Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Revelation.  Tonight is study #27 of Revelation 2, and we are presently looking at Revelation 2:22:

Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.

We have been looking at this section of chapter 2 for several studies, and the Lord began by speaking of Jezebel, and the churches were quickly assigned that identification of being likened to Jezebel.  The Lord said that Jezebel “calleth herself a prophetess, to teach and to seduce my servants to commit fornication, and to eat things sacrificed unto idols.”   That is, it points to those in the churches that were in authority, like a teaching deacon, or elders, or pastor, whether it was the first century A. D., or any other century during the entre church age.  Many of these men were not rightly dividing the Word of truth, and they were not following God’s proper methodology to come to right doctrine and faithful teachings.  Instead they developed ideas from their own minds and their own understanding.  Yes, they might consult some renowned theologian, and take up the mantle of some theologian from the past who had written a commentary, and they would add to his error  their own errors, and they would develop doctrines and teachings and gospels that were other than the true doctrine of Christ and the true doctrine of the Word of God, the Bible. 

In so doing, they taught God’s servants, and these included the professed believers in the churches and congregations, as well as the true believers, as the wheat and the tares were growing together.  They taught them “seductive,” or deceitful things, that had nothing to do with worshipping God in the way the Lord had outlined in the Bible, but it resulted in committing spiritual fornication and eating things sacrificed to idols.  Their doctrines were not doctrines of the true God, but they came from “another god,” and there is no other god, but simply dumb idols. 

The New Testament churches were not as foolish as men in the Old Testament who literally built idols.  While the New Testament churches did that to some degree, they knew that they could not build idols as the Jews had built idols and were judged of God for it.  (Some churches still had their idols, like their statutes of saints, prayer beads, and crucifixes, and so on.)  But for the most part, the idols the New Testament churches were involved with were not chiseled of wood and stone, but they were doctrines that were created in man’s mind, out of his own thinking and understanding, and not from the mind of God.  So men made doctrines after their own imagination, and not from God.  It was not coming from Him.  We do not have to list all these false idols as there are too many to list dealing with manners of salvation, baptism, women teaching, the qualifications of deacons and elders, the Sabbath day, and so forth.  There are just too many things to list. 

Men took Scripture from the Bible, but they did not submit their findings to the scrutiny of the Word itself, making sure their conclusions harmonized.  They did not carefully seek everything the Bible had to say about a matter, but they would take something a theologian had written many hundreds of years ago, and they said, “This is the faithful truth, and this is what our church will stay with, and we will not have any more questions on the matter.”  The Scriptures were relegated to a submissive role to the confessions and creeds of that church and the writings of their favorite theologian of the past.  The Scriptures were in a submissive role to these writings of men which had become the “idols” of the churches and congregations.  They were teachings that were “untouchable,” and you dared not speak against them.  If you were a member in good standing in that church, and you would go to the pastor and those in authority in that denomination, and you said, “We have taught this for quite a long time in this church.  However, have we ever looked at these verses?”,  you would be looked at with suspicion, and they would think that you were a trouble maker.  “Our doctrine is our foundation.  We do not dare touch that.”  They may not come right out and say that, but for all intents and purposes, that is exactly how it is, and their doctrines were untouchable.  That is why their doctrines were never improved upon, and the doctrines remained stagnant, and they remained the same as they had been for hundreds of years.

Of course we are living at a time when this is no longer of concern because God has already come and judged the churches for these things, as He had already given them space to repent of their spiritual fornication and idolatrous practices, and they did not repent.  And the Lord has already accomplished what it says in Revelation 2:22:

Behold, I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation, except they repent of their deeds.

We are privileged to have the vantage point of living in the time when God has opened up the biblical calendar of history, and His entire plan for the New Testament church was laid out upon it.  And we can now see very clearly that the period of the church age started in 33 A. D. when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the Day of Pentecost, until May 21, 1988 (the day before the Day of Pentecost), when the church age came to an end.  For 1,955 years God gave “space” to repent.  That was the season of the firstfruits, the period of time the churches had been granted in which to operate.  If they had turned and gone back to their first love, humbling themselves mightily, and crying out to God to help them become faithful to His will and to turn from these things, then God would not have brought His wrath upon them to judge them.  But, of course, they did not turn.  They did not repent, and the Lord came to visit, and He found the same sins multiplied because the churches had multiplied all over the earth.  These things were imbedded into the churches and congregations.  They treated them as the Word of God itself, and in many ways as a standard of faithfulness to be upheld, which amounted to nothing more than spiritual fornication against the Word of God. 

Therefore God had no choice.  It was time, just as God had given Israel a long period of time in which to repent, and now He had given the New Testament churches and congregations almost two thousand years to repent.  They did not.  Therefore judgment began at the house of God when the church age came to an end.  God abandoned the churches.  Christ came out of the midst of the candlesticks, and immediately, the light (of the Gospel) within the churches went out, all churches (100% of all congregations) were abandoned by God.  God left them all, never more to return, as the Holy Spirit came out of the midst.  The Lord loosed Satan to enter into the congregations, and Satan entered in as “the man of sin” to rule in the churches and congregations.  That began the judgment, and it would be the judgment for 23 years.

We are also privileged to have the vantage point in time wherein the Great Tribulation has come and gone, from May 21, 1988 to May 21, 2011.  The Great Tribulation has ended, and now we are in those days after the tribulation, another period of time which is Judgment Day.  Of course we are very weary.  We are tired spiritually, and we would prefer that there be no more time.  We had hoped that the Lord would take us home at the end of the Great Tribulation, but God is wiser than we are, and His plan cannot be spoken against.  We must accept the will of God and patiently wait upon Him to complete His judgment on the world, and for Him to complete His purpose for His people.

You know, it is good for us, as God is testing us, to be weary and tired.  Why is that?  Just looking at it objectively.  When someone is in full strength mentally and physically, they are very much prepared for the test.  But when someone has become weak and very tired because of great difficulties, and then they are placed in a fiery trial of faith, it is far more likely that the true nature of that individual will come to light.  The true nature will surface because people in a wearied condition are quicker to anger, quicker to drop the pretense and do things that they had been resisting by their strength as they tried to portray themselves as a true child of God.  But as things have developed the way they have, with circumstances that God has willed in these trying times, the individual is much more want to be himself and to speak his mind: “I have had it with this Gospel teaching of comparing spiritual with spiritual.  I have had it with dates.  I have had it with these other teachings that have been revealed as God has unsealed His Word.” 

But why would they become fed up with these things?  These things came from the Bible.  Where did we get the biblical calendar of history?  It came right from the pages of the Bible itself.  God is the one who placed that calendar in His Word.  It just so happens that His Word is so perfect and trustworthy that when we project the calendar, we see all these incredible proofs that the calendar develops in a precise way for a pattern of the time of the end. 

The true believers may have been confused and troubled in mind, and we may not have known for a time what was going on and what God was doing, but we never get to the point of dropping the Word of God and the information that was so sound and based on the Bible itself.  That is not the nature of the true believer.  The true believer waits on God, and waits for Him to open up Scripture and bring things together.  As we have done so, we have seen that there are biblical answers.  There are very precise reasons why things have unfolded the way they have.  God has a plan to try us and to test us.  What a perfect test it is!  None can deny that we are all being severely tried, and we have also learned more about God’s judgment program to bring about a spiritual judgment on the world.

That is what it took because we were thinking that May 21, 2011 would be a day of great destruction when an earthquake would occur, but we had understood that time would go on for a period of five months in which God would complete the judgment on the unsaved.  We had several things correct, but the major thing we had incorrect was that we were looking for a physical earthquake, a physical judgment on the world, because the world operates in the physical realm  That is probably why we did not take note of the information in the Bible regarding all the other major judgments God had previously wrought – they were all spiritual. In the Garden of Eden, in the day that Adam and Eve sinned, they did not die physically, but they died spiritually.  In the Garden of Gethsemane when Christ drank of the cup of God’s wrath, nothing happened outwardly; there was no lightening from heaven, and no sword descending from heaven to pierce Him that anyone could see.  It was all spiritual. 

When God gave the cup of His wrath to the churches and congregations for 23 years as He judged them, it was not physical.  It was all spiritual.  These were the major judgments in the Bible which the Scriptures declared, and God even told us in Jeremiah 25 that He would give the cup of His wrath first to the city called by His name, and we correctly understood that God’s plan was to begin the judgment at the house of God (the churches), and we correctly understood that it would be entirely spiritual in nature – there would be no physical bloodshed.  Yes, the Bible had said there would not be one stone left upon another, and we knew it was a spiritual language, and we were not to look for a physical destruction of the churches.

Then in the same chapter of Jeremiah, God told Jeremiah to take the identical cup and give it to the nations of the world, and they were to drink from it the wrath of God, just as Christ drank from that cup.  Why did we not realize this because Christ drank of the wrath that was all spiritual, just as the church drank of that cup?  But we missed it, and we were looking for a physical earthquake and physical destruction.  But God did exactly what He had said He would do.  He shut the door of heaven and brought about the Day of Judgment on the date He had declared to the world on May 21, 2011.  But He deceived us, and I say that only in the sense that He did not open our understanding, and He permitted us to continue with the understanding we had, and He did not forewarn us that His plan was to bring an identical judgment on the world of a spiritual judgment.  The light of the Gospel would go out in the world just as it had in the churches.  The door to heaven would shut to the world just as it had shut on the churches and congregations.  There would be no more salvation taking place.  It was Judgment Day.

But to all the world that was mocking and to the churches that had been saying, “No man knows the day or hour,” it appeared nothing had happened.  They saw nothing.  And even God’s people were looking in the wrong direction as we looked in the physical realm.  We too were looking for something outwardly observable, like the great shaking of an earthquake that would prove these things were true, but none of that happened.  And yet God brought about the perfect snare upon all the inhabitants of the earth.  He even tells us that in the Bible in Luke 21:34-35:

And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth.

And that day did come as a snare, and it entrapped all the inhabitants of the earth.  No one knew at that time that God had, indeed, brought the Day of Judgment.  It was only later as we continued to read the Bible that we understand that God had kept the same pattern of judgment as He did with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and as He did with Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and as He did with the corporate church.

And so He gave the cup to the nations, and they were to drink, and it was a spiritual judgment upon them.  It was the identical judgment.  In Isaiah 24, a chapter that goes into detail describing Judgment Day on the people of the world, it says in Isaiah 24:17:

Fear, and the pit, and the snare, are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth.

That is what has happened, and that is where we are in these days after that tribulation.  It is the last period of time, and we have learned from the Bible that it could be 1,600 days because that number is found in Revelation 14, and it would complete the 8,400 days of the Great Tribulation.  What do I mean by that?  If you add 1,600 days and 8,400 days, it totals 10,000 days, from May 21, 1988 through October 7, 2015.  It would be 10,000 exact days of judgment: 8,400 on the churches; and 1,600 on all the inhabitants of the earth.  And the numbers “10,” “100,” or “1,000,” and so forth, points to completeness. 

And that is exactly what we have been looking for as we wait for God to complete the judgment process that He began on the churches.  We had thought that May 21, 2011 would be Judgment Day transitioning from the churches to the world, and that was correct.  But we had thought that Judgment Day would last a literal five months, but we were incorrect about that.  The “five months” is a figurative, or spiritual, number that represents the entire duration of Judgment Day, which could possibly be 1,600 days, for a total of 10,000 days of judgment upon mankind for their sins.  Then God will have completed His wrath, and He will have poured out the complete measure of the fulness of His wrath.  All those to drink of the cup of wrath will have drunk from it, and the wrath of God would then be appeased.  That is what we are looking toward right now.

We did not get a chance in this study to discuss “bed,” as we had hoped.  Lord willing, when we get together in our next Bible study, we will look at this verse where it says, “I will cast her into a bed, and them that commit adultery with her into great tribulation.”