Revelation 

(Unlocking the Bible series)

The Revelation Riddle

David Pawson

Well today we are going to study the book of Revelation so I want to begin by reading

some of it especially because it says bless is the one who reads it, so I want a

blessing.

The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what,

must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John who

testifies to everything he saw—that is, the word of God and the testimony of Jesus

Christ. Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy, and blessed are

those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near.

To the seven churches in the province of Asia:

Grace and peace to you from him who is, and who was, and who is to come, and from

the seven spirits before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness,

the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth.

 
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood, and has made us to

be a kingdom and priests to serve his God and Father—to him be glory and power for

ever and ever! Amen.

“Look, he is coming with the clouds, and “every eye will see him, even those who

pierced him”; and all peoples on earth “will mourn because of him.”

So shall it be! Amen.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is, and who was, and who

is to come, the Almighty.”

Well Revelation is a strange group and it divides Christians into two groups, those

who can’t get in to the book and those who can’t go out of it. Do you know what I

mean? It is the fearful and the fanatical. And human opinion has varied enormously

about this book. Some thinks it is a wonderful book, some thinks it is a terrible book

ad leaves it strictly alone.

Among the negative comments, I’ve made a book of a few, as many riddles as there

are words, a farrago of baseless fantasy, a haphazard accumulation of weird symbols,

and worst of all it will either find you mad or leave you mad.

Unfortunately, the protestant reformers, three or four hundred years ago, ha a very

low opinion of Revelation and ever since it had a little place in protestant churches.

Martin Luther is very rude about it. He said it is neither apostolic nor prophetic. He
said everyone thinks of the book whatever his spirit finds there. There are many

nobler books to be retained. My spirit can’t apprehend with this book and he wished it

was not in the bible at all. John Calvin was very similar and he omitted it all together

from his New Testament commentary. And the third most famous, you might have

not heard of him, from Norwich Switzerland, he said it’s not a book of the bible so we

can resist its testimonies. And the last from there, the protestant churches attended

to have a very low view of this book. Certainly it took a long time to get into our New

Testament but thank God it is there. Later I’m going to try and get you to imagine

what it would be like if your bible ended with Jude and didn’t end with Revelation. It

would be terribly incomplete.

Fortunately there are many people who have very positive opinion about this book

who think it is a masterpiece, one of the greatest books in the bible and that is my

opinion too. In fact it is my favorite book because my favorite book in the bible is that

last one I’ve studied. So today, this is my favorite book in the bible. But I believe it is

a very, very important book from where we are in the church history. It is the book

that I want the whole church to be studying to prepare us for what lies ahead.

Now we know the devil’s opinion of this book, he hates it. There are two parts of our

bible which satan wants to keep out of your reading if he can. It is the first three

chapters and the last three chapters in the bible, the first few pages and the last few

pages. Why? Because the first few pages tell us how he got a hold of us, how he got

in to this world and took it over and he is now the prince, the ruler and the god of this

world. But the last few pages tell us how he is going to be kicked out of this world.
His days are numbered. So he hates these two bits of the bible. And if he can

persuade you that Genesis is myth and Revelation is history, he is happy.

Over the last 20 years or so, we have had many tapes of Revelation 20 ruined,

between the leaving and current perfect condition and reaching of the people over

century. And it is usually 7 minutes on that Revelation 20 tapes that was ruined. And

during those 7 minutes I’ve talked about satan’s doomed. So he is not very happy

with you being here today.

What does God think about this book of Revelation? Well we know of His opinion. He

has very high opinion of this book. It is the only one in the whole bible that has a

blessing at the beginning attached to those who read it and a curse at the end on

those who tamper with it. The curse at the ends says that if you ever take anything

out of this book or add anything of your own into this book you will suffer the plaques

describe here in and you will lose your salvation, your place in the city of God.

Now these are serious things. There is a great blessing attached to those who read

this book aloud and those who hear it read and take it to heart. And there is a curse

at the end about not tempering with it. Now that is unusual. It is the only book in the

bible that has a blessing and a curse attached to it.

Now let us just see its place in the whole bible. It is the final book; it is the end of the

story. Now the bible can be looked out from two points of view. It is a history book

through and through. Unlike most of the other sacred book of other religion which are

not history, our bible is history. But unlike any other history book you can get in the
library, it starts earlier and it finishes later. It starts at the beginning of our universe

and gets right through to the end of it. No other history book that you can read

covers such a span. And without the book of Revelation we would not know how

history is going to end. Your guess is like as good as mine as to how the world would

end. But we know. We are the only people who do know how this history of ours is

going to end, how the world will end and it I because we have this last book. It

completes the entire history of our universe.

Another way of looking at the bible is that it is to see that it is a romance. It is full of

romance, a very romantic book. It is a story of a father looking for a bride for his son.

And if we didn’t have the book of Revelation we wouldn’t know the account of the

marriage. We’ll finish with the engagement between the son and his bride.

Paul writing to one of his churches says, “I’ve bestrode you to Christ” and that is the

present relationship of Jesus to Christians. We are engaged to Him, we are bestrode.

We are not married. The marriage comes at the end. Unlike any good romance, the

bible finishes with and they got married and lived happily ever after.

There is a lovely miss print at the end of our romantic novel which says, “and they

got happily married and they lived happily even after” but the normal ending is, ‘and

they got married and lived happily ever after”. That is how the bible ends, and it ends

with a marriage. You see if we didn’t have Revelation, it might end with a broken

engagement but it ends with the marriage supper of the Lamb, it ends with the

weeding and they go to live happily in the New Jerusalem forever and ever.

 
So without this book the bible would be very much short and then cut of and the

story wouldn’t end whether it were history of romance so we are glad we’ve got it. So

I’m afraid many Christians are frightened with this book. They tried to read it and

they get well through the first few chapters, to about chapter 5. And then chapter 6,

they find themselves out of their depts. And they are wondering what it is all about

and where it is all going. And the few pages further on, they are giving up.

It is at first sight a very complicated book, a very difficult and obscure book. But I

believe that is because we’ve forgotten two important facts. Fact number one, this

book was written for ordinary people. It wasn’t written for theological professor. In

fact I’ve got a lovely quote here. It is one of the misfortunes of our expertise oriented

culture that when anything seems difficult, it sent off to the university to be figured

out. But that’s what happens to this. And here is another quote I found which put this

to devastating way, “we boldly affirm that the study of this book would present

absolutely no possibility of error if the inconceivable, often ridiculous prejudice of

theologians in all ages had not so trembled it and made it bristle with difficulties that

most readers shrink on it from alarm. Apart from these preconceptions, the

Revelation would be the most simple, most transparent book that prophets ever

paid.”

That is quite a statement. It is basically a basic book written for simple people. For

the members of 7 churches in what is now Western Turkey. And they were very

ordinary people. Not highly educated, not very noble, just very ordinary people and

many of them are even slaves and this book was written for them and made sense for

them.
 

I heard a lovely story from America. It could be a preacher’s story. Do you know what

I mean by that? A little boy asked his father once. “Daddy was that story true or were

you just preaching” well there are these Apocrypha story which many preachers love

to retell. And this maybe is one of them. But it is a story of a group of theological

students in a seminary in America. They were having lectures of the apocalyptic

literature of the bible including Revelation and they were left on total confusion by the

professor. So they decided to have a game of basketball in the campus gym nation.

While they are playing basketball, they noticed that janitor or caretaker sitting at the

side of the gymnasium, a black man. He was waiting with the keys to lock up when

they’ve finished. And they noticed he was reading his bible. So after they’ve played

their game, they went to him and said, “Good to see you reading your bible?” Oh I

love my bible. “What part are you reading?” ‘Revelation’ “You don’t understand that,

do you?” of course I do, “What’s the message of it? “Simply, Jesus wins”. That is an

excellent summary of the whole book of Revelation.

Now there is a bit more to say than that. It is not quite as simple as that and we are

going to take all day to say a good more. But hat is the essence of it, that simple man

had got the real message, Jesus wins”. I love that verse that says, “The common

people heard Jesus gladly”. That is not just a tribute to Jesus; it is a tribute to

common people. It is because you can’t fool common people. You can fool educated

people very easy, just dress it up in the right philosophical language. But common

people can’t be fooled, they just say the emperor has no clothes and they just say it

like it is. And this is written for common people and therefore we need to read it with

common sense. That is one of the greatest helps in understanding the simple, straight
forward message of Revelation. Use your common sense. Take a statement at its face

value. Don’t be thrown by the symbols. No one takes the whole book literally, no one

take the whole book metaphorically or symbolically. It is a mixture of a literal and the

symbolical.

How do we know when we are dealing with this and that? Well when you see a scarlet

woman sitting in a dragon, your common sense says that is not literal that is a

picture. At other times your common sense says that is literal. Use your common

sense. Also you use the rules of common speech. And one of the rules in common

speeches that the same word in the same context has the same meaning. Now that

sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But I tell you know when we come to Revelation 20, there

would never have been the whole discussion about whether you are a millennial,

premillennial, or postmillennial if people had used that simple rule, the same word in

the same context has the same meaning. So much can hang on simple rules of

common speech.

Well it was written for ordinary people like ourselves. However it was written for

people a long time ago and a long way away, about 2000 years ago and nearly 2000

miles away. And therefore we do have to try to get back into their minds and their

hearts and read it through their eyes. So it does involve a little bit of exercise to see

what would those 7 congregations make of this book and then we could start applying

it for today.

Now that was first important principle, it was written for ordinary people. The second

principle that opens this book to us is it is written for a very practical purpose. I want
to say very strongly that it was not written to satisfy your curiosity about the future.

And if you treat the book like that, you are mistreating. It was not given to us to

make us what are called illuminati in history, those who have secret knowledge, and

those who’d been initiated into the secrets of the future. It was not given to us to

make us superior in that way. Nor was it given to us so that we can write it all out on

a large chart or time table and then work out what time it is on God’s clock and how

near we are to the end. There is an awful lot of that that has been done in Revelation.

And it is therefore had no practical effect whatever on the lives of those who studied

it, just to be in the know about the future may satisfy your curiosity. But that is not

why it is written. It was written for a practical and not an intellectual purpose. It was

written not just for your mind but for your will and for your heart. And we will come

to that practical purpose in a moment. It is not an old most almanac with a detailed

forecast.

True, the book is filled with predictions about the future, there are all together 56

separate predictions about the future here in this book. Some of them are written

more than once. Furthermore that is the highest percentage of predictions in any

book in the New Testament. Not the whole bible. Daniel has a few more and Ezekiel

has a few more. But in the New Testament there are more predictions about the

future in this book than any other book in the New Testament. So it is about the

future but not to satisfy your curiously. The Lord has only told us what we need to

know about the future in order to be ready for it. Now that is the practical purpose.

The reason He has told you what is coming is that so you can be ready and be

prepared to use the Boy Scout motto. Be prepared, get ready now.

 
In other words, all the New Testament says about the future is to help us to live right

in the present. And therefore many of our questions about the future are not

answered in the bible, all sorts of details. I’m sure some of you will want to ask me

questions after today and a lot them I have to say, “I don’t know, we are not told”.

What we are not told, we don’t need to know now. What we are told is what we do

need to know if we are to live right now. That is why a Jesus said, “I told you all these

things that are going to happen so that you wouldn’t be deceived now, so that you

can live right now.”

So that’s the practical purpose, al the predictions given about the future is to

influence the present. And that is because we lived by three virtues, faith, hope and

love. Now abide faith, hope and love but the weakest of this is love. That is my own

translation. And in the modern church, I find that hope is almost none existence

because hope is what we know is going to happen in the future. It is not really a good

English word because it is an uncertain word. “I hope it going to be fine tomorrow; I

hope I’m going to pass my exam” there is an uncertainty. Where is in a Greek word

“Elpis’ which is translated word means that you are absolutely sure that it is going to

happen. That is a very strong word. That is why hope is like an anchor to your soul,

what we know is going to happen, holds us when the storm comes. And the very

center of the hope in the future is the fact that Jesus is coming back in planet earth.

And the whole book of Revelation is built around that fact. It begins and ends with

notice of His coming, His second coming, His return to planet earth and that holds

you like an anchor when the storm hits you. Jesus is coming back. That is the very

center of our hope for the future.

 
I have no hope for every politician but every election is beginning to be messianic.

Have you noticed? Every election is looking for a political messiah who can put

everything right and get us out of our troubles. And each time somebody wins, we

think we found him. Six months later we are beginning to be disappointed and few

years later we are disillusioned. That is because there is only one messiah. They are

many false ones who claims to be but there is only coming back to put it all right and

one day Jesus will be back among us and he will put it right. And among other things,

He is going to kick the devil out. And until that happens we are going to have trouble

the whole way because we can’t get rid of the devil but He can. Well now I’m jumping

ahead right to the end, don’t i?

Well now the particular practical purpose for which this book is written may be found

in one verse right at the middle of the book at chapter 14 and verse 12. And for me

that one verse right at the middle of the book opens up the whole book. Let me read

it.

“This cause for patient endurance on the part of the saints who obey God’s

commandments and remain faithful to Jesus”

This \book of Revelation at the end of the bible is written specifically for suffering

saints. And this may be why we have such problems with it, because we are not

suffering. But Christians in many, many parts of the world are suffering and dying for

Jesus. And for them, the book of Revelation is as plain as day. You all must need to

be a suffering saint to understand this book and we are not. So we treat it as an

intellectual or academic challenge instead of seeking to feed ourselves on it so that

we can suffer and endure. And this is written by a man who is already suffering for

his Lord. It is written by John on the island of Patmos, a little island 8 miles long

about 60 miles at the crawlies at the city of Ephesus. And he is a political prisoner; he

has to work on the alley on that little island. Let us look at this picture.

Right at the top of the highest hill of the island, there is now a monastery, the

monastery of Saint John. It looks more like a castle than a monastery. But that is on

the side of the prison, near the quarry where they have to ship out granite from the

quarry. And they slept in cells here. And John is there. What crime has he committed?

He says, “I’m here for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus”. He is a traitor to

the Roman Empire and so he has been vanished to what was then the equivalent of

Robin’s island, Alcatraz. And there he is in prison, he is suffering for Jesus. So the

book was born out of a man’s suffering for Jesus but he is writing for saints who are

also going to suffer. And he is preparing them for that. And that is why I believe this

book is so important because Christians are going to be less and less popular. They

are going to suffer more and more as we get neared to the end of this age. And this

book was written to prepare us before the suffering hits us so that we are ready for it

and able to endure it when it happens.

Now John was writing this book in that prison in Patmos on the Lord’s Day, “The”

Lord’s Day not ”A’’ Lords day. And we tent to make a mistake thinking that was

Sunday and he must have been missing going to one of the 7 churches that he used

to visit for preaching. That was not quite the case. I must give you a bit of history

now.

 
25 years before Jesus was born, there was a Roman Emperor called Julius Caesar. He

actually evaded these shores. And Julius Caesar was the first emperor to call himself

divine. Not just human but divine. He was followed by Augustus and Tiberius. And

Augustus went one further and he commanded worship and he said, “I want you to

erect temples to me all over the empire”. And so Augustan temples were raised and

in them people worship Augustus as god. And particularly in western Turkey, the cult

of the Roman Empire took deep roots and many temples were built to the Roman

Emperors. But Revelation was written much later around the year 96 AD, towards the

end of the century. And by that time, Christians had begun to suffer. They’ve began

to suffer in Rome itself under Nero and Nero did horrible things. If you ever go to

Rome, stand with your back to the coliseum and look at a green hill at the opposite

side of the Rome. That was Emperor Nero’s garden. That is where he held garden

parties by night. And he tied Christians to pose and have them covered with pitch and

set a light alive t illuminate his barbeques. That is the way he used to order Christians

to be sown to the skin of wild animals and then wild dogs will let loose on them in an

enclosure. That was how Nero amused himself so. But that persecution did not spread

beyond Rome.

About 30 years later Domitian became the Roman Emperor and he really started the

Christian suffering right through the empire. You see he called himself two new titles.

He said, “You should call me lord and god” that is exactly what Thomas had once said

to a carpenter from Nazareth, “My Lord and my God”. Well Domitian said something

more. He said, “Once a year everybody must worship me. They must stand in front of

a vast in me and an altar with a fire on it and they must take a pinch of incense and

burn it on the altar and raise their hands and say three words, Caesar my lord”. Every
year he expected everybody in the empire to do this at the cost of their life if they

refuse.

Now Christians were presented with a horrible alternative. only three words, Caesar is

lord, but Jesus is Lord was the earliest creed of the church and they will not give that

title to anyone else. God had highly exalted Jesus and given Him the name Lord which

is above every name. And so they were going to refuse or at least they would now

give Him the most acid test of their royalty to Jesus they’d ever had. Would they say

those three words? After all they are just three words.

Now the day, on which Domitian commanded that to be done throughout the Empire,

he gave a special name for the day, “the lordy day” and that is the exact phrase in

the Greek in Revelation 1. It is ‘the lordy day’ and lord is an adjective and not a noun.

“I was in the spirit”, says John, “on the lordy day”, not on a lord’s day but the lordy

day. Sunday is always called the first day of the week on scripture, but the lordy day,

that is special. It was an annual day when the Emperor said, “You all say Caesar is

lord”. And John in his prison could see that this is going to be greatest test of the

people in those 7 churches that he had passed and taught. Would they give in? Would

they go under? And so he wrote the book and it is a call to the saints to endure. But

not just to endure, that means to endure under something. He used another word

which is actually the key word to the whole word and it goes all the way through. It is

the word overcome. Endure is to go under something, to overcome it is to get on top

of it. Jesus said, “Cheer up. In the world you’ll have big trouble but cheer up, I have

overcome the world. I am on top of it.”

 
When I ask a friend of mine, “How are you” he said, “I’m very well on over the

circumstances” which is unique Christian answer. And so this book is a call to be

overcomers not just endure under this pressure but get on top of it, come out

victorious, be, as we sung earlier, more than conquerors, to be on top of the situation

and not under it. To that end, to the book offers two kinds of incentives, both positive

and negative. The positive incentive is offered all the way through in terms of rewards

for he who overcomes. Those who come out on top will get one reward after another.

And here are some of them, I have listed them.

The right to eat from the tree of life in the paradise of God

The right not to be hurt at all in the second death

The right to have the hidden manner and the right stone with the secret new name on

it

The authority to all the nations to rule them, to be dressed in white, to be made a

pillar in the temple of God, never to grow out again

The right to sit with Jesus on His throne

All these are positive rewards offered to believers who overcome when they are under

pressure, who get on top of it and come out victorious. At one point Jesus says in this

book, “He who overcomes as I overcame and sit on the throne of my father, he who
overcomes will sit on the throne with Me”. In other words, Jesus doesn’t ask us

anything He hasn’t done Himself.

On the other side is what a believer can lose if he doesn’t overcome but goes under

when the test comes. And this is the most serious note sound at all the way through

that book. It comes in chapter 3:5 where Jesus says this, “He who overcomes, I will

never blot out his name from the book of life” literally the word there is never scrape

off his name. They use a pen knife to scrape ink of parchment to erase a name. And

Jesus said, He who overcomes, I will never erase his name on the book of life.

What does it mean for in simple common sense English for those who don’t

overcome? Quite simply it means their names could be rubbed out, scraping out. In

fact the book of life is only mentioned in 5 books of the whole bible. But one of those

talked about names that are being rubbed out of the book of life, right at the end of

Revelation, remembering that this is a book written for saints and not sinners. It is

not written for unbelievers. It is written for 7 churches, for believers. At the end of

the book comes this extraordinary verse, after describing the new heaven and the

new earth d the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. It is says this, “He who

overcomes will inherit all this but the cowardly and the faithless and the immoral and

the deceitful their lot will be on the lake of fire which is the second death”. Now that

is written to sinners. It is not written to unbelievers. It is written to believers. And it

ties in with Paul’s and Jesus teaching elsewhere. Here is Paul’s teaching. “If we died

with Him, we shall also live with Him. If we endure, we shall also reign with Him. But

if we disown Him, He will also disown us.” And that is a quote also most direct from
Jesus Himself who said, “Whoever disown me before men, I will also disown him

before my Father in heaven”.

Now this of course raises the question, once saves always saved a cliché which never

appears in scripture. Though some believes it stands for what appears in scripture.

However may I just recommend you to read my little book, “Once saved, always

saved?” in which I pointed out that of all the warnings about hell the Jesus gave, all

but two of them were given to born again believers and those were given to

Pharisees. Jesus didn’t talk about hell to sinners. He did talk about hell a lot to His

own disciples who had already left all to follow Him. And Revelation therefore is

written for this very simple purpose, to keep Christian names in the book of life so

that they do finish up in the heavenly city and the new heaven and the New Erath.

That is the very simple reason for which it is written, a very practical reason.

It holds before us, this book, to eternal destinies which are held in front of the

believers of the saints, of the members in those 7 churches in Asia. one destiny is to

be resurrected and reign with Christy and share in the whole new universe. The other

destiny is to lose our inheritance in the kingdom and finish up into everlasting

torment. And I fear less having preached to others, I will be cast away myself. I fear

hell that is why I can talk about this. I could never say, “Blow you jack, I’m alright.

You sinners are going to hell and I am a saint going to heaven”. No this book reminds

us that when Jesus comes, He is not looking for those who profess faith but those

who kept faith. To whom He can say, “Well done good and faithful servant”. It is not

the faith we start with but the faith we finish with that ensures our place in heaven.

 
That is the practical purpose of this book. It is not just to unveil the future so that you

know what is coming but so that you can be ready for it. And just to give one little

example, this book tells us that things are going to much worse before they get

better, that there is going to be big trouble at the end, great tribulation. But one of

the comforting things in that book is this, that that great trouble, the big trouble, the

worst of all wills only last three and a half years, 42 months or 1260 days. The Lord

couldn’t have made it clearer. But the contrast with that is reigning with Christ on this

earth for a thousand years. The whole book is saying; don’t throw away that for this.

When you are under pressure, when things are going bad, the going gets really tough

hold on the future and all you got to look forward to and don’t risk losing that but

remain faithful to Jesus. This is a call for endurance on the part of the saints who

keep God’s commandments and remained faithful to Jesus. That is why we read the

book.