Good evening, everyone, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Revelation.  Tonight is study #39 of Revelation 2, and we are continuing to look at Revelation 2:27-29:

And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father. And I will give him the morning star. He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.

We have spent quite a while on verse 27, and we have seen how this verse is looking ahead to the Day of Judgment when the Lord Jesus would rule with a rod of iron over the nations, and He would destroy them as the vessels of a potter, and they shall be broken to shivers.  This describes the judgment of God in the Day of Judgment, the time we are presently in, and God indicates that He is punishing the unsaved people of the world that He likens to  vessels.  God typifies Himself as the Potter, and mankind that He created are like the vessels of a potter.

There are many vessels that will be destroyed due to man’s rebellion and unregenerate state.  They are dishonorable, according to Romans 9, and they are in ruin and good for nothing.  So God will destroy them, and He has started that process.  He guaranteed their destruction by ending the day of salvation, once Judgment Day began, and during this period of time all the unsaved will be ultimately destroyed.  They will be annihilated, and then God will turn His attention to eternity future with the people He chose for Himself, His elect, whom He likens to “vessels unto honour,” the redeemed vessels that He has saved.

Now let us look at the closing statements of this chapter.  It says in Revelation 2:27:

… even as I received of my Father.

God has just told us that the unsaved people will be like the vessels of a potter that are broken to shivers, or as the Old Testament puts it, they will be dashed to pieces.  They will be utterly destroyed.  Then He makes the final statement, “…even as I received of my Father.”  That is, the Lord Jesus Christ is telling us that what will happen to mankind in the Day of Judgment is something He has already received of His Father.  Is it so that Christ has been “broken to shivers” by God the Father?  Yes, because the Lord Jesus Christ had been judged and punished as He was bearing the sins of His people at the foundation of the world, and He suffered and died for those sins to satisfy the Law’s demand: “For the wages of sin is death.”  And the Lord Jesus did die in making payment for all the sins of His people.  In that sense He drank of the cup of the wrath of God, and the language of being broken as the vessels of a potter is describing Judgment Day, which God also likens to drinking of the cup of His wrath.  And all unsaved people are presently drinking of the spiritual cup of the wrath of God, and Christ was indicating that He had also received the wrath of God from the Father.  We see, for instance, when the Lord entered into the Garden of Gethsemane, it  says in Matthew 26:36-39:

Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here, while I go and pray yonder. And he took with him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be sorrowful and very heavy. Then saith he unto them, My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death: tarry ye here, and watch with me. And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.

Christ did this three times.  He asked that the cup of the wrath of God might pass from Him, but He also prayed, “Not as I will, but as thou wilt,” because He knew the will of His Father perfectly.  And He knew the reason for His coming into the world was to demonstrate (in a tableau) what He had already done in drinking of the cup of the wrath of God from the foundation of the world.  In other words, Christ prayed that the cup might pass from Him even though He knew that it could not pass from Him.  And we wonder why He would do that.  All we can say is that God gave Him the privilege to come to Him and make request for the cup of wrath to pass, and it was of benefit to the Lord Jesus.  It was a help for Him to be able to do this, even knowing in advance that His position of being under God’s wrath would not change, and could not change, because He was fulfilling His purpose in entering into the human race.

And this helps us.  Now that we are in the Day of Judgment, we also wonder, “Can we still pray for people, especially those that are still in the churches in a situation where God was not saving?”  And when we transitioned to the Day of Judgment, that condition that was only true in the churches is now the condition everywhere in the world.  Certainly all those in the churches were bundled as tares for the burning, and they are drinking of the cup of the wrath of God.  Can we still pray for them?  After all, they are under God’s judgment.  And the answer is, “Yes.”  You see, this gives us allowance by God where we can pray, “O, Father, I know this person was in the church up until May 21, 2011.  May the cup of your wrath pass from this person?”  Of course we know the Father’s will, just as the Lord Jesus knew His Father’s will for the Day of Judgment, so we add, “But not our will, but thine by done.”  But God has graciously given us the ability to continue to pray for all people, desiring the best for them.  We do not desire that anyone suffer.  We do not desire that anyone die.  We do not desire that anyone experience the wrath of God, so we continue to desire the best for them, and we pray that they might be delivered from the cup of the wrath of God, but we conclude our prayer, “But not my will, but thine be done.  May your will be accomplished in this day.”

Again, here Jesus was drinking of the cup of the wrath of God.  And another thing we have learned is that it was a “spiritual” cup.  In Revelation 14, a chapter that describes Judgment Day, which began on May 21, 2011 and has been continuing ever since, it says in Revelation 14:10:

The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb:

This is describing God’s plan to punish all unsaved inhabitants of the earth at this time, and the Lord speaks of them drinking of the cup of His wrath, just as did the Lord Jesus Christ.  In order for us to understand what this cup points to when God says that someone is drinking of the cup of His wrath, we must turn to the rest of the Bible to get our definition.  And when we turn to Matthew 26, we realize that Jesus drank of an “invisible” cup of wrath.  There was no literal cup as He drank of God’s wrath.  There was no outward sign of that wrath if someone would have looked upon Him in the garden.  They would have seen Him all alone, and they would not have seen any thunderbolts coming down from heaven, and they would not have seen an angry God.  They would only have seen Christ, and that is because He was being punished in a spiritual and invisible way that no one could see, and yet it was very real.

So that teaches us about the “cup.”  Also, if we turn to Jeremiah 25 where God speaks of a “cup of wrath,” He goes into some detail, and it says in Jeremiah 25:15-18:

For thus saith JEHOVAH God of Israel unto me; Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it. And they shall drink, and be moved, and be mad, because of the sword that I will send among them. Then took I the cup at the JEHOVAH'S hand, and made all the nations to drink, unto whom JEHOVAH had sent me: To wit, Jerusalem, and the cities of Judah, and the kings thereof, and the princes thereof, to make them a desolation, an astonishment, an hissing, and a curse; as it is this day;

Then it goes on to speak of the nations that would also drink of the cup of the wrath of God.  Then God says in Jeremiah 25:28-29:

And it shall be, if they refuse to take the cup at thine hand to drink, then shalt thou say unto them, Thus saith JEHOVAH of hosts; Ye shall certainly drink. For, lo, I begin to bring evil on the city which is called by my name, and should ye be utterly unpunished? Ye shall not be unpunished: for I will call for a sword upon all the inhabitants of the earth, saith JEHOVAH of hosts.

We have gone to this chapter for years in order to show forth God’s plan to begin the judgment process at the city called by His name.  In other words, judgment begins at the house of God – it begins with the corporate church, those that were God’s outward representation of His kingdom to the world throughout the church age.  Then God visited them, and He saw their unfaithfulness at the time of the end, and He began to judge the world by first judging the churches that identified with Him.

Following that, then He took the cup He first gave to His own people, the professed Christians, and He gave it to the nations of the world.  He makes a point of saying, “For, lo, I begin to bring evil on the city which is called by my name, and should ye be utterly unpunished? Ye shall not be unpunished: for I will call for a sword upon all the inhabitants of the earth, saith JEHOVAH of hosts.” 

We understand that God first judged the churches.  He began judging them on May 21, 1988, and He continued that judgment for 23 years until May 21, 2011.  And we understood that judgment to be completely “spiritual” in nature.  We fully realized that when God said He would give “Jerusalem, and the cities of Judah” the cup of His wrath, it would be a spiritual cup.  We had no problem with that.  We realized that to be the nature of the Bible, and God speaks of a spiritual cup of wrath.  We also understood that when He said there would not be one stone left upon another, He did not mean that literally.  He was referring to spiritual desolation, a spiritual destruction of the churches, and not a literal tearing down of the bricks of the physical buildings of the churches.  We understand when the Bible speaks of many being “killed” and their bodies lying all over the ground, He is not talking about physical bloodletting when it comes to killing those in the churches, but it is a spiritual killing of those in the congregations.  And we fully understand that.

Here, we are given instruction on the cup of the wrath of God regarding the churches as “Judah,” pointing to the New Testament churches and congregations that would drink of that cup at the time of the end.  And we understood that when Jesus drank of the cup of the wrath of God, it was a spiritual cup.  We get that, but for some reason when it came to that day of transition of judgment on the churches to judgment on the world, we automatically assumed that it must a physical, literal judgment, something the world could see.  We probably thought this way because the world operates in the physical realm, and they cannot see spiritual judgments, and we somehow adapted the “cup of wrath” to fit the circumstances of it being the world that was being judged.

But that was all wrong because God was teaching us through the judgment that began on the churches and the language of them drinking the cup, and through Christ drinking the cup in the Garden of Gethsemane, that the nature of the “cup of the wrath of God” was spiritual.  It is God’s punishment for sin in a way that mankind cannot outwardly observe.  Mankind cannot see the judgment upon them.

Could anyone see God’s judgment on the churches?  Even those in the churches and congregations could not see it, even though they experienced it for that 23 years, and they do not think they were ever judged.  They do not recognize or acknowledge any wrath of God coming upon them at all.  That is incredible that God could judge them, and yet they would be completely ignorant of the judgment.

And that is exactly what God did on May 21, 2011 with His judgment on the world.  He has followed the pattern that He has established in the Bible.  We have every biblical authority to say that the cup of the wrath of God given to the world was spiritual.  Actually, anyone that says it must be “physical,” they have to show in the Bible where the cup of wrath is given in a physical way, or something that can be seen outwardly.  What judgment can they find?  When they point to the judgment in the Garden of Eden, God had said, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”  Adam and Eve did disobey God, and they ate of the tree, but did they die in that day in any outward way?  No, not physically.  And God did not distinctly say “how” they would die, but He simply said they would die.  And it turned out that the original judgment on mankind was a spiritual judgment, and in the day they ate of that tree they died spiritually in their soul existence.  This is why all men are born dead in their spirit, and they must be made born again in order to have life within their soul.  Mankind’s soul died in the garden, and everyone born into the world since that time was born with a dead spirit.  That was the first judgment, and it was a spiritual judgment.

The judgment on the churches was a spiritual judgment, and the judgment on the Lord Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane was a spiritual judgment.  Where in the Bible can you find more major judgments than these?  You cannot find judgments that are greater than the original fall into sin, or the wrath of God ending the church age, or the judgment in the garden upon the Lord Jesus Christ?  Where in the Bible are there judgments that were not spiritual?

Now we do know that at the end of this spiritual judgment upon the world, there will be a physical, literal destruction of all unsaved people, which God must do in order to destroy this world, and then turn His attention to the creation of the new heaven and new earth and eternity future.

Let us go back to Revelation 2:27:

… as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father.

Therefore, Jesus is saying that the judgment on the nations of the world and its unsaved people will be even as He received of His Father.  Again, He had received the cup of wrath from God that was spiritual in nature as He was punished in that earthly tableau, and there was no outward, visible indicator in the garden of anything else.

Let us move on to Revelation 2:28:

And I will give him the morning star.

To whom does this refer?  It is referring back to verse 26: “And he that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, to him will I give power over the nations.”  Again, the elect overcome in Christ and through Christ, as He was victorious in winning the battle over sin and Satan.  The Lord Jesus won the battle over death itself, and He resurrected from the dead, and He has overcome all.  He has overcome the world.

So in Him we will receive “the morning star.”  The “morning star” is also mentioned in Revelation 22.  The word “morning” is different, but it is the very same idea.  It says in Revelation 22:16:

I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.

Jesus is the “morning star,” and that makes perfect biblical sense.  God is indicating that the children of God overcome through Christ, and are given the “morning star,” or Christ Himself.  He is given to us, and everything that He is, and His Spirit is given to us, and He dwells with us forever.  It says in Revelation 21:3:

And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

Remember that “Immanuel” means “God with us, so Christ will be with us.  He will be within us.  He will never leave us nor forsake us, the Bible says.  He is given to us for evermore.  We have the most intimate relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ that is imaginable.  He will be our Teacher and Guide, and He will give us of all abundant spiritual gifts the Bible speaks about, and He will wipe away all our tears.  He will give us life, and peace, and joy.  He is all of these things, and He is the great gift of God, an unspeakable gift that has been freely bestowed by the grace of God toward each individual God has saved. 

We really have a great treasure.  God has given us something of supreme value that is of more value than a thousand worlds like earth.  It is of more value than anything we can imagine, and it is really of value that is above and beyond our imagination.  We have very limited knowledge of the glorious gift of salvation, who is Christ, and God has granted Him to us by His mercy and grace.  We experience a little of it in this life, although our knowledge of it is limited.  What we can experience in our new souls is limited because we still have struggles, difficulties, and afflictions in our physical bodies, but it is God’s plan to give us eternal life.  And all the future eternal blessings that He intends to bless us with are all a result of Christ and what He has done.  So we will be given the “morning star.”

Then this chapter concludes with Revelation 2:28:

He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.

Once again, God is reminding us that He is speaking in a parable, and you have to have an “ear to hear,” and naturally men do not have that ear.  The natural man is deaf, and they cannot hear God’s Word, and they need an “ear to hear,” and only God Himself can give us that as He grants us His wonderful salvation, and all the people of God are given ears to hear. 

And it also says, “…hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.”  It was not just the church in Thyatira, but it was being said to all the churches throughout the ages.