight is study #22 of Revelation, chapter 22 and we are going to read Revelation 22:18:
For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book:
I will stop reading there. Here, God is giving us a verse that has been extremely helpful to the people of God throughout the New Testament era. The reason it has been helpful is because with the completion of the Book of Revelation, God completed the entire Bible. He finished writing His grand work of Scripture and “the volume of the book” was completed when the last Word of the Book of Revelation was penned as God moved the Apostle John. Then the Bible was complete. God began to write the Bible through Moses some 1,500 years earlier as He moved Moses to write the first five Books known as the Pentateuch and as He moved all the prophets of the Old Testament and of the New Testament. He moved the Apostle Paul to write many Epistles and He moved Luke to write the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts and He moved Peter to write two Epistles, and so forth. Finally, the Book of Revelation would put the closing Words in the Bible with this last chapter of this last Book and it was the 66th Book of the Bible.
The Book of Revelation has 22 chapters and this is chapter 22 and this is almost the very last verse, as there are only three short verses left, but right at the end of the last chapter of the last Book of the Bible, God says, “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book.” In this case the word “heareth” is not pointing to those that hear spiritually, although God’s people do hear the Words of the Bible spiritually because the Bible says, “For faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” God has granted them spiritual ears to hear. But, in this case, God is talking to everyone who hears the reading of the Bible in the form that God delivered it and with the words that God wrote. The “prophesy of this book” means the very Words that are before us and if anyone hears the prophesy of the Book and then “add unto these things,” it means every Book of the Bible from Genesis through Revelation – it is the Word of God and it was the divine revelation that came forth from the mouth of God. It is holy. It is a holy Book and it is a holy communication to mankind, unlike anything else ever written in the world and unlike anything that ever will be written.
So, now God is saying that no man is permitted to “add unto these things.” Of course, it has always been true that no man was to add to the Word of God while the Book was being compiled and, occasionally, God would let this be known. In the beginning when God gave the initial revelation to Moses to write the Books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, God caused Moses to write in Deuteronomy 4:2:
Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you…
This helps us to understand what God is referring to in our verse in Revelation 22:18. Again, it says in Deuteronomy 4:2:
Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of JEHOVAH your God which I command you.
Do not “add unto the word.” Of course, that applied to all men while God was compiling the Bible because the Bible is God’s work and it is His Book. It is not just anyone’s Book. No one can come along and try to contribute a chapter, a verse or even a word, jot or tittle. It is God’s work and God would determine what would go into His Book – it would come forth from Him and no one else.
That is why there was such a thing as a false prophet in Old Testament days who would say, “I heard from God. God has told me thus and thus.” We see this in the Book of Jeremiah, especially. There were men that said things contrary to God. God had said that Judah would be judged and destroyed by Babylon and they would go into captivity, but men rose up and said, “Not so,” or they said, “The captivity will return shortly,” and so forth. Yet, those things were not from God and they were adding to the Word of God.
There has always been people that develop religions and other gospels and they have sought to add to the Bible and, yet, God says in Proverbs 30:5-6:
Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.
Only God was allowed to add to the Scriptures as the Bible was being put together. In Jeremiah, chapter 36, God shows us how He would move the prophets of old to declare His Word and He would command them to “write in a Book.” Jeremiah had a scroll of Scripture and it found its way into the hands of the king of Judah and he dared to burn it. Actually, this is what many people do in their hearts as they despise the Word of God and try to destroy it or get rid of it. Of course, God is not fazed by this and it says in Jeremiah 36:32:
Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe, the son of Neriah; who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words.
God dictated the words to Jeremiah and Jeremiah dictated it to his scribe Baruch and Baruch wrote the words. Notice that it is called the Book of Jeremiah and we often say that Jeremiah said this or that, but Jeremiah dictated to a scribe and we do not say that Baruch is the author of the Book of Jeremiah. Some people like to say that these men were the authors and not God, but they avoid these kinds of verses because they do not like to think about this situation in which Jeremiah is dictating to a scribe and the scribe writes it down because it is the parallel situation to God dictating to “holy men of old” and the holy men writing it down. This is exactly what God did in writing the Bible. He moved in these men and they wrote exactly what God had determined to say, just like Baruch did. Baruch was not writing his own thoughts and ideas, but he was writing what came out of the mouth of Jeremiah and Jeremiah was telling him what came out of the mouth of God. It is just “one step removed.”
This is how God wrote the Bible and people understand the principal. The CEO of a company will call in their admin and the admin is going to receive dictation from the CEO because the CEO has an important letter to send to the entire company. So the CEO sits back and composes the e-mail to the admin and the admin records it and types it and sends it to the company from the desk of the admin. The whole company receives the memo and they understand that it came from the admin of the CEO. Even though it was sent through the admin’s email and they know that the admin wrote it down and sent it to them, do they read it as if it were coming from the mind of the admin? No way! Does anyone receive the e-mail and say, “Oh, this is from the admin, so I will just delete it because the admin cannot tell me anything and I am not going to listen.”? You can believe that this important message that called for action from all the recipients would not be ignored and any individual that disregarded the memo would be in big trouble and might even lose their job because they were idiotic enough to think that since it came from the desk of an admin it could not have been from the CEO. That foolishness could be enough to dismiss the person from their job because it is obvious to all that the CEO is too important to sit down and type the message when that is the admin’s job. We understand that. The secular man understands it and I doubt there is anyone foolish enough to delete a message from the CEO’s admin and refuse to accept it as from the CEO.
Yet, why is it that people understand that, but they refuse the idea that God (the King of kings and Lord and lords and the Supreme Authority of everything and more powerful than a billion CEO’s) that secular atheists and others cannot understand that God would dictate to His assistants (the prophets of old)? God declared to them His Word and they wrote it down or their scribe wrote it down. The Apostle Paul also had a scribe named Tertius and Paul dictated the Book of Romans to him, so Tertius actually penned the Epistle as Paul dictated it to him. These men were dictated to by God, the ultimate Supreme Authority and God gave them the assignment, “Here is my Word. Write it down. I will put my Book together and watch over it and I will have others send it forth.” It is just like the admin sends out the e-mail.
Of course, that is understandable that the Lord of lords and Kings of kings would deliver His holy Word in such a way. It is just that man is so deceitful. We have to be honest about that because we all know it. Men are so deceitful because they do not want to accept this Book as the Word of the Lord of lords and King of kings, so they try to find excuses to refuse it. If they had conducted themselves in a similar way in the corporate world, they would be quickly out of a job. When people dismiss and ignore the Word of God, it leads to even more terrible consequences than losing a job. It leads to the individual’s destruction, as God says concerning His Word in 2Peter 3:16:
As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.
If these individuals that wrest with the Scriptures do so to their own destruction, but there are those that outright dismiss the Scriptures. They will have the same end and they will be destroyed. They were to hearken to the Scriptures because it was the Word from their Creator and Maker and it was not to be lightly treated.
So, here God is coming to the conclusion of His great writing, the Bible and it is the greatest of books. It is the Book because it is the holy Bible. There are no other books that are on an equal footing. It is not that the Bible is just one of many books that people have to respect and revere and obey as holy, but it stands alone. The Bible and the Bible alone is the Word of God. As God delivered to us the entire 66 Books of the Bible He concluded, “If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” This is the Word of God and there is no other Word of God. For example, there is the Book of Mormon, but you can throw it out because it is not the Word of God. God finished the Bible in the 1st century AD and then later some men come up with their ridiculous claim: “We have found another writing and it is the Book of Mormon.” They then developed another religion and it is a religion that has led people to destruction and to come under the “plagues written herein” in the Bible because that religion has added unto the Words of the Bible. Even during the day of salvation, anyone adding to the Bible or accepting of information that is added to the Bible could not be saved thereby. It would only result in condemnation and destruction from God.
Or, there are those that give “lip service” to the Bible, like the Muslims, and they say, “Oh, yes, Jesus was a prophet and Abraham was a prophet and the Bible was written by God, but then they say you cannot trust it because it has seen corruption from the churches. If you have dialogue with someone from the Muslim religion, they will not hearken or listen to the Bible. The Bible is not their authority and they mistrust the Bible. Instead, they have another writing, the Koran, they believe is from God and they believe that writing is perfect and without error and they trust it over the Bible. Therefore, they have come under the condemnation of Revelation 22, verse 18: “For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” This condemnation is for those that add to this Book, the Bible, and no other book. It is not the Koran. The warning is for those that hear the words of this Book, the holy Bible. “If any man shall add unto these things” is referring to the Words written in the holy Bible and the warning is this: “God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book.” When God finished the Bible, He stopped moving prophets to record His Word. There were no other prophets that held the official capacity of “prophet” that God moved to give divine revelation after the Apostle John. There were no other additional Words for this Book – not a single Word came forth from the mouth of God after He finished the Bible. There is no other book that can say it comes from God and if they do so, they have added unto the Word of God and God says He will add unto those that do so “the plagues written herein.”
The Bible speaks of many plagues and many terrible things and, basically, the plagues are the wrath of God and it describes the final destruction of sinners. They will annihilated and live no more. They will not live. They will not enter into heaven. They will not enjoy eternal life in an eternal habitation with eternal God. Those that add to the Words of the Bible will not go into God’s holy heaven. They have broken God’s Law. They have offended God and transgressed against Him and they are not saved by Him. They are not of His elect people and Christ did not die for their sins. Therefore, they will die in their sins.