Eschatology Archives - Truth Is The Word

Religious Woe

7 Comments / Blog, Home Bulletin, My Blog / Christopher Peppler

Religion is a word cherished by many but vilified by the irreligious, and there is a reason for this.

Once again, things will only become clear when we get to later chapters of Revelation, so before I state what I believe to be the second Woe, let’s follow a few clues.

The second demonic plague of Revelation Chapter Nine, pictured as grotesquely mutated horses, is connected in some way to the Altar of Incense (Revelation 9:13). We know from Revelation 8:3-4 that this altar is a symbol of prayer and worship and Revelation 9:20 strengthens this connection by declaring that the victims of these invading demons are caught up in idolatrous worship.
The hosts of hell were released from across the great Euphrates, a river that provided a natural divide between the West and the East. In ancient times great invading powers like Babylonia and Syria were to the East of the Euphrates. In later ages the major ‘invading’ religions, such as Islam, came from east of the Euphrates.
The colours of the demon horses were red, blue and yellow (Revelation 9:17). Why did John record this seemingly insignificant detail? Because it is not insignificant – the three prime colours of pure light are Red, Blue, and Green but the prime colours of reflected light are Red, Blue, and Yellow, which when mixed together form Black. This represents the exact opposite of the beams of refracted light coming from the throne of God which I described in and earlier post.

So, this second Woe has to do with demonic prayer, worship, eastern religions, and the ‘throne’ of Satan. We encountered in the letter to Pergamum (Revelation 2:13). Let’s give this Woe a name … RELIGION.

This might shock many of you because the word ‘religion’ is usually used in a positive or neutral sense. However, I see religion in an entirely negative light. An origin of the word is the Latin religare: to restrain or bind, and that is just what I believe it does.

Christianity is not a religion, although many call it that, rather it is a living relationship with the living God. It is an eternal relationship and a supernatural relationship, and in this relationship we are set free, not bound!

I see religion as the sum of The Occult, New Age Mysticism, World Religions, Cults, and Apostate Christianity.

Religion is in essence the enthronement of satan and the denial of God. It is man’s attempt to make a god in our image and then to prescribe a way of worshiping this idol.

The first four in this list are obvious, but Apostate Christianity needs some explanation. It is the religious system of rites, rituals, teachings, and sacraments that masquerade as ‘Christian’ but is in effect Christ-less. In this system Jesus is honoured as a Prophet, but not as God Incarnate, the Bible is regarded as instructive but not truly inspired, and salvation is believed to be attained through learning, intellectual ascent, and good works.

Religion has plagued our world for millennia and has caused endless destruction. Just consider the crusades, wars, bigotry, enslavement, oppression, and terrorism perpetrated in its name. What you will see in later chapters of Revelation is that Religion always partners with Humanism and together they form a formidable trinity of evil. Trinity, because the third ‘woe’ in the upside-down triangle of terror is Satan himself.

I have more to write concerning Chapter Nine of Revelation, but that will have to wait until the new year. In the meanwhile, please take a look at the following depiction of some of the southern constellations in the night sky (from the vantage point of Jerusalem) and see if you think they relate to the revelations of Chapter Nine.

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Woe is Us

5 Comments / Blog, Home Bulletin, My Blog / Christopher Peppler

A natural calamity can be a warning but a supernatural invasion can only be described as a Woe.

The First four trumpet blasts of Revelation represent ecological warnings to mankind (discussed in my previous post), but the two that follow are of an entirely different nature and are called ‘woes’. The trumpets of Revelation Chapter Eight affect humanity indirectly though the environment whereas the woes of Chapter Nine effect mankind in a very direct way.

The graphic presentations in this chapter are among the most bizarre in the book and have given rise to some weird interpretations. I have read books in which the strange locust like creatures depicted here are really Apache attack helicopters and the horses that follow them are Saracen tanks! But how are we supposed to interpret what these strange ‘beasties’ represent? Actually, it’s not that difficult to work out the general meaning of these scenes if you remember the interpretive principle of Revelation 1:20 – the truth is conveyed through symbols and is not meant to be reduced to concrete objects, dates, and numbers.

So, let’s look at the clues in the text:

The scene opens with a ‘star that had fallen from the sky to the earth’ (Revelation 9:1). According to the interpretive key ‘stars’ equal angels, so this depicts an angel that had fallen from heaven to earth. Jesus used very similar words when He exclaimed, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” (Luke 10:18-19).
This fallen angel is given the key to the Abyss, the bottomless pit. Once again, we can look to Jesus to understand what this represents. Luke:8 26-33 records how Jesus confronted the hoard of demons possessing a man living in caves in the region of Gadara. Verse 31 records that they ‘begged him repeatedly not to order them to go into the Abyss’. So, the Abyss is the name assigned to the state where demons are confined and so the terrifying beings pouring out of the abyss therefore represent demons.
All of this is supported by the added detail that ‘they had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon’ (Revelation 9:11). i.e. the devil.

So, we can easily determine that demons constitute the first Woe, but you will need a further clue in order to understand their ‘sting in the tail’: ‘They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any plant or tree, but only those people who did not have the seal of God on their foreheads’ (Revelation 9:4).

Their target is unsaved humanity; those who’s spirits and souls are not sealed by the Holy Spirit and protected by the truth. They rob such people of life while not physically killing them.

At this point you will need to extend some grace to me for I need to make a bold statement that I will only be able to substantiate when we get to Chapter Thirteen.

The demon locusts are a vivid symbolic depiction of HUMANISM in all its various forms.

Now this statement is probably a bit of a shock to the system. The dictionary definition on humanism is ‘a system of thought which is based on the values, characteristics, and behaviour which are believed to be best in human beings, rather than on any supernatural authority’. This is indeed how a spiritually unregenerate person would view humanism, because a worldly understanding is that humans are essentially good and that the supernatural does not exist. But, if we take the source of humanism as the rebellion of Adam and Eve in Eden, then both of these presumptions prove false – man is not inherently good and supernatural evil is both real and responsible.

I understand humanism to comprise science, medicine, philosophy, economics, technology, military power, politics, and hedonism. There is an obviously dark side to each of these, such as war, addiction, greed and so on, but why would I label the ostensibly noble pursuits of the human race as a ‘woe’? Well I don’t. What I class as a catastrophic woe is the pursuit of these things outside of the Word of God, the authority of Scripture, and the Lordship of Jesus Christ. I therefore define humanism as the godless pursuit and manipulation of the categories of human endeavour I have listed. Defined in this way humanism is nothing less than the enthronement of self and the denial of the lordship of Jesus Christ… and that is indeed a demonic woe that has plagued mankind for millennia and will ultimately deliver a death blow to godless humanity.

The second woe is just as destructive… but I will write about that next week.

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Model and Reality

10 Comments / Blog, Home Bulletin, My Blog / Christopher Peppler

Who needs a Time Machine when we have the book of Revelation?!

The fascinating yet frustrating idea of traveling back in time was popularised by H. G. Wells in his story The Time Machine, published in 1895. Since then many books have been written and movies produced around this idea. So, in this spirit, let me ask you a question: If you were able to travel back to Moses’ time (1250 BC), how would you describe the solar system to him? Planets orbiting in three-dimensional space at different trajectories around the Sun! In all probability you would have to construct some sort of physical model and walk him through it. This would give the venerable Moses some idea, but how could he be expected to really grasp the fact that the sun is a star, and that Jupiter is 300 times larger than the earth and 588 million kilometres away? Just by thinking of this we get some idea of the difficulty the people of biblical times must have had in comprehending a revelation of spiritual realities – to this day we still struggle with this. In Moses’ case God helped him understand something of the heavenly dimension by giving him the plans to construct a Tabernacle, a 3D model of a multidimensional realm.

The High Priests were the people in charge of the Tabernacle, and the author of the book of Hebrews wrote about their duties: ’They serve at a sanctuary that is a copy and shadow of what is in heaven. This is why Moses was warned when he was about to build the tabernacle: “See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain”.’ (Hebrews 8:5) Here is a plan of the Tabernacle:

The thing I want you to note first is that the Tabernacle was laid out in three areas: (1) The Outer Court, (2) The Holy Place, and (3) The Holy of Holies.

The outer court was where the public ministry of the priests took place and contained a huge basin for ritual washing along with an even bigger alter for making the vast number of sacrifices required by the ceremonial law. The first of the two ‘inner’ areas was called the Holy Place and entrance was restricted to priests. This area contained a table on which stood twelve loaves of bread, a seven-branched candelabra known as a Menorah, and a small golden incense altar. A thick curtain separated this area from the most sacred space of all, the Holy of Holies. This cubic area contained only one item, the Ark of the Covenant and only the High Priest could enter on just one day of the year, the Day of Atonement.

Here is what the seven items I have mentioned symbolise for us today:
1. The Outer Court represents the public aspect of the church where all, saved and unsaved alike, have access.
Item 1: The great Brazen Alter of sacrifice = The cross of Calvary where Jesus, the sacrificial Lamb of God shed His blood for our sin.
Item 2: The Bronze Laver/basin also known as the Bronze Sea = The ritual washing away of sin – water baptism.
2. The Inner court, the Holy Place, represents the membership of the church to which only born again disciples of Jesus have access.
Item 3: The Table and the twelve loaves of bread = the fellowship of the church epitomised in the Lords Supper/Holy Communion.
Item 4: The Golden Menorah = The light of revelation through the Scriptures/Bible.
Item 5: The Golden Incense Alter = The prayers and worship of the believers/church.
Item 6: The curtain through which the Holy of Holies is accessed = The separation between God and man open for us through the atoning work of Jesus Christ.
3. The Holy of Holies represents the place of communion between God and believers.
Item 7: The Ark of the Covenant – a golden throne = The presence of God.

Now, if you read through Revelation 4 carefully you can pick up much of the layout and contents of the Tabernacle. Here is a picture to make this clearer:

The angels form the wall of the outer court, the elders constitute the wall of the Holy Place/Inner Court, and the Living Creatures form the wall to the Holy of Holies. In this inner sanctum is a representation of the Ark of the Covenant/Throne and the presence of God. The seven-lamped Menorah (vs 3) is in the Holy Place and you can pick up a reference to the Incense Alter in Revelation 8:3-4: ‘Another angel, who had a golden censer, came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all the saints, on the golden altar before the throne. The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of the saints, went up before God from the angel’s hand’. The Bronze Sea is referenced in Revelation 4:6.

What’s missing in this depiction of Heaven? Firstly, the Altar of Sacrifice is not there because the cross of Christ applies only to our earthly realm – it was here on earth that Jesus gave up His life as an atoning sacrifice on the Cross. The Table of Bread is also missing because this is embodied in the fellowship and communion of the church on earth. Heaven comes to earth, to a degree, in the church!

The Tabernacle was the physical model of the heavenly realm and the portrayal in Revelation takes that model into a higher dimension… but it is still not reality. The heavenly realm is multidimensional and timeless, as we understand dimensions and time, and is far beyond our ability to fully comprehend. The depiction in Revelation does however help us to understand a little of the glory that awaits us.

In my next post I am going to describe another layer of meaning built into Revelation which was better understood by the people of John’s time than by us. So, it’s time to revisit this ‘revelation’… next week.

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Satan’s Deep Secrets

8 Comments / Blog, Home Bulletin, My Blog / Christopher Peppler

In the early days of the church Satan’s deep secrets came in the form of pagan idolatry, in later years he promoted his lies through the philosophical gnostic (knowledge) cults, but today they come better disguised.

In the last few posts I have picked up some points from the letters to the first three of the seven churches and in this article I will tie together three threads that appear in the letter to Thyatira. I have commented in previous posts on Jezebel, who is a focal interest in the letter, but now I want to bring together the ‘so called deep secrets’ she taught with Jesus’ injunction to ‘hold on to what you have until I return’, and his declaration that those who overcome will have ‘authority over the nations’.

During the twentieth century there have been many Christian and pseudo-Christian heresies who’s originators have claimed special, and often secret, revelation. In the last couple of decades we have seen the emergence of the ‘New Apostolic Reformation’ (NAR). Sometime in the future I will be writing extensively on this movement but for now I will need to describe it in, perhaps, oversimplified terms. The NAR, contrary to what its name suggests, is not really new at all. Much of its core theology comes from the Latter Rain movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. To this has been added Postmillennial Dominion theology (I will explain this shortly) and what is often referred to as Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare. (One definition of this is ‘praying against territorial spirits, seeking to “map” their strategies over given locations by discerning their names and what they use to keep people in bondage, and then binding them so that evangelism may go unhindered’).

Postmillennialism is one of the various end-time teachings and enjoyed some support before the World Wars. The core idea is that Christianity will become so dominant in human affairs that the world will experience a golden age of peace and prosperity (the millennium) at the end of which Jesus will come again to claim his now perfected bride, the church. The horror of two world wars demonstrated conclusively that human society was not getting progressively better and so postmillennialism quickly fell out of vogue. Now it’s back in a particularly aggressive form labeled Dominionism, a belief that Christ will rule the world through the church by gaining either direct or indirect control over education, government, business and so on. This is how NAR teachers would understand the application of Jesus’ words, “I will give authority over the nations” (Revelation 2:26).

Earthly dominion was never on Jesus’ agenda, the first disciples certainly did not see it as the church’s mandate, and it cannot reasonably be argued from an exhaustive study of scripture

Verses 26 and 27 of Revelation chapter two are complex and require far more analysis than I can give in a short article. These verses quote from Psalm 2 which is generally accepted as a messianic prophecy fulfilled in Christ Jesus. When Jesus began his public ministry the devil tempted him by offering him authority over all the kingdoms of the world, but he rejected this out of hand.. At the end of his public ministry Jesus was asked by Pilate if he indeed was an earthly king and his answer was, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36). Earthly dominion was never on Jesus’ agenda, the first disciples certainly did not see it as the church’s mandate, and it cannot reasonably be argued from an exhaustive study of scripture.

When Jesus instructs his church to “hold onto what you have until I return’ he is commenting on what his disciples have been taught by the apostles as opposed to the teachings of Jezebel. In other words, “Stick with what I have taught you and do not get caught up with any so-called deep teachings”. If Jesus and his Apostles did not teach what NAR ‘apostles’ teach then what do they claim as their source of authority? Well, they claim to receive special ‘revelation knowledge’ and by this they usually mean that the Holy Spirit gives them special insight into the meaning of certain scriptures. How this occurs is often by way of allegorical interpretation of types, patterns, and isolated texts, usually drawn from the Old Testament. For instance, the army of locusts in Joel is understood as a type of the end-time church army that will gain dominion over the earth, and so on.

There is some room for responsible allegory because Paul used it on occasions (Galatians 4:21-24 1 Corinthians 10:4) and Jesus sometimes spoke allegorically (John 10), but a good rule for interpreting allegorically is to ensure that any ‘deeper’ meaning is consistent with the literal first intended meaning of the text. By this I mean that any additional meanings of a Bible passage must be consistent with the more obvious meaning of the text and not contradict or present something unrelated to its essential message.

Much of what we hear taught as ‘prophetic revelation’ is based on unfounded allegorical interpretations of Old Testament scriptures. These are not the deep things of Jesus, so we are left to wonder at their source and the validity of those who teach them.

In my next post I want to focus on the phrase ‘morning star’ that Jesus used at the end of his letter to the church in Thyatira, and I am sure you will find it ‘illuminating’.

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The Comet is coming

3 Comments / Home Bulletin, Special Message / Christopher Peppler

There are numerous sites on the internet containing ‘facts’ proving that something big is about to happen. A comet is set to strike the earth on 24th September, 2015! Blood moons confirm this and the Shmita year supports it. So batten down the hatches folk because we are in for a near extinction event…. not!

In my latest sermon I show how these predictions are biblically incorrect and logically flawed. If listened to before the end of September, 2015 the sermon should prove instructional… after that it will be more entertaining than anything else.

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Eschatology