Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Revelation.  Tonight is study #13 of Revelation 2, and we are going to begin by reading Revelation 2:10:

Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer: behold, the devil shall cast some of you into prison, that ye may be tried; and ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.

In our last study, we were looking at this verse, and we saw how Daniel 1 greatly identifies with the statements found in our verse.  In turn, Daniel 1 relates to the time of the Great Tribulation, so we can understand that it is what God is referring to regarding the time when Satan overtook the churches, and he was ruling in the world as “the beast.”  It was also a time of trial for the people of God, as it says, “…and ye shall have tribulation ten days,” which points to the completion of the Great Tribulation period.

Now we are going to move on to the last statement in Revelation 2:10:

…be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.

God is calling upon His people to remain faithful, and we are not surprised at that.  To be faithful means to obey His Word, and to live according to His will.  And we know what God’s will is for us.  God has not kept that secret.  He has written it down in the Bible.  If we want to know the will of God in a certain area, the Bible tells us of God’s will in practically every area.  There may be a few areas that are not so clear, but they are very few.  Normally we have great guidance from the Lord.  We know we are not to steal, lie, commit adultery, or kill people, and so forth.  We have commands against these things.  And then God gives us direction in things we are to do, the positive things, and the things of the Spirit.  We are to love our neighbor, our wife, our children, and so on.  So God really does give us all kinds of direction and guidance for our lives. 

The problem is normally not that there is a lack of knowing what we should do, but that we do things we ought not to do.  We go contrary to God’s Law, or His commandments, and to the leading of His Word.  And keeping His Word is what the Bible calls faithfulness. 

So in our verse the Lord is commanding us, “Be thou faithful unto death.”  It is not just to some point in time when we are still living.  He did not say, for example, “Be faithful unto May 21, 2011, and then after there is no need to continue to obey me or to follow my Word.”  No.  God says to be faithful unto death.  So if we find ourselves alive and living on the earth in this Day of Judgment, we are still under this command to live faithfully, and that covers every area of our lives, without exception.

Further on we read something else, and we may as well read this now.  When the Lord addresses the angel of the church at Pergamos, He says in Revelation 2:13:

I know thy works, and where thou dwellest, even where Satan's seat is: and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith, even in those days wherein Antipas was my faithful martyr, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth.

Here, God gives us an example of a child of God named Antipas, who was a faithful follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he was faithful unto death.  That is why he is called a “martyr,” or faithful witness.  And he was slain among those in the congregation at Pergamos where Satan had a seat and dwelt there.  That is, he had infiltrated the church with a sufficient number of tares to have had a position of authority within the congregation.  So when Antipas held to the truths of God’s Word, Satan would have opposed that by coming with other kinds of doctrines and gospels, which cost Antipas his life as he maintained faithfulness to the Word of God.  He would not “bow the knee” to those things taught in that congregation, and He would not compromise the truths he knew of Christ and the Bible.  Therefore he was killed.  There is a very good possibility that this is a true historical statement.  We have no reason to doubt it.  God is giving us the name of an individual that was a member of this congregation.  He was one of the elect, and he was slain for the sake of Christ and for the sake of the Word of God.

And that is nothing out of the ordinary.  God’s people have been killed physically, or in a spiritual sense, all through history.  It says in Revelation 6:9:

And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held:

Let us stop here for a second because this is a good description of what it means to be “faithful unto death.”  Notice the reason that they were slain.  It was “for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held.”  They held it dearly to themselves, and they were faithful to the testimony, the teachings of the Bible, because it was the Bible’s testimony that had saved them and delivered them from their sins.  It was the Scriptures that God taught them through His Spirit as He opened their eyes to see the truth of the Bible.  Those Scriptures were their delight!  Those words of the Lord were their comfort.  They were everything in their lives because God makes His Word everything to His people. 

People who have never experienced deliverance from their sins by being rescued from the fires of the wrath of God and set free from the bondage of sin and Satan just do not understand the tremendous relationship that develops between God and the people who have been set free and delivered.  They are given eyes to see and ears to hear.  They have been rescued from eternal destruction and granted eternal life.  The unsaved just do not understand the depth of love that begins to grow within the person in whom God puts a new spirit, and His own spirit indwells that person.  Then that child of God begins to love the Word of God just as He loves Christ because he recognizes that you cannot separate the two.  He loves the Lord Jesus Christ so much for what He has done for him.  Christ first loved him.

And then when there would arise a situation in a congregation during the church age as a teaching would develop where a pastor, elder, or deacon taught a doctrine, and the other people in the congregation would widely accept it.  “Oh, is this not wonderful?  This is such a great teaching that our pastor is teaching us!”  But for an individual like Antipas (one of God’s elect) , he would recognize it as a false teaching: “This is not of God.  God is not teaching this thing.  It is not coming from the Lord, but it is coming from man.  And furthermore, it is coming from Satan.  Satan must have gotten a foothold in this congregation because most of the members accept it.”  But the true believers would not accept it, but they would be greatly troubled by it, and they would be disturbed: “How can the people not see these things?  How can they go away from their first love so quickly?  How can they leave the true and faithful Word of Christ for this pitiful doctrine that is masquerading as the Word of God?”  So the child of God would not follow.  The true believer would protest.  Depending on their standing in the congregation, they might protest very loudly: “We cannot do this brethren!  We cannot follow this teaching.”  And at some points in history, a person could literally have been killed for their stand, or, perhaps, through a vote of the membership they would decide to get rid of that person.  “Let us drive this person out of our church.”  And as they would cast someone out of their congregation, God likens that to being killed, spiritually, and that has happened to the true people of God again, and again, over the many centuries of the church age.  There would be physical tribulation and affliction rising up against the true believers, or there would be spiritual affliction as they were driven from the churches.

The historical period of the Reformation is a good example of both physical and spiritual persecution.  In some cases, elect people who held to the Bible…and maybe it was just the belief that individuals should have a Bible that resulted in their execution for going contrary to the teaching of the church on that matter, or for other matters.

Many died by being burned at the stake, or in other ways, during the Protestant Reformation. 

But also during that time there were other individuals that were driven out from the church as the Catholic Church would pronounce “bulls” against them and decree them as heretics.  They were cast out of the congregation, and according to the teaching of that church, they could not enter into the kingdom of God.  In effect, they were making a pronouncement of condemnation, “killing” these people by driving them out of the church.  They could no longer participate in partaking of the Lord’s Table, and from the so-called blessings of the church itself and the possibility of eternal life. 

So here in Revelation 6, we see the souls of them that were slain for the Word of God, and for the testimony which they held.  It is a historical fact that the people of God have died for the sake of the Word of God.  Notice that it goes on to say in Revelation 6:10: 

And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?

These would be those that were slain over the church age, the long 1,955-year period, and in essence they are asking God, “When will you bring about Judgment Day?”  And notice what the Lord responds in Revelation 6:11:

And white robes were given unto every one of them; and it was said unto them, that they should rest yet for a little season…

This is how we know that the “souls under the altar” are the souls of the figurative 144,000, or the firstfruits, saved during the church age.  The “little season” is a way God refers to the Great Tribulation period, so all the “souls under the altar” had died before the Great Tribulation period because it said that they “should rest yet for a little season,” meaning that the Great Tribulation must expire first.  Then it goes on to say in Revelation 6:11:

…until their fellowservants also and their brethren, that should be killed as they were, should be fulfilled.

Here, God is speaking of the “great multitude,” other true believers whose names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.  They were not (necessarily) those saved during the church age, but their salvation identifies with the period of the Great Tribulation, that 23-year period that identifies with the period from May 21, 1988 through May 21, 2011.  So God is saying to the “souls under the altar,” the firstfruits saved during the church age, “You need to wait for the ‘little season’ of the Great Tribulation to elapse, and during that period time is when your fellow servants and brethren will be ‘killed’ as you were.”  That is, the true believers would be driven out of the churches during that little season of the Great Tribulation.  They would be called heretics and cult members, and for all intents and purposes, the churches will have “killed” the elect, spiritually, in the sense that the Lord teaches in John 16:2: “They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.”  Driving the elect out of the churches is akin to “killing” them.  So God is saying, “Rest for a little season, and during the little season your brethren will be killed.”  Then the implication is that they will no longer need to rest because their desire for judgment will be fulfilled following the little season, and the Day of Judgment would come when God would avenge their blood.  And that matches our understanding that right after the Great Tribulation came Judgment Day on May 21, 2011, which was “immediately after the tribulation of those days.”

Again, we see that God’s people have been dying both physically or spiritually for the sake of the Gospel, or for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, throughout the New Testament period, and throughout time.

Let us go back to Revelation 2:10:

…be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.

Let us look at this phrase “ a crown of life.”  A “crown of life” is a figure of speech the Bible uses to describe salvation.  We will look at a few verses.  For instance, in Proverbs 4 it speaks of “she,” a reference to “wisdom,” or Christ.  It says in Proverbs 4:9:

She shall give to thine head an ornament of grace: a crown of glory shall she deliver to thee.

Wisdom will give grace, or a clown of glory.  Remember that Christ is “wisdom,” so we could understand that Christ will provide salvation (to His elect).  That is what this is teaching.

It also says in 1Peter 5:4:

And when the chief Shepherd shall appear, ye shall receive a crown of glory that fadeth not away.

Again, this would be looking particularly at the return of Christ at the final end of all things when the believers will receive their new resurrected bodies, and their salvation is completed.  So the crown of glory will not fade away.  Why will it not fade away?  1Corinthians 9 helps us to understand this, in 1Corinthians 9:24-25:

Know ye not that they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? So run, that ye may obtain. And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible.

That is why it will not fade away.  It is incorruptible.  That “crown,” which identifies with salvation, is incorruptible, just as God says in 1Corinthians 15 that the dead are raised “incorruptible.”  We presently live in corruptible bodies, and because our bodies are corruptible, we will weaken, age, and die (unless the Lord returns before our death), and our bodies will go to the grave.  That is what corruption does.  Corruption is the ruination of this creation.  Corruption is the working of sin in mankind and in everything God had originally made good.  But due to man’s fall into sin, the whole creation is corrupt.

But God’s plan is to recreate a new heaven and a new earth which will last for evermore.  He will recreate us with new resurrected bodies to match our new resurrected souls so that we might be one whole and incorruptible personality, and we will live for evermore in the presence of the Lord Jesus Christ.  And that is the crown of salvation.  It is an incorruptible crown.  It is most definitely something worthy of our efforts to obtain it.  It is exceedingly and infinitely more worthy of effort than anything we can imagine in this world.  As a matter of fact, if we thought of all the things we might desire to put forth effort for in this life, and if we combined it altogether and compared it side-by-side with the incorruptible crown of salvation, it would not be worthy of comparison.  It is an exceedingly great crown of glory, greater than any of the world’s “tiny” glories, as it says in 2Corinthians 4:17:

For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory;

That is the wonderful nature of the crown of glory, or the crown of life.  It is exceeding and eternal weight of glory, far surpassing any glory that the world can imagine.

Let us look at one last thing in James 1:12:

Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried, he shall receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.

Now we find ourselves in the period known as Judgment Day, and we know that God is trying us.  When the Bible refers to a “trial of faith,” or a “fiery trial,” it has these days in view.  Likewise, so does James 1:12, and that is why the next thing spoken of after being tried is to receive the “crown of life,” or the “crown of glory.”  And remember it is when the Chief Shepherd appears that the crown will be granted.