Good evening and welcome to EBible Fellowship's Bible study in the Book of Revelation.  Tonight is study #19 of Revelation, chapter 6.  We have been looking at Revelation 6:12 for some time now.  We are presently following the words “great earthquake,” the megas seismos in the Greek.  It has led us to Acts, chapter 16, where there was a “great earthquake” in a city where Paul and Silas had been witnessing of the Gospel and due this witnessing, they end up in prison – in a dark dungeon.  While in the prison at the time of midnight, they were praying to God and singing praises to God and the prisoners heard them.  Spiritually, that points to the Gospel that came to the world, as mankind “lieth in darkness” and the praying and singing praises unto God is language pointing to the sharing of the Word of God.  They were witnesses.  They were ambassadors for Christ as they entered into that prison and they gave a good testimony for the Lord. 

And while they were singing praises to the Lord, there was a “great earthquake” and we saw in our last study how the language of a “great earthquake” identifies with May 21, 2011 and the Day of the Lord.  Revelation 6:12 is set in the context of the great day of the wrath of God, according to verse 17 of that same chapter.  It identifies with a “great earthquake” occurring on the beginning of the Day of Judgment, although it is not referring to a physical earthquake.  That was the mistake that we made.  Just as the sun, moon and stars and the things happening to them were not physical (and we had previously understood that correctly), so we should have realized that since the “earthquake” is in the same verse, of course, it will not be physical.  But we did not. 

God did not grant us that understanding, for His own purposes, but now we realize that a “great earthquake” did occur that brought about the fall of the city of Babylon; in bringing down Babylon, it loosed the “dungeon,” we could say, of Satan’s kingdom and all of the prisoners that were destined for salvation were freed.  And the Bible tells us this: before the world began, God chose certain individuals and predestinated them to become saved.  Now the sins of these individuals were laid upon the Lord Jesus from the foundation of the world, as Christ died at that point; He was the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world and, thereby, God obligated Himself and guaranteed that they would become saved as they were born into the world in their particular generation throughout the history of the earth; and once they were born, before they could die, they must hear the Gospel.  God obligated Himself to that so there was a constant spiritual battle between the kingdom of darkness (headed up by Satan) and the Kingdom of Light (headed up by the Lord Jesus Christ) and the point of battle had to do with these elect.  Satan was doing everything he could think of to prevent the Word from reaching their ears and, if it did reach their ears, he was doing everything he could to pervert and twist and confound or confuse the Word to try to prevent that person from hearing the true Word.  If they heard the true Word, he wanted them to think it was false, so they would go away from it, so he sowed tares amongst the wheat during the church age. 

Wherever the Gospel was found, Satan would have his emissaries, in this hope: “Perhaps, if I can get a false gospel and if I can come looking like Christ (as the beast that spoke as a Lamb, according to Revelation13) and if my emissaries can look like ‘emissaries of righteousness’ and be convincing enough, then maybe we can draw one of these elect away from truth and, therefore, away from salvation and we will just stall and try get them so disgusted by the process and discouraged that they will go away from the idea altogether.  And if we can prevent just one of these elect from experiencing salvation and having the blood of Christ applied to them, then we would win the battle.”  That is from Satan’s perspective and God would have had quite a big problem on His hands; He would have a sinner whose sins were paid for by the Law of God and, yet, the salvation and atoning work of Christ had never been applied to his heart and he never became born again and, as a result, he would have died in his own sins.  Oh, that would have been the unthinkable.  That would have been something Satan could certainly use and accuse against God, claiming that God’s whole salvation program was a failure.  So this was the point of the battle and where the battle lines were drawn in this battle, down through the centuries of time and right up to the time when God ended His salvation program.  Satan was trying to keep these sinners, as they were not saved yet, so they were still in their sins and we read of an elect person that had not yet been redeemed in having Christ’s blood applied to his heart, in Ephesians 2:1-3:

And you hath he quickened who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.

Now that is basically saying that we were held captive in the dungeon of sin and ensnared to the devil, just like every one else.  Yet, we were elect.  We were chosen and predestinated to receive the salvation of God, so Satan was desperately fighting to keep us in the prison – to keep us in his kingdom of darkness and not to allow us to be translated out of that kingdom and into the kingdom of God’s dear Son.

But when the end came, God began to evangelize the world a second time with the outpouring of the latter rain during the “little season” of the Great Tribulation.  God determined to send forth the warning message of Judgment Day beginning on May 21, 2011 and God arranged for this Word to be heard in a way that was unparalleled in the entire history of the world.  Never before in the world’s history had a message of judgment from the Bible reached the ears of practically every human being in the world – through the people of God carrying tracts and sharing verbally or pooling their resources to send forth a broadcasted radio over radio, internet and satellite or setting up billboards in the most remote places imaginable, or putting advertisement in newspapers and through the news media picking it up.  It was a declaration and proclamation of a message from the Bible that the world had never seen before. 

God used all this to attract the attention of these sinners held fast in the stocks, in the bands, in the dungeon of sin and Satan and God said, “Now is the time.  Seek me while I may be found, for the day is fast coming in which I will shut the door to heaven.”  And the Lord stirred up these individuals and drew them quickly to Himself and saved them by His Word and, immediately, they were delivered.  Now the entire company of the elect – all whose names were recorded in the Lamb’s Book of Life – were rescued and delivered out of the kingdom of Satan before God shut the door on May 21, 2011.  That is why we read, of this “great earthquake,” in Acts 16:26-28:

And suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken: and immediately all the doors were opened, and every one's bands were loosed. And the keeper of the prison awaking out of his sleep, and seeing the prison doors open, he drew out his sword, and would have killed himself, supposing that the prisoners had been fled. But Paul cried with a loud voice, saying, Do thyself no harm: for we are all here.

The Lord saved every one of the prisoners.  This is a similar statement, in a sense, to the prisoners that were on the ship, if you remember, in Acts, chapter 27.  There was a ship with 276 prisoners and the ship became shipwrecked.  Now that ship represented the New Testament churches and congregations, but the prisoners were pictures of God’s elect that were delivered from the shipwreck.  They all made it safely to land, the island of Malta or Malita.  They are a picture of all those that God would deliver out of the churches and congregations.  Well, they were just prisoners…yes, they were prisoners that represent those held in captivity to sin and Satan, but God’s elect were also all prisoners at one time to Satan.  But, now in this historical parable in Acts, chapter 16, those in this dark prison are representative of all the elect in the world that had previously been held captive to their sins and to the devil and now they were loosed. 

But, incredibly, after all were loosed, the keeper of the prison came in, expecting all of the prisoners to have fled and the assurance is given to the keeper of the prison: “Do thyself no harm: for we are all here.”  This relates to what happened on May 21, 2011.  We had a misconception; we had thought that God’s people would be raptured and taken out of the world before judgment would come on the unsaved of the world.  We did not think it was possible that God would leave His people on the earth in the Day of Judgment. 

You know, this is a similar misconception to those that have thought that God would not bring judgment on the churches and congregations until the believers were taken out of the world, or that the Great Tribulation would not come unless the believers were removed first.  We were corrected of this misconception and we realized that God’s people would go through the Great Tribulation.  We would not be taken out of the earth, but we would be here and live through it.

Now we have learned something additional.  It was not God’s plan (and never was) to take His people out of the world and for them to be in heaven while He punished the unsaved inhabitants of the earth.  But, rather, it is God’s plan to leave His people in the world in order to try them (for one thing) to see if they are truly His people – to see if they will trust His Word during this time of a fiery trial of their faith, and for other purposes, too.  We have learned this and we can see from this historical parable in Acts, chapter 16, that the prisoners are all freed, but the prisoners go nowhere.  They do not leave the prison.  And this world, in a sense, is just like that prison.  It is a place where darkness was and it is a place where we were held in captivity to our sins and we were bound at Satan’s will and, yet, we have now all been freed and we are still here.

Now the Lord uses the fact that Paul and Silas and all the prisoners went nowhere and did not escape as a means to bring about the salvation of the keeper of the prisoner and his family.  How are we to understand this?  Let us read in Acts 16:29:

Then he called for a light, and sprang in, and came trembling, and fell down before Paul and Silas, And brought them out, and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house. And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house. And he took them the same hour of the night, and washed their stripes; and was baptized, he and all his, straightway. And when he had brought them into his house, he set meat before them, and rejoiced, believing in God with all his house.

Well, how are we to understand this, if this “great earthquake” typifies what God did on May 21, 2011, in releasing all the captives, then why is this jailer and his family professing belief and salvation?  Well, it is because this is all a result of what God has done.  God saved everyone.  This, again, is an historical parable, but it cannot give us every single detail.  It is teaching us that as a result of that “great earthquake” and as a result of God opening up the prison, this will impact those, like the jailer and his family.  In other words, there is a purpose for the believers, typified by the Apostle Paul and Silas and the rest of the prisoners, for them to remain on the earth after the “great earthquake” occurs and after they have been freed from sin (saved) and that is that they are to be a blessing to others that, likewise, were saved prior to God shutting the door to heaven.  This is just the consequences of that “earthquake,” so we learned that it is God’s plan that the true believers (those that were saved by His grace and freed from Satan’s dungeon) are called upon to feed sheep. 

We are called upon to share the truths from the Bible that we have learned as God opened the Scriptures at the time of the Great Tribulation and, now, into the Day of Judgment.  We are called to share these things with them so that they may also come to the realization that they have been freed, spiritually, from their sins.  It is not as though they are going to become saved, but it is really a result of the fact that they have already been saved and God has already loosed their bands when He opened up their prison doors.  He did a work all around the earth with every one that was held fast in Satan’s kingdom.  So this is really a wonderful picture God is giving us of the great salvation that He accomplished in saving all of His elect. 

I would just like to say that some speak of disdain concerning the Bible’s teaching at this time – that there is no more salvation – and they would say (of anyone sharing that God has shut the door to heaven and put out the light of the Gospel), “They are no salvation teachers!”  And if they could, they would spit out those words – it is such an ugly thing to them: NO SALVATION.  It is really spoken with absolute disdain and, yet, what the Bible is teaching (and what God’s people are privileged to share) is not just a message that there is no more salvation, although that is true.  There is no more salvation in the world at this time and if we are to be faithful to the Word of God, we must share that, but that is just a small part of the story of what God has done.

There is no more salvation because He has accomplished His salvation program and because He has saved every one that was to be saved.  It actually is a time of the greatest of victories, the greatest of triumphs!  The Lord Jesus is exalted as the victorious Lamb of God that saved His people.  He obligated Himself to save them and guaranteed they would be saved and now He has accomplished what He said He would do.  This is not a small thing.  It is a most glorious thing.  There is, we could say, not “no salvation,” but “great salvation.”  It is salvation to the utmost that God has saved every one of His elect, all whose names were written down in the Lamb’s Book of Life to be saved. 

They have become saved and what more can be done?  What more can God do?  What more would man have God to do?  Would they want Him to offer salvation when there was no possibility of it, just for the psychological benefit of people so they could feel good that there was some offer of the Gospel still available?  Well, God never concerned Himself with the non-elect.  God’s concern has always been those that He chose to save.  That is the entire purpose of the sending forth of the Gospel throughout time, throughout the history of the world, to find the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 

And now that the lost sheep are found, are we to say that this is somehow, in some way, a failure because God is not gathering goats?  No.  The grace of God has abundantly covered the sins of every one it was intended to cover.  The mercy of God has abundantly been bestowed upon all the sinners that God intended to have mercy upon.  What more can be done?  There is no more for the Gospel of God to do.  He has finished His salvation plan and it is a time where He ought to be greatly praised and greatly honored and greatly glorified by His people.