Book of Revelation with Dr. Jeannie Constantinou

Good morning, everyone. I know you have your, uh, programs in front of you, but just, uh, permit me a few words, uh, just as an intro to our speaker and lecturer for today, Dr. Evania Costantino, or uh, Jeie—Dr. Jeie. Dr. Jeie holds several degrees in theology, including Master of Theology degrees from Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, Harvard Divinity School, and a PhD from University Laval, where she specialized in the Apocalypse in the ancient Church of the East. Dr. Costantino has taught Theology and biblical studies for many years at the University of San Diego and four graduate schools of theology, including Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, our seminary in Brooklyn. Dr. Costantino currently teaches Advanced New Testament courses at The Franciscan School of Theology and at the Saints Athanasios Ceral Coptic Orthodox School of Theology. Dr. Jeie has attracted an international following through her two long-running podcasts on Ancient Faith radio, entitled "Search the Scriptures" and "Search the Scriptures Live," both which can be found at ancientfaith.com and also at OrthodoxBibleStudy.info. She is the author of *Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind*. Her most recent book, *The Crucifixion of the King of Glory: The Amazing History and Profound Mystery of the Passion*, was released by Ancient Faith Publishing in 2022. And I could just say, on a, a personal level, that I was in her first, uh, class that she taught on a graduate level—it was the Gospel of Matthew at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology when I was at Seminary—and, uh, a few of us enjoyed it. We enjoyed her so much that we took her, uh, her elective the next, uh, very next semester, the, the, uh, Book of Revelation, uh, which she also taught. Um, and I can tell you that, uh, the lessons and tactics that she presented to us are, uh, lessons and tactics that we still use—myself especially, I can only speak for myself—we still use in our Bible studies, uh, today. So thank you, uh, to Dr. Jeie for being here today, and without further ado, Dr. Jeie Costantino.

Thank you, Father Nick. Um, it's such a pleasure to be with you. And you know, as Father—Father mentioned, he was my student a long time ago, and I can't tell you what wonderful joy and pleasure it is, you know, as a professor, especially of theology, to see your students, you know, graduate and go on to serve the Church in such a meaningful way as clergy. There's nothing—I think there's nothing better than that. And, um, it's, it's really a wonderful honor. And all of us have others who have contributed to our formation in the faith; so, for some of us, it's a parish priest; for others, it's a professor; for others, it's a parent or, uh, a grandparent. So all of us really are only here and able to do what we do because of the support and encouragement and the inspiration of people who came before us. And this is one of the wonderful things about Orthodoxy. So, um, at any rate, we're here to talk about the Book of Revelation. I think it's enough from me, and we're to begin by, uh, talking about what exactly is Revelation, why is it so strange, and we're going to go ahead and get started. So, the Book of Revelation is unique in the Bible in many ways. By the way, can you all hear me in the back? Is there anybody—raise your hand if you need me to talk louder, because I can do that, and louder. Okay, I'll do that. So, Father, you can let's monitor this. How's that? How's that? Is that okay? All right. Because I don't want to blast people. Okay, very good. So the Apocalypse is a unique book in many, many ways. It's the only apocalyptic book that is, is part of the Bible. And by that we mean that the whole thing is apocalyptic; other books have sections that are apocalyptic—that's the style of writing, as you will learn—but only this one was entirely apocalyptic. It's also the only book that is prophecy in the New Testament, and it also has other things that make it very unique. It's the only book that actually tells Christians to read it; it is the only book that blesses the people who read it and blesses the people who hear it: "Blessed is the one who reads and those who hear the words of this book." It's the only book that was in the East accepted as scripture, then rejected, then accepted again. It never had that problem in the West, but in Eastern Christianity it had a very rocky path to canonical acceptance. And, of course, it's the only book that has two names; it's known by two names: Revelation and the Apocalypse.

Okay, so what else is unusual about it? For us as Orthodox, even though it's in the New Testament, it's never read in church, except by the Copts—the Coptic Orthodox, those are the Egyptian Orthodox. They read it once a year, and they read the whole thing on the, in the vigil after, uh, Good Friday night, overnight. They have a long service where they read a lot of scripture until the next morning, and they do that. I, I've went to that once. I stayed till 4:00 A.M., and they read through all kinds of books, and I was waiting to hear Revelation read—the whole thing—and I had to go home because we have Liturgy Saturday, Holy Saturday morning. I said, I have to sing, so I have to sleep, so I never got to hear it, uh, the whole thing read in the Coptic Church, but this is when they do read it. So what are we going to talk about in this session? We have four sessions today. We're going to start by talking about what is apocalyptic literature, why is it so strange, why did John write like that, and can this book be used to predict when the end of the world will come? So we're going to start with this most important question, and that is, what is apocalyptic literature? Because you're probably unaware that there were other books that were written in this style. This is not simply characteristic of the Book of Revelation. This book is written in a literary style called apocalyptic, and it was a very popular form of writing from about the year 200 BC until about the year 200 AD. So, if it's BC, obviously that's before Christ, that's before the time of the Church. So this was a style of writing popular among Jews, all right, in certain circumstances, but because the Christian faith emerged out of Judaism, Christians inherited this, um, form of expression, and they copied it and used it for certain books, especially books when the con—when the community was suffering persecution. So apocalyptic writing has a very specific worldview. And, by the way, if you learn this, if you understand this, you will recognize apocalyptic currents also in our culture, because we do have apocalyptic thinking and apocalyptic attitudes, not simply among religious groups, but also politically. There are people in groups that tend to be apocalyptic; in other words, Doomsday, the end of the world is going to come to an end unless we do this. Okay? So this kind of apocalyptic idea, um, the ideas behind this thinking can be found in a lot of places, even today. So there's a specific worldview and a specific style. So we'll start with the worldview. The worldview of apocalyptic writing is that God's people are suffering unjust persecution; the world is under the control of Satan, and it operates usually through governments, institutions; they try to oppress the people of God in order to destroy them. This kind of a thinking that you could see is very strong among Jehovah's Witnesses; it's very apocalyptic; is very strong and among Seventh-day Adventists; it's very, very big for them, uh, but also in many of the cults that some of us remember, like the, uh, the cult at Waco, Texas, had this idea of the government being controlled by Satan. This idea is the reason why Jehovah's Witnesses refuse to salute the flag, have anything to do—they won't vote, they don't participate in the military or anything like this—because they have this idea that everything, everything outside of their religion is controlled by Satan, and he wants to destroy them. But, of course, there's always this element too, that God will grant Victory to the righteous, to the true faithful, and He will intervene and save them, or He will reward them afterwards, uh, for being faithful in times of persecution. So the whole idea is that eventually, the Good will triumph over evil and the devil, but in the meantime we're supposed to be faithful and patient and endure whatever persecution comes.

Now let's talk about the literary style, because that's the more striking element of the apocalyptic genre. So, first of all, and this is—all of these things are things that we see in the Book of Revelation—apocalyptic writings describe a glimpse into heaven or a glimpse into the future. So, of course, we see this in the Book of Revelation, in chapter 4, when there's—John sees an Open Door in heaven, and there's a voice that says, "Come up here," so he gets—goes up, and he goes up through the door, and he's in heaven, and he sees things in heaven, and he sees things on earth. So he has both a glimpse of the future, but also a glimpse of Heaven. There are Heavenly guides that explain—they interpret what is seen. We see this in Revelation also. Sometimes there's an Angelic interpreter who explains to, to, uh, John what he's seeing; sometimes there's an elder, one of the 24 Elders, who explains to John what he's seeing. In the very beginning, in chapter one, is the Lord who explains at least a couple of the symbols that he sees. But most striking is this characteristic that apocalyptic literature is very symbolic; it has symbolic colors and numbers and animals and cosmic signs, but also other kinds of symbols. So I want to talk to you about how we, um, how the book of, of Revelation worked in terms of the symbols, because it's very mysterious to us because we don't understand the symbols that the book is using. It's, it's a verbal description of symbols that people were very familiar with. We also are surrounded by symbols, and we don't stop to think about them; we just know what they mean, okay, because it's part of our culture. But if a person was to come here from a different culture, they're not going to understand the symbols. Likewise, this is why it's difficult for you to understand Revelation. John didn't write something that was confusing for everybody, always, obviously. He had a message for his communities, so they understood it. Otherwise, why write it? If you're supposed to give somebody a message, you don't give them something that's like gobbledygook, and they have no idea what it is. They have to understand it, which means that the meaning of Revelation was understood by the people who received it. And I'm going to go through this exercise to show you how we also have symbols that operate in our daily lives, but of course I'm going to be using mostly visual symbols to show you how easily you understand what is meant by them.

Okay, so symbols have meaning. So we understand this symbol; we recognize the shape, we recognize the color, we recognize what this means even without the word on top of it. Well, what if you saw this? You were driving around, and you saw this. What would you do? Would you keep on going, or would you stop? You know it says stop, because this is what this symbol means. All right. So some symbols are just informational, like this, okay? You see a parking space. Oh, great. Oh, I can't park here; it's for handicapped, right? So you don't have the placard, you can't park here. What about this? This is ubiquitous, right? Is the symbol for the library. So this again is simply informational. Some symbols are very, very specific to a certain group of people who use them for a specific purpose. If you're a musician, these things all have a specific meaning; you know exactly what it means. If you've never studied music, they're dots with a line on them and these funny squiggly kind of symbols. So here again, this is just a symbol, but it's telling you, go up, go down, is how long to hold the rest, uh, if it's a sharp or a flat or a treble clef or bass clef—all of these things have meaning to the person who understands them, right? If you don't—if you go to the choir and you sing, you just—when the note goes up, I go up; when it goes down, I go down. Okay, that works. We do—a lot of people do that, too. But musicians know what these symbols mean. How about this? Every child knows what this means, and, uh, whenever we would pass one, especially if there was a place to play, my son would want to stop, right? So this is a, a everywhere, okay, throughout the world now. So some symbols are understood internationally—the Nike swoosh, right? Everybody knows what that is. And in places—you might go to Greece or someplace and you say to maybe one of your relatives, um, "You want me to bring you anything from America?" "Yes, bring me, you know, something with—" that's a name brand. They know the brands; they don't want a generic, you know, sneaker; they want Nike or something like that. So Adidas, something like this, but they recognize the symbol. So this, however, is something that is particularly American. We recognize these symbols as representing political parties; that is not something that would ne—necessarily be known in Tanzania. Okay, you'd have to live here probably to know this. I'm not even sure if that would be known in Mexico or Canada, our neighbors, but it is very unique to our culture nonetheless. I don't have to explain to you what this is, right? So some symbols are rather new. I remember when this started to appear, right? Recycling, in the '70s, this symbol first appeared when people started being interested in the process of recycling. How about this one? If you use a computer, you usually know what this is—the Windows logo, right? Some symbols are very old. Now, when this symbol began, nobody wanted to see this kind of a symbol; this was not the original symbol of the Christian faith, because it was a symbol of terror; it was a symbol of death—the cross—and, frankly, people ridiculed Christians for believing that their God had died on a cross. So today we see it and we're—and strengthened and encouraged and, and inspired by the cross, but that was not always the case. Okay? Because of what it symbolized, today it has a very different meaning than what it did in the first-century Roman Empire. So whether or not we understand a symbol depends on a lot of elements: our age, our cultural background, our exposure to that symbol, etc. So if I showed you this, some of you might recognize this—NRA. What is that? Well, you—the kind of—it kind of looks—if you look at the eagle and the, the graphic part of it, kind of looks like, uh, belongs to a union or something like that. And, of course, NRA, today, most people would say it's the National Rifle Association, but that's not this poster. My father would recognize this poster because he grew up in the Depression. Does anybody know what it is? National Recovery—it says National Recovery Act. So this was, um, part of Roosevelt's plan to get the country out of, out of the Depression, and then after that they ended up in World War II, which is where we—people began to hang things like this in their windows. Today, um, people do talk about a Gold Star family when somebody's been killed in, in the war, but that was something we never really heard until recently; in recent years they started using that terminology again, but Gold Star—Gold Star mother, Gold Star father—was not something that we heard in the '60s and '70s because we weren't involved with, with any wars. What about this? A big-time sucker, right? You sit down to say, well, I just send a little message, and then before you know it, an hour has passed. When Facebook began, it was very popular among the young people, but as soon as their parents started using it, then they stopped using it; they had to switch to something else, like Instagram, and now they're all about TikTok and the rest. But today, again, this is one of the most recognizable symbols in the world, and it's used by two billion people—that's a lot of people in the world—all over the country. So symbols can also change in their meaning, and the same symbol can have different meanings depending upon who's using it. So when I was growing up, Apple was the Beatles record label, okay? But not today. Today Apple is the computer company; it's your phone, it's your computer, etc. But the same symbol also can have different meanings depending upon how it's used and who is viewing it. So the Star of David—this is a very precious symbol to people of the Jewish faith or for Israelis, but it's not so pleasant when it appears like this, right? This is the patch that was put on Jewish people in Nazi Germany to identify them as Jews, right? So now, of course, it's still their symbol, but it has a different meaning entirely, and it's scary, right? For the, for the people who are wearing it, obviously. So there are so many examples. So we're talking here about symbols; symbols have meaning, and this is very often—it's much deeper than what you could describe in words. So if somebody says—if I say to somebody, and they—"How are you doing?" "I'm doing great." "Well, that's wonderful. Uh, what's going on with you?" "I met the most wonderful girl; I'm in love." So you can see this person—they're very happy. So if you ask them to describe how they feel, what would they say? Okay, they would say—if they—I doubt most men—men would not say this, but this is what they're thinking: "I'm like—it's like I'm running through a field of flowers, and the sun is shining, and the green grass, and the birds are singing." So what happens? What does that mean? You're in this state of mind, and you're, you know, so happy; you're thinking of images to help you describe how you feel. Conversely, somebody loses someone; there's a death in the family. "How are you doing?" "I'm in such a dark place." You wouldn't say, "Well, look at all—there's a lot of light." What are you talking about? Well, they're in their mind; they're using symbolic language to express something that cannot be expressed in words. That's what we're talking about here. So sometimes people say to me, "Well, what did John see?" It's not that he saw something with his visible eyes; he had an experience; he had a spiritual experience, and these things can never be expressed in words. So he chose to use symbols. Okay? So sometimes the symbol—the meaning differs about who or where it's presented, who's receiving it, in what context it's being viewed, etc. So the—this is what I'm trying to convey to you: the symbols have a lot of power. Visual symbols, of course, have a lot of power, but also in—when it's described in words, which is what we're dealing with with the Book of Revelation, has a lot of power. So most of us are proud of our country; we love our country, so we see the flag and we feel good; stand up, we salute it; we—this kind of a thing; it's a positive thing. But what about this? If you're from the South and you see this, your reaction to this symbol depends upon whether you're a white Southerner, in which case this represents their culture and their heritage; they don't think of it as referring to slavery, but this is what it represents to African-Americans. So there—everything depends upon who the viewer is, the reaction that they have to it. Some symbols are so associated with one particular idea, they can never have a neutral meaning; this is one of them. So when you see this—this—I don't have to say anything immediately—and that we're many, many generations removed from World War II, but when we see this, because we've seen movies and, and read books, immediately we're—what comes to our mind—everything—all the horrors of the war—Hitler—I don't have to say Hitler; I don't have to say Nazi; I don't have to say—I just show you this, and everything comes to your mind—the destruction, the suffering, and the—how Europe and the whole world was affected by this one idea, and it's all expressed in this symbol with these particular colors you see. So symbols are powerful. What does this have to do with the Book of Revelation? Well, this book had a very specific meaning to the early Church, to the original audience that received the book. Remember, John is writing for them. John had no idea that we would be talking about his book 1900-plus years later—1930-some years later—he had no idea that we would still be talking about it. He's writing because he's concerned about those people in Asia Minor that he was responsible for, what they were going through. So they understood the meaning of the symbols. We, however, find it…

Difficult to understand it because the symbols are not part of our culture. They were very well understood by first-century Jewish Christians in Asia Minor, in the Roman Empire. So my point is this: if we wish to understand the apocalypse, we have to learn what the symbols meant to those people, to the people to whom the book was originally intended. We have to understand it in its context. Otherwise, what happens—and here is what happens—people say, “Well, this is what I think it means, and this is what I think it means.” Oh, here it, here is talking about Elvis Presley and rock and roll, this degenerate society. Oh, here is talking about miniskirts. Oh, this is atomic war. This is, you know, this is not anything that John intended; that’s not what the symbols mean. But this, because the book is so highly symbolic, people take those symbols; they make it into anything that they want; then they convince people that it’s true. So we have to be careful about that. So we can’t just choose the meanings out of our imagination and delude ourselves into thinking that God has given us insight: “This symbol means this.” It’s completely different from what John intended; that can’t be right.

So I showed you the McDonald’s symbol, so we know what this is, okay, because it’s everywhere, right? Well, what if a thousand years from now there’s no more McDonald’s, or 1900 years, because that’s how many years between us and the Book of Revelation, and somebody found this symbol? Which, no doubt, ologists—if there are any in those days—they’re going to find a lot of these Ms all over the place. And I’m wondering what will they think? Was some cult? They’ll probably think it was some religious cult, and they’ll invent some theory about what it was. But what if I said, “Oh, they, oh, this was in San Diego; they found this; it represents Mexico,” and they’re convinced that it’s correct? Or maybe it’s a worship of uh, some, some God whose name starts with an M. Would they be correct? No. Just because that’s their idea doesn’t make it correct.

So when people take the Book of Revelation without any consideration of its historical context and they say that this is what the symbols mean, and I’m going to tell you when the end of the world is going to come, they’re really abusing it, and that’s not how you interpret the book. So people interpret them, often interpret according to their own opinion or their own imagination rather than respecting, respecting the original meaning of the book. And this is Bible abuse; they’re abusing the Bible; they’re distorting the Bible. But they are convinced, sometimes very often, they’re convinced in their own minds that they really understand it. Of course, this is spiritual delusion. All right. So the people who interpret symbols without regard to its original historical meaning are either completely ignorant—I should have added “deluded” here—they’re deluded, or they’re charlatans. And we’ve seen all of that, and some of it in rather recent years. Some of you may remember—I think you’re most of you are here; we don’t have anybody really young—I was talking about this to one of my Stu, to my students at the Franciscan school. Okay, what happened May 21st, 2011? Most of us remember this. They, these guys are young; these guys are studying for the priesthood in the Franciscan School; they’re like 25; they don’t remember this, but I do; you probably do. There was a fellow named Harold Camping who had a radio program on Family Radio, it’s a, which is a big Protestant radio network, and he said that Jesus was returning; the Rapture was going to happen on May 21st, 2011.

Well, I would listen, sometimes I would uh, be listening to the radio in my car as I was driving places, and I would turn on sometimes a Catholic radio station, sometimes this Protestant one, and I heard this fellow Harold Camping talking about how Jesus was coming back. And this was like a couple of years before it happened, and I remember the day because that’s my husband’s name day, May 21st. Okay, okay, St. Constantine and Helen; his name is Costa, and 2011. So that was a couple of years ahead of the actual date, so I was sort of checking in. And people would call into this because it was a Bible study; it was a call-in Bible study, and they would say, “But Brother Camping, what if you’re wrong?” He says, “I’m not wrong; I’m not wrong; I’m not wrong; Jesus is coming back; you can bet, bet; I’ve been studying the Bible for 70 years; Jesus is coming back May 21st, 2011.” So all I knew was I was going to tune in on May 22nd, 2011, to hear what Brother Camping was going to say when Jesus didn’t come back.

Now, this idea, this belief, his teaching flew under the radar for a long time; he was predicting this for a couple of years, maybe longer that I know of, uh, until that day. But right about two months before is when the media, the mainstream media, picked up on this and started talking about it. And people who were serious about it were really waiting for Jesus to come back. But other people were having kind of Rapture parties and just making fun, and of course it was a way that they were ridiculing the Christians, and people like Brother Harold Camping were making us kind of a laughingstock, all right, by this. Okay, so now, um, this billboard was down the street from our University, so I said, “I have to take a picture of this for posterity.” Okay, so look up here; you can’t really see it very well; you see this, this little uh, symbol here; it says, “The Bible guarantees it,” really; that’s what it says. Oh, so, so this is the channel in San Diego, Family Radio 910, so this is when Brother Camping would be on giving his little spiel. Um, but here’s, I love that part: “The Bible guarantees it”; it has that little seal there. Well, the Bible guarantees that Jesus is coming back; that we know how or when; that’s what we don’t know.

So the other thing that was very ironic about this whole thing, um, right here this says, “Cry unto God; you have to repent,” right? So there were these, there were these um, vans, and they were, the back of the van says, “Now ye the Lord with all his meek of the earth,” so it’s Zephaniah, and then you’ve got a Psalm that you’re supposed to repent right now. The interesting thing about this particular guy is that he believed in predestination, so, and people would try to ask him, “Well, what’s the point of calling upon people to repent if you believe that you’re going to be in heaven or hell regardless of what you actually do? God has already predestined you for this or end, or for that end.” And he never, he always danced around that; he never really um, answered that question. But at any rate, he was completely sincere, and his followers very sincere. And if they had, they had, they had a few hundred radio stations, this really little group, Family Radio, around the world, and he was listened to by millions of people. Now a lot of people didn’t follow him uh, by leaving everything to spread this message that Jesus is coming back, but a lot of them did, people. And we’re talking about more than a handful; we’re talking about people, hundreds, maybe thousands of people stopped working; they stopped paying their mortgages; they maxed out their credit cards because Brother Camping convinced them that Jesus was coming back. So when he didn’t come back on May 21st, there was silence. Um, Family Radio was still on the air, but they were just playing music; nothing, no nothing from Brother Camping. A week after was because, of course, the media was all over this; a week later he’s, he came out of his house and he said, “Well, I, I G, Jesus did come back, but he came back invisibly.” Okay, the real end of the world, because this was supposed to be the Rapture; you see what he was saying is Jesus would to come back, Rapture up all of the faithful, and then there’s going to be a period of tribulation for three and a half years when everybody’s going to really suffer. Jesus came back invisibly, but in six months, on October 21st, 2011, is when the tribulation will begin, because I obviously, he said, “I must have done something wrong with my calculations.” So of course we waited for October 20, you know, 21st; nothing happened. And then after another couple of weeks, they, they C, found him; I mean, the guy stayed in his house; he was afraid to come out. Galath, we say to the Greeks, “Good serves him right.” So what, what did he say? Well, what do you have to say for yourself, Brother Camping? Well, he said, “I guess I don’t know when Jesus is coming back.” I said, “Very good; it took you all that effort, but look at all the people who were harmed by this,” not to mention the fact that the rest of us—I don’t know how many of you are speaking Greek here—made us look like fools, Christians; of course, most Christians did not believe him, but this is how the media portrayed it, okay, that we look like idiots.

Logic demands that we begin with this kind of a premise: that no author writes a book that’s not going to be understood. The reason why John and other authors write books is to communicate a message, which means that the people who received the Book of Revelation read it, and they understood it, and that the author—that’s John—knew the audience would understand it, and they in fact did understand it. But over time, the meaning of the symbols was lost because the culture changed, just like our culture. Eventually, I showed you the poster from the Depression; nobody recognizes that anymore unless you’re 95 years old; you wouldn’t recognize that. So things, things change, and that’s why it’s a mystery to us, but it wasn’t a mystery to those first Christians who received the book. So it was understood by the first-century Christians. Revelation is prophecy; okay, it does talk about the future; it has a future fulfillment, and it has a message for us today. We’re going to be talking about that uh, later in the day, but it was never written to provide a roadmap for the end of the world, to predict when Jesus is coming back. And people who try to use it that way are misusing it. Okay, this is one of the main things. So can it be used to predict when the end of the world will come? Absolutely not.

So two of the most important things we need to remember when interpreting the Bible—if you remember nothing else, remember this: context. What is the literary context of what is being said? That is, what was said before it? What was said after it? What is the reason why the author made that statement? There, whenever you read anything, you always consider the context in order to understand the meaning. We all know what it means to take something out of context; we everybody understands that. Well, when you take a verse from here and a verse from there and you pluck them out and you create a whole scenario—which is what people do with Revelation—then you’re taking these words out of context, and you’re giving them a meaning the author never intended them to have. Okay, and St. Irenaeus made this ex, gave this example; it was repeated by a lot of fathers after him, like St. John Chrysostom. This is what heretics do: they take the mosaic of a king, mosaic portrait of a king—you know what a mosaic is: lots of different little colored pieces of glass or or stone—and they make, together they make a beautiful portrait; it’s a portrait of the king. Well, heretics take it, and they move all the little stones around, and they make a dog, the portrait of a dog, and they say, “This is what it is,” why? Because they’ve taken it out of its original arrangement and context and distorted it. So this is what we’re not supposed to do with the Book of Revelation or any book of the Bible. And this is why Orthodox interpretation of the Bible and our conclusions are different from those of Protestants; they take one verse, take it out of its context, and try to use it to prove something it was never intended to prove.

Then purpose: why was the book written? Why was the passage written? Why did Jesus make that statement? When Jesus said, “If your right hand offends you, cut it off,” did he mean that literally? Well, all of us have our hands, okay? So we have to understand the context and the purpose; what was behind that statement? Why was the Book of Revelation written? Was it written to provide clues for the end of the world? No. So in the next session you’re going to find out the purpose. So if we try to use it in a way that uh, violates the purpose, we know that that conclusion that the person reached is wrong. Okay, so if Revelation was written to tell us when Jesus is coming back, and then you have an idea of when he’s coming back based on Revelation, I, I couldn’t really argue with that. But it was never written to tell us when Jesus is coming back; therefore, a conclusion that uses it to tell us when he’s coming back has to be wrong because it violates the author’s purpose. Okay, let’s talk about the historical context really briefly; in the next session we’ll talk more about this. The historical context of the Book of Revelation is the Emperor cult. The Roman Emperor Domitian wanted people to worship him as a God, and we call that the emperor cult; that’s the historical context. We’ll expand more on that in the next session. What is the purpose? John’s purpose in writing to those Christians, the seven churches of Asia, was to encourage them not to worship the emperor, regardless of the consequences, and they were severe: torture, imprisonment, death; that’s what was going to happen if you didn’t worship the emperor. So this is why he, that’s a context, and that’s the purpose of Revelation. Okay, so how, why does this matter? It can help us decide, remembering the context and the purpose, if an interpretation is true or false. Okay, if the interpreter is true or false. Okay, because if it violates the, if if it violates the purpose or the context, then we know that the conclusion is incorrect. So uh, Revelation cannot be used to create a timeline to predict the end of the world, and there is no Rapture. Why? Because the purpose is to tell Christians to remain faithful in spite of tribulation, and the whole idea behind the Rapture is that you’re going to avoid tribulation; that can’t be right because nowhere in the Bible does it ever say, say that Christians won’t face tribulation; it says the opposite: it says, “You have to be faithful regardless of tribulation; the one who endures to the end will be saved.” That’s the message of the book, and that’s the message frankly throughout the New Testament.

So what does Christ say? This is another reason, and this is something that people used to confront our friend Brother Camping about; they would say to him, “But Jesus says you’re not going to know when he’s coming back.” And Brother Camping said that was before, but now he wants you to know; he wants you to be ready, etc. And by the way, he said, he said no church was to be followed; he just wanted people to listen to him; that all the churches had apostasy, and he was the only one who’s saying the truth. So he was telling people not to go to church but just to listen to his show. So what did Christ say about the, about the end? “It will come as a thief in the night,” that is, when we don’t expect him. So what else does he say? When the disciples ask him, “Lord, will you now at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” He says, “It is not for you to know the times and the seasons which the Father has established by his authority.” So everything we need to know for our salvation, everything Christ wanted us to know, he taught very, very clearly, right? Where does he ever talk about Rapture? He doesn’t. Every scenario of the end times that we can find from the words of Christ have nothing to do with that. Instead, he says, “I’m going to come; the householder is going to come when the servants aren’t expecting him.” It’s the opposite. Okay, he would not have left us to guess. Also, it would be harmful for us to know the time of the end. Why would it be harmful? Wouldn’t it be better because you’re getting ready? No, you’re going to say, “I have lots of time; lots of time,” right? We get, we say, “Well, it’s plenty of time.” So that’s why it’s spiritually harmful for us. So this is the other reason: everybody who has ever predicted the end has been wrong. Okay, every single one. So what’s the chances that the next guy who comes along, or next gal—but they’re almost always men; I don’t know if any women have done this—but what’s the chances that somebody comes along with another scenario is going to be right? And why do people keep trying to predict it? Because uh, in the 19th century, in the 1800s, when the Seventh-day Adventists got started, they were very big into this; Seventh-day is very new religion; it’s only like a couple hundred years old. So Seventh-day Adventists were very apocalyptic; they still are, but they actually set dates for the return of Jesus. And people literally climbed on the roofs of their houses, and they waited for him to come back. They did that twice, and then they figured, “We shouldn’t do this anymore,” because they were wrong both times. Then out of the Seventh-day Adventist came the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Charles Taze Russell was a Jehovah’s, um, was a Seventh-day Adventist; he started the Jehovah’s Witnesses with a Bible study, by the way, of only eight people. Okay, but he was very apocalyptic, and they set several dates for the return of Jesus. The last one that they actually said was in the 1980s, and of course they were wrong. Maybe they’ve stopped because I haven’t heard anything about them setting any dates recently. But of course some of you also remember the Y2K, the year 2000; a lot of Christians were, were convinced Jesus was going to come back, and they literally went to Israel to wait for Jesus. Okay, in the year 2000. So the chances are almost zero, okay, that anybody’s prediction about when Jesus is going to come back is is correct. So why do they keep on doing that?

Pride. Okay, everybody else was wrong, but I know; I figured it out; this Holy Spirit is speaking to me; I read the book; I did my calculations. By the way, I sent away for Brother C, Camping; I said, “I have to get this book.” He said, “Write in, and you’re going to get a free book telling you about how we know when the end of the world is going to come.” So I said, “I have to have this,” of course I wasn’t going to pay for it, so that’s good. So he sent it to me, and I did, could not read it; it was incomprehensible. He starts with the uh, flood of Noah, and he has all these complicated calculations; they treat the Bible like it’s a a collection of different secrets to be unlocked. The Bible contains mysteries, but that’s not how we’re supposed to approach it. So this is how people, a lot of people have a spiritual pride that drives them; they don’t think that they’re proud, but they believe they have uncovered the mystery of the secret, or they have the right calculation, or you read every fifth letter, and then together send some secret coded message. Okay, this is nonsense. So people have a belief that they have a special spiritual insight; the Holy Spirit is speaking through them, and of course that’s spiritual delusion. Sometimes people want to be important, feel important, or they, this is fed; their pride is fed in this way. Sometimes people have genuine spiritual experiences, and this unfortunately leads them to have false spiritual experiences. I’ll tell you one story that St. Paisios told: there was a woman in Greece who had some kind of a spiritual experience—I don’t remember now what it was—but it was genuine, and because of this she did develop pride, and she started talking about how the, she started having other experiences; the first one was real, but the others were not; the devil used the first experience to lead her astray, and she began to attract a little following, and people were talking to her about, you know, she was giving them advice, and and she was thinking that she’s some kind of a conduit of the Holy Spirit, and he, he was insisting to her that she was wrong. So what happens is we, sometimes the devil takes these good things that happen to us, and he uses it against us. So, “I’m going to read the Bible; I’m going to understand Revelation.” It’s a good thing to read the Bible; it’s a good thing, even if you want to read Revelation. But as soon as you, you start…

To get the idea that somehow you're something special, and God is using you in spite of everybody else in the world who's ever lived, to tell you some, give you some special insight that's probably coming from the evil one. So this is why, in the Orthodox tradition, we are taught not to accept dreams and visions, to be very skeptical of them, because this is how the evil one also works. And so people sometimes feel like they're important. Then you have the people who just want to manipulate others. And if you know if somebody is of that type, they want to start their own religion. What about Scientology? Okay, this this is classified as a religion; it's a it's a considered a charity, and this is one of the most evil and destructive cults that exist. Okay, so some and people are highly manipulated and controlled by that. So there's also there are also people who use the Bible for their own purposes.

And of course, the other reason why people are involved in this is because they believe they've already been saved, and there's nothing else for them to do but wait for Jesus to come back, and they're going to tell you exactly when. So it took me a long time to figure out why so many Protestants were so obsessed with the apocalypse, and I think this is the reason: we've already been saved; there's nothing for us to do, so all we're going to do is wait for Jesus to come back. But when is he coming back? When is he coming back? When is he coming back? Can we get him to come back sooner because we're ready? Okay, so a lot of evangelicals, especially, are very into the state of Israel, and they identify Israel, this modern state of Israel, with with the Bible. But the Bible is not talking about the modern state of Israel. Okay, so there's a bit of confusion there, but there's a real desire for the—and that's a wonderful thing—we're all supposed to say, "Maranatha, come Lord Jesus." We want the Lord to come back. Maybe maybe not, maybe when we're ready. We don't maybe we don't feel ready; we're not quite ready for that, but we should be saying, "Come, Lord Jesus," but we shouldn't be looking to make it happen, happen. This is one one reason why so many evangelicals are very invested in Israel; they're very supportive of Israel is because of they believe that Jesus, the the Israelis have to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem before the Lord comes, then then the Lord will come back. So this is why they're promoting this, but there's a there's a lot of danger in that too. So we have to be very very careful about thinking, "I have everything all wrapped up; my spiritual life is good; I've got nothing to do, nothing to grow, nothing to repent for, and all I have to do is wait for Jesus to come back." So we have to be very careful.

So what is the position of the Orthodox Church? What is the position of the ancient church, that is our church, the ancient church? We believe what the Lord said in the scriptures: "No one knows the day or the hour." He said this many times; nobody knows. And we remind ourselves of this every year on Holy Week, don't we? We sing the the hymn of the bridegroom: "Behold, the bridegroom comes in the middle of the night, and blessed is the servant whom he shall find watching." In other words, we're supposed to always be prepared for the end; that's what we're supposed to do as Christians. Because whether Jesus comes today or in a hundred years, I'm going to die at some point, and the chances are very likely that I will die before the Lord comes back. I could die when I leave this building. So we have to be always prepared because that's the end for us. That's why it's spiritually harmful to be investing a lot of time studying and trying to figure out when he's coming back or a scenario of this is going to happen, then this is going to happen, then this is going to happen, by piecing together different parts of the Bible, because this time that is invested in that really is not useful for us spiritually. It's more spiritually useful if we see, "How can I become a better person? What sins am I committing that I'm not recognizing that I should repent for? How can I do more for my church, for my community? How can I develop more patience if I am impatient? How can I stop being angry? How can I remove the sin of lust or the sin of avarice? How can I be less vain?" All those things that is spiritually profitable, profitable. Okay, not although and in spite of all that, I'm glad you're here today. I'm not trying to suggest we shouldn't learn about the Bible; I'm just trying to put it in this spiritual context.

Okay, so why is Revelation so strange? Why did John choose to write in that style? First of all, as we mentioned, it was part of the Jewish tradition, and the church, having come out of Judaism, also had that tradition. John was functioning as a prophet, and he had a spiritual experience, and it was very difficult for him to articulate it. So he used a lot of symbols that we see in the Old Testament. And so this is what happens that very often when we've had a very profound experience, we don't have um words to explain it, so we turn to symbols, like as I mentioned, when we're in love or we've suffered a great loss or something like this. And so this is why he writes in this manner. Symbols convey very deep and powerful meanings. Um, if I'm correct, the the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, um, each had end-time prophecies. Uh, the Gospel of John didn't. Could The Book of Revelation be considered his end-time prophecy? That's a good question. Could The Book of Revelation be—I I don't think so, because the synoptics, what they're doing is they're repeating the words of the Lord. Their the disciples were sitting across um from the the the Kidron Valley, opposite the city of Jerusalem; they saw the temple; it was spectacularly beautiful; they're sitting on the Mount of Olives, and they said, "Look, Lord, how beautiful the temple is," and he said, "I tell you, there won't be one stone left on top of another," and this is when he begins talking about to them about some of the events of the end times. But but that's because they were he was prompted to do so by the question of the disciples. John wrote this because the Lord wanted him to give a message to the seven churches of Asia. This was the area which John was responsible for. Um, it's that's different from them deciding on their own that they're going to give a prophecy. Do you see I'm saying? In both cases it was prompted by the Lord, but in for the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it was because the disciples asked him when, how are these things going to happen, whereas in John's case, for Revelation, nobody asked him; he just had this spiritual experience. Why don't we take a break and get up and have some refreshments and come back in a few minutes, and we'll take care of part two?

Okay, I wrote my dissertation on the Book of Revelation, on the Book of Revelation in the ancient Church of the East, because um what's important, important is that we understand it in its original context. Now my it was about the early church and how it understood the Book of Revelation. So this is the approach that we take as Orthodox Christians: what is the context? What is the purpose? How is it understood? Of course, with Revelation, it takes a bit more work, but here we're going to take a deeper dive into the background for the book so that you can understand it. So we're going to talk about the author, the recipients, the circumstances, the historical context, and why it is not read in the Orthodox church today, and yet where do we see the influence of Revelation in the church? So why was it written? Every book has a purpose; we must always consider the purpose of the author in writing a book. What is Paul's purpose in writing Romans? If I arrive at a conclusion that is not orted by the purpose for which the author wrote, then you better question your conclusion. Okay, so well these are what we're going to talk about; we'll start with the author. Okay, so the author, luckily for us, identifies himself as John in the book. Now the question is, which John? Who was John? Or which John? Because today the most scholars believe it was not the Apostle John. This is how I was trained when I was uh in college and in graduate school; most of them think it was not John. However, I have to tell you, surprisingly enough, that this was not really part of my research. My research was about how the early church interpreted Revelation, not the authorship of Revelation itself. But in order to understand how the church interpreted it, I read everything that was said about it from the time it was written to the year 600. Okay, what all all the different Church writers said about it, and everybody attributed it to John, but especially important is that it was attributed to John, 1 of the 12, by people who lived in Asia, that was John's region, that today we call it Turkey, and people who knew John, who said or knew people who knew John; they're the ones who said he wrote it, and I thought, felt that the evidence was overwhelming, okay, that it was John the Apostle. He was one of the 12; he died as a very old man after after the year 100. Okay, so he's extremely old, and he's responsible for the churches of Asia. So he's in prison or in exile, really not a prison but an exile, when the Church of Asia is facing this serious crisis, and he had a vision in which he was told to share this information with his churches.

So to whom did he write the book? Well, it begins with a prologue that indicates also that this book is also an epistle, a letter, and it names the recipient. So how does it begin? "The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him to show to his servants what must soon to take place, and he made it known by sending his Angel to his servant John." So he had a revelation, and notice that it's a reference to something that's going to take place soon, and John bore witness to the word of God, to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. So it's a vision; so he saw it, but he didn't see it like a picture we would recognize with our ordinary sight. Now here's the first blessing: "Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear and keep what is written therein, for the time is near." So in the first three verses we have two references to the shortness of the time. All right, now, "Blessed is the one who reads," that's because this is how people used to encounter the scriptures; somebody would have a copy; he would read or she would read, and other people would listen. So people didn't have Bibles, and there you know obviously all books were hand-copied. So first he begins by blessing the person who reads and the the people who hear. So here is the uh map of Asia, and we see where these um where these churches are located to which John wrote, and the S the island where he was is Patmos, this little tiny island here. You see Patmos? Okay. Okay, now Patmos is a very small island; it's so small it doesn't have an airport; it's only 4 miles long from the top to bottom, and it's kind of shaped like an hourglass. It is stunningly beautiful, but it's really small, and it was kind of a um place of exile in the Roman Empire. One of the things that sometimes they would do to you if they didn't kill you is they would send you away into exile. So here is where the letter begins: "John to the seven churches that are in Asia: Grace to you and peace." Now you might recognize this format, excuse me, from the Epistles of Paul: "Paul to the Church of God in Rome," "Paul to the Church of the Saints of Colossae," "Paul too—" So this is how a Greek letter started; you always mention the sender first, then the recipient. Here we have the seven churches of Asia, and the greeting: "Grace and peace to you from the one who was, is, and is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne." So far we're talking about the Father and the Spirit; the one who was, is, and is to come is not the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that's just the Father here in this context; the seven spirits is identified with the Spirit, Holy Spirit, who are before his throne, and then we're going to see the Son is mentioned next. Okay, and from Jesus Christ. So here's the third person of the Trinity: "The faithful witness, firstborn of the dead, ruler of the kings of the earth, to him who loved us and freed us by our sins, from our sins by his blood, made us a kingdom and priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen." So he's he's sending grace and peace to the people of Asia Minor, the churches of Asia Minor, and um and glorifying God, the the Trinity. Now John was associated with Asia Minor; it's very very strong; we have a lot of early church tradition, a lot of early church writers who talk about St. John being responsible for the churches of Asia. So now we have this reference to the Parousia, the second coming of Christ: "He's coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, everyone who pierced him, and all the tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen." There's a lot that can be said about anyone of these verses, but I'm trying to get to the historical context and setting. So after this we have this statement: "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, says the Lord God, who was, is, and is to come, the Almighty." Now I I just chose this with a picture which looks very similar to what you have here in in this church. Um, of course, this is the—most churches have a an icon of Christ in the dome of the church that looks almost exactly like this. Sometimes the language varies, and in your case, in this church, you have a beautiful, very very nice icon, and the language is is not the same; it always has some words of the Lord here. This one is, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of the Almighty, who was, is, and is to come." Here it's specifically citing the Apocalypse here, and um most churches don't have that; they'll often have what is there in your dome. You know what I'm going to leave you to read it, but it's it's what the bishop says when he comes out during the—theon—and he says, "Lord, you know, look down upon this vineyard which you have established." Okay, so that's all because the Lord is looking down upon us as we pray. So this is how we remember this in church, but this idea of calling that icon the Pantocrator is the word here in Revelation for the Almighty or the ruler of all; sometimes it's translated as ruler of all. Now this one here is he is the one—this definitely a statement of Jesus Christ, who is the one who is, was, and is to come. Now didn't I just tell you that over here the one who was, is, and is to come is the Father? This is the Father; this is a reference to the Spirit, but now we have the same language, and this is a reference to the Son. Why? Because it's in a different context; the Son has the same essence as the Father; the Son of God is God, equal to God the Father, and this is why he is described with the same language as what we saw previously with God the Father. So after this initial statement in which John identifies himself as the writer and greets his audience, the seven churches of Asia, we have what's called typically by scholars the opening vision, and this icon is some one that's kind of well known. So it's showing us this little image of what John sort of had in his vision. So these are the circumstances that prompted him to write the book: "I, John, your brother, who share with you in Jesus the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus." This is generally understood to mean that he was in exile because he had been preaching about Jesus Christ, and of course this was a crime, and we're going to go further today to talk about why that was a crime, why uh the Romans were persecuting the Christians at all. He goes on to say that he was in the spirit on the Lord's day, so he had a mystical experience, a spiritual experience, and he heard a voice like a trumpet saying, "Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches: to Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea." These were major cities of Asia Minor, and he was told to write to them, and then the contents of what he was supposed to say to them was revealed in the next two chapters. But before he writes, it says he turned to see the voice. Now this is a very strange statement; nobody looks at a voice. This is the beginning of what you should recognize as very strange, a very strange expression. He heard—we would say he he turned to see who was speaking—but you don't look at a voice, but there was somebody who was speaking to him, and he saw seven gold lampstands, and in the midst of the lampstands, one like a son of man with a long robe and a golden girdle around the breast; that means a belt around his chest. So his belt, instead of by by the waist, was up here by the chest. Now all of these things that John saw had a meaning, okay, but this is his vision of Jesus Christ as a one like the son of man. Now this is an icon of the Ancient of Days. "His head and his hair were white as white as wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire; his feet were like burnished bronze refined in a furnace; his voice was like the sound of many waters." Um, have you ever been to Niagara Falls to hear the water? It's powerful. So all of these descriptions have a meaning. So it it isn't necessarily that John saw something that he's now describing for us, but he had this spiritual sense impression, and he's using words to try to describe to us what he experienced of Jesus Christ. He's in a long robe, and his belt is up here, not down here. Why is your belt down here? Well, men used to wear robes too, right? They tied their belt around their waist, and they used to say, "Girl, your loins!" Man, remember like that in the Bible? That means tie your belt tighter. When you wanted to work, you tightened your belt, and you pulled up your robe so that it came up short to your knees, and that that way you were able to work. Jesus has a long robe, and his belt is up here because his work is done. Okay, there's a lot of deep meaning in these things. What the white hair—what does white hair mean? Ancient antiquity, eternity in this case, and of course with white hair comes wisdom. And the eyes as a flame of fire—fire was the only way that people had light in antiquity. Think about that; know if you know this, but when Edison invented the light bulb, people were afraid of it because it was light without fire, and they were very superstitious of it. So um you always had flame. Now St. Basil the Great, other fathers of the church have said that the flame of the eyes of Christ uh is like the the eyes of God are like a flame because to the sinners they burn, but to the righteous they illuminate. So fire has two properties: it illuminates, but it also burns, and how you receive it, with the effect that it has upon you, the presence of God upon you, the eyes of Christ in this case depends upon whether you're a sinner or whether you're among the righteous. So now it continues to show us that he held seven stars in his right hand; from his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and his face was like the sun shining in full strength; it was so bright you can't look at it, right? A dazzling brightness. What about this? It's weird to think about a sword coming out; it's not that John saw Jesus standing there with a sharp sword coming out; it's he's trying to say that his words were penetrating and they were sharp and they were cutting and they were deep and they were profound.

Because this imagery of the word of God as a two-sword is something we see in the Bible, so the images that we see in Revelation are images that we see elsewhere in the Bible. Because John is drawing on that imagery to explain to you, with with these images, what he experienced. It's not that he was sleeping and he saw Jesus standing there in a robe and a sword coming out of his mouth. You understand what I'm trying to say? So we shouldn't be so carnal in our understanding. So imagine it with our minds to picture it; of course, we tend to do this because we are physical people, we're physical beings, and so this is how we understand sight and vision. But he experienced something spiritually, and he's trying to convey this experience to us.

"When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead, but he laid his right hand upon me and said, 'Fear not; I am the first and the last, the living one. I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore. I have the keys of death and Hades.' Now write what you see, what it is, what is, what is to take place here after."

As for the mystery of the Seven Stars which you saw, now here's the first explanation. We have a few of these where they, the meaning of the symbol is explained for us. There are the seven gold lampstands are the churches; the Seven Stars are the Angels of the seven churches. Okay, so that's the first explanation that we have. So this is the opening Vision.

Now let's talk a little bit deeper about the historical context, the emperor cult, and Roman persecution. So what was the emperor cult, and why did it result in Christian persecution? So the very first Roman Emperor was Augustus Caesar; his name was originally Octavian, as you remember from your high school civics class. He is the first one to deify an emperor, and that was Julius Caesar, his uncle. So when Caesar was assassinated, and Octavian finally took over and he won, he became the first emperor. He proclaimed Julius to have been a God. So now he set the St, the uh, he began a, he set a precedent. Okay. Augustus Caesar was an outstanding Emperor and much more famous, much more important, much more impressive than Julius Caesar. So of course, when he died, he was proclaimed to God, that is Augustus, by his successor Tiberius, and this got this President going. Okay. So this was a formal honor that was conferred upon death. When an Emperor died, died, his successor would Proclaim him to have been a God. All right. So, for example, Domitian's father, who was the emperor when John wrote uh Revelation, Vespasian, understood this meaning, and when he was dying, he made a joke and he said, "I fear I am becoming a God." Okay, so that was just the tradition in the Roman Empire; when when a Emperor died, you proclaimed him to be a God. And by the way, they built temples to them and everything.

So Domitian, however, was different. So he was Emperor from 81 to 96. He was the third of the Flavian dynasty; the last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty was Nero, then you have a brief interlude with there was a civil war, then you have the Flavians. Now I can't exactly fault Domitian for this; what fun is it if you're God after you're dead? Why can't you be God while you're alive? That's what he was thinking, and he wanted people to address him as "My Lord and my god." Domitian, of course, he was, he was paranoid; a lot of people, all those, all those Emperors were, because they knew that somebody was always hoping they would die or was ready to kill them so they could take over. And he actually was murdered in his bed; Domitian was, but that's another story. So the Roman, he was the Roman emperor when John wrote Revelation. He was the third of the Flavians, and it seems that Domitian wanted to be worshiped as a God and addressed as a god while he was alive, and this is an innovation. Before the um Emperors were Mo, mostly like the, the first citizen; this is like Augustus's ideal. Of course, they had absolute power, but the idea was that they represented Rome, and they were the first citizen, but not, not like the idea of the Emperor or King being God is really an Eastern thing. Excuse me, like Egyptians, the consider Pharaoh to God, be God; the Babylonians, it really wasn't a Greek thing, and it wasn't a Roman thing, but Domitian likes it, of course. So most of the Roman Empire didn't have any objection to Emperor worship; it's just a formality; they worship so many gods, so so what's the difference? One more plus, the emperor represented the Empire. So here we see the Empire, and uh, it's circled, you know, it's encircling the Mediterranean Sea, and the emperor is the representative of the entire Empire. So when they worshiped him, when the Romans worshiped him, it was to them showing respect. Okay, kind of like this. Okay, so when, when President Biden, he just left for, where did he go? Egypt, or is he going someplace else now? So he goes overseas; he goes overseas; he's representing the country, you know, regardless of what you think about him, that's our country; this is our leader; he's President Biden. So when people see Biden, they think, think America. Okay, that's normal; when they see our flag, they think America; that's the association. So people thought of it more like this; you say the Pledge of Allegiance, you're showing your Allegiance and your respect for your country; you approve of its values; you support it, etc. To us, this is what we think of when we salute the flag. For the Romans to worship the emperor, that's what that meant. Okay, but the problem is, how were they supposed to express their support of their respect for the emperor and the Empire? Well, it was through religious means; it was a religious expression. When we salute the flag, it's not a religious statement, but if you were going to show your respect for the emperor, you had to do it in a religious way. There was no such is a separation of church and state, right? So they would have to burn incense, and they were expected to make a prostration before his statue and say, "My Lord and my god, Domitian." For the Romans, it's really not a big deal; they had a lot of gods; they already had Idols, but of course, it's a problem for the Christians. So what do you think? Is that okay? We get sensed by the priest; that's okay, but what about this? Is that okay? What about this? That okay, we can't do that; we don't worship anyone but God; we don't worship Saints; we don't worship the Virgin Mary; we all know that God Alone is worshiped. So this prostration, it's an act of worship.

Um, so Jews were exempt from Emperor worship, but Christians were not. So this is sometimes puzzling to people; why were the Jews exempt? Because it was a legal religion; it was recognized by the Roman state; it was actually an ancient religion; it was older than Rome. Judaism goes back to Abraham; that's 1800 BC; Rome only went back to 700 something BC. Okay, so the Jews were much, much, much older than the Roman. Even the Romans in their own mythology about Romulus and Remus, and Judaism was considered a tribal or ethnic religion; the people who followed it were all descended from this one guy, Abraham; they were considered a nation, even though they lived in Rome or Greece or Babylon or or Sirene or um or Egypt; they were all part of the same race or nation, and their religion, because it was ancient and it was kind of ethnic, it was accepted by the Romans. All right, so they were exempt; they said that, of course, they knew; plus the Romans knew the Jews would never bow down in front of Idols; they would never worship anybody but their own God. The Romans knew that, so they said to them, "Will you pray for the emperor?" And they said, "Yes, of course, we will pray for the emperor; we just won't pray to the emperor." Right? So they said, "That's okay; we will pray for him." Christians were not exempt. So why were they not exempt? This was a new religion; it was considered foreign; it was secretive; it was strange. In order to participate in any of their ceremonies, you had to be one of them. So that's why it was sort of secretive, and there were all kinds of rumors about these weird people who worship somebody who was actually crucified; that's perverse; it's sick; they must be out of their minds; that was the Roman thinking. Okay. Christians were also monotheists; they were opposed to idolatry, like the Jews, but they weren't exempt; they were an illegal religion called a superstitio, a Superstition, a cult by the Romans; they didn't have the legal protection of Judaism. So in order to meet, you had to have permission; the Romans were extremely nervous about treason. So in order for any group to meet, you had to have the permission of the state. So, for example, you belong to the Guild of the sandal makers; you had to have permission. So we know this because there are inscriptions; an inscription is um a message that's CH chiseled into stone. So we have lots of Roman inscriptions, lots and lots of them; sometimes they engraved; sometimes they're columns; sometimes it's just a placard. So on columns in the marketplace, there would be an inscription: "The Guild of the sandal makers meets here every third Thursday." You know that means they had permission to get together and to meet, and by the way, as part of their meetings, the first thing they would do is worship whoever their Patron God was. In order to have any kind of gathering, you had to have the permission of the state. So Christians legally did not have the right to gather to Worship the Lord. All right, Jews did. And by the way, if you ever go to Rome, you might see this, one of the best preserved uh temples called the Pantheon, and it's, it's called Pantheon, all gods, because inside of it, it's, it's round, um, there were all the idols of all the gods that were worshiped in the Roman Empire; there were thousands of them, and also a Menorah, okay, was in that Temple. But Christians were illegal, so they didn't have any of the protections of the Jews. And here's, and then if somebody said, "Listen, we don't believe in Idols either; we worship one God," that sounds very Jewish, and they would say, "What, what's wrong with you? Why won't you worship this statue? Why just, just bow down in front of the emperor?" They could not understand it because by now most of the Christians were not Jews anymore; most of them were Gentiles. So what's your problem? You're from Crete, or you're from Libya, or you're from Cyprus, or you're, why, why you just bow down; you're not Jewish. So you see this was very puzzling.

But there's something else. Because the Christians refused to worship the emperor, the Romans began to suspect them of disloyalty, because all it is is a, is a, a sign of loyalty to the Empire. And the Romans knew that Christian, that Jesus Christ, the person that they worshiped, had been executed by a Roman governor on a charge of treason. So the Romans said, "Aha, that's the reason why they won't worship the emperor," because long after Domitian was dead, other Roman emperors continued this practice of insisting that people worship the statue of the emperor. So that go, that went on for a very long time. Why? Because it, it was a way of proving your loyalty, whether or not you were loyal to the state or not. All right. So the worship of the emperor became a loyalty test by which Roman officials identified Christians and executed anybody who wouldn't participate in the emperor cult. By the way, they did that; it was because it was illegal. This is, by the way, what of the things that they would do is ask them three times, "Are you to, to renounce Christ and to worship the Emperor or the, or the Roman gods?" And if the person, after the third time, when the person refused, they were immediately taken out and put to death without a trial, summarily executed. So similarly, today, when we baptize someone, we ask them three times to renounce the devil, right? Three times, "You renounce Satan and all his worship and All His angels and all his pump?" "I do renounce him," three times. Then you turn, and you accept Christ. What? Three times, "You accept Jesus Christ?" "Yes, I do," you know, etc. So you have to do this three times. So this was the practice of the ancient Church, okay, and it was the practice of the Romans to try to get you to deny Christ three times.

So the first Roman persecution had occurred about 30 years earlier, in 65, when Nero had used the Christians and blamed them for the fire of Rome; they used them as a scapegoat. The only Christians who were killed in that persecution were the Christians who actually lived in Rome, and there was an underlying charge; they were charged with arson and conspiracy. But after the executions of by Roman by Nero, that wave of persecution was over, and it was limited to the city of Rome. But then under Domitian, because he wanted to be worshiped as a god, this new wave of Roman persecutions began around the year 90, and it continued until 313, when Christianity was finally legalized by Constantine the Great. So that was a long time. Now it's not that there was kind of a constant persecution, but it would kind of come and go in waves. And I had somebody, I was in this course on Revelation, and somebody, this was um, this was in Boston, and somebody said, "Well, you know, I read this book," and they said, "The persecutions, you know, really weren't that bad," and I was thinking about, because it was just a few people, what they said, and I was think about our little community in Somerville, Massachusetts; we had a couple hundred uh families, and somebody said, "Well, wasn't that bad; just, you know, a handful of people were killed." I was thinking about our Parish; that would be a crisis if a handful of people that here were, were killed; that's not a little thing. But do you see how our modern thinking is, with thinking in terms of numbers? "Oh, it's just a few people; not a lot of people were killed." A lot of people were killed, by the way. There was a book that came out by some, I don't know, some scholar from someplace who talked about the myth of Christian persecution; that Christians weren't really put to death by the Romans. You know how many documents we have about this? There was a lot; there were many, many, many, especially at the very end, what's called the Great persecution, right before the the legalization of Christianity; entire Villages, thousands and thousands and thousands of people were put to death. So this idea that there weren't a lot is not true; there, it would come sometimes in waves; there were only a few Empire-wide persecutions, but there were a lot of localized ones; there were a lot of them were, let's say the Harvest was bad, or there was a drought; people would say, "It's the Christian fault," and they would round them up, and they would put them to death. Why would they say it's the Christians fault? This happened a lot more than we even know about historically. Why? Because people believed that Rome was powerful and prosperous and strong because of its Gods, you see, and as Rome was declining, the Empire, Christianity was ascending, and people believed that the rise of Christianity was responsible for the decline of Rome. And even as Rome itself, the city was surrounded by barbarians, and they were attacking the city, the pagans were saying to the Christians, "This is your fault, because the gods have stopped protecting us," you see, and they said, "Look, if we just start praying to the gods, all of these Invaders will go away." But that's the mentality of the people, you see. So U, they blame the Christians. So that's the historical context of the Book of Revelation.

So why is it, why is it never read in the services of the Orthodox Church? Well, because the the readings that we have come from what we call the lectionary; there are assigned readings for every single day, and the that was developed during the 4th century, and this happened, uh, we have this one-year lectionary; this is why we hear the same things every year at the same time of year. And this lectionary was created very early on; the cycle of readings that was done in the 4th century; they started to, to do this; the Revelation, well, really the fifth century for the lectionary. Revelation was accepted as scripture when the canon of the New Testament was created around the 300s; it was pretty much set by the year 400, but by the end of the 4th Century, most Greek fathers did not accept Revelation, and so um, it's during the 4th Century that it lost a lot of its uh appeal, and it lost a lot of its uh credibility. So the lectionary was created after that, in the fifth century, so by that time The Book of Revelation had fallen out of favor, and it was mostly rejected by the East. Gradually it was re-accepted, but most of the time it was not. So why was it rejected at all? So if you look at the Book of Revelation and you compare it to the Gospel of John, they're very different in style. Revelation is, is written; it's not a very polished book, whereas the Gospel of John is very lofty, and the Greek is very polished. But also, people could not understand the meaning of the symbols. By the year 300, 350, 360, 390, people no longer understood the meaning of the symbols, because it had been written to Greek Christians, really Jewish Christians in Asia Minor in the first century. Okay, so it was also being misused by people who insisted on understanding the symbols literally; some of them were monks, and others were a group called Monis. And also the writing style was very different from the Gospel of John, and they said, "You know, we don't think John wrote both Books." Okay, so that's the reason why it's not read in the Orthodox Church; at the time that the lectionary was created, it was um not widely accepted.

Where do we see the church in Revelation and Revelation in the church? So we see the church in Revelation in the descriptions of worship, beginning in chapter 4. There's Heavenly worship that's described a lot like what we see in the in the church today; there's angels, and there are people. Of course, we worship together; we believe that when we worship the angels are present, and we express those; we see angels in the iconography of the church. When the ites, the Altar Boys come out of the altar, they're holding the processional fans, you know, those round things that you see; maybe you don't know it, but has the image of an angel on it; represents the presence of the Angels. When we sing the Cherubic hymn, we say, "We who mystically represent the cherubim uh and sing together with them," we're singing with the angels as we worship. There is incense; there's an altar; there's Martyrs under the altar or in the altar; we do prostrations; we sing h; there's a u; everything is about praising God; that's what goes on in the Orthodox church today; that's what John is describing of the Heavenly worship. So we see that even if uh it's something that we don't read about in church from its earliest years, our church was liturgical, and it employed ritual. So this is something that a lot of people have difficulty accepting, because they assume that early Christianity would have been simple, okay, like a Protestant church with nothing or maybe with just a cross. But remember that the first Christians were all Jews; they went to the synagogue every week, and the synagogue had ritual; there were assigned readings; there was an order of the service; when they brought the Torah out, they brought it out in procession, and they covered it with velvet and jewels, and it's very similar to what we see in our liturgy. And they went to the temple; the first Christians were all familiar with the temple, where there was priesthood, where there was incense, where there was sacrifice, where there were trumpets and a lot of of um elaborate worship; worship was ritual, and there's nothing wrong with ritual, as long as it's not empty formalism. But for us, it's not empty formalism. So we had, there was a Liturgy of the temple; there was a Liturgy of the synagogue; there was rituals that were follow, and a lot of those became part of our early Christian worship, and we still have it today, even when we don't recognize it; even when we don't recognize it, it's there, and it's embedded. And anybody who's Jewish who comes to an Orthodox Church recognizes it right away. Jewish Worship in the first century is not plain; it was not simple; they didn't, they didn't say, "We're Christians now; we're not doing that anymore." Why not? That's what people think; oh, they, we're, we're Christians. The early church considered itself, and the church today still considers itself the Fulfillment of Judaism.

The early Christians would say, "We are the new Israel; we are the true Israel." This is why they would say, "Those people call themselves Jews, but they're not okay." The first Christians considered themselves to be the true Jews. And why is that? Because they acknowledged that the Messiah had come. They said, "You're not Jews; we're the Jews because we believe that Jesus is the Messiah and you don't." So they recognized the Fulfillment of Judaism in the church. So they didn't say, "Well, we're not going to have any kind of worship that's anything like Judaism." On the contrary, they embraced that, and everything became focused on Christ and how Christ fulfilled everything about Judaism. Okay, so let's talk about it in the church where we see it artistically.

The depictions of the four evangelists as four creatures: Now when John had his spiritual experience, he did not see Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There, those are not the four creatures. Okay, the symbols like Alpha and Omega come from The Book of Revelation. The title we use for that icon that's in the Dome of the church, bondor, comes directly from The Book of Revelation, and also the rainbow motif around the pond. I think you have it too; I forgot to take to to check. But the descriptions of the four evangelists as the four creatures around the Throne of God, that's very ancient. That is not something that John thought of; that was an interpretation that was used by St. Irenaeus in the 2nd century. And then, of course, we see this all over; we see this in the West and in the East, identifying certain evangelists. And again, it's not that the the the creatures—one like a man, one like a one like a um, one like an eagle, one like a a calf, and the other one um like a lion—those have become identified with the Evangelist because of Irenaeus. But then different fathers gave them different interpretations. They said, "No, that guy is not the eagle; this guy is the eagle. No, this guy is not the lion; this guy is the lion." But it's sort of settled now who is identified with which, but that's something that we see in a lot of Christian churches. And if you go to Venice, the symbol of St. Mark is the lion, so there's a big lion on the pole in the square of Venice. So here again, you see the four evangelists, four creatures in Revelation. Here you'll see them, and this image of of Christ is the lamb, and this you see the four evangelists and the Christ's lamb in the center. And of course, the use of I Alpha and Omega is commonplace in many, many churches, and the icon of Christ Pantocrator, and you see that sort of rainbow motif around the uh, sometimes it's here's a band, but other times it can be a kind of uh, and here this one has the words of Christ. Sometimes it's like little diamonds around the APO, the pat icon. Okay, so these words are the holy—the one I showed before—again, you can't see very clearly here. You do see the rainbow, different colors around the person of Christ, and that's because of the description in in chapter 4 in The Book of Revelation.

What changed in John's mind when in 70 AD? What changed in John's mind in 70 AD? In 70 AD was the destruction of the temple. I can't tell you what was in his mind, but I'll tell you what it meant for Christians—all Christians—and I think he would have agreed with this, um, that that that um, this is the reason why the Christians called themselves a new Israel because it confirmed for them that uh that the that the church was the new Israel, and the era of animal sacrifice was over. That the church also described itself as the ones who have inherited the pr proes of Israel. This is something that is disfavored today, especially after World War II because of the Holocaust. And nothing—I hope nobody takes anything I'm saying as as suggesting um anti-Semitism or anything like that—of course not. But after World War II and the Holocaust, the uh Catholic Church especially came out with statements that were very favorable toward the Jews in the big conference that they had had, a council called Vatican II, and the Catholic Church uh rejected the kind of statements that I'm making, and they called it supersessionism—this idea that the church is the continuation of Israel or the new Israel. They called it; they called it a heresy. All right, I'm saying it because this is what the early church said about itself.

So how is it that we are the continuation of Israel? Because we have the Holy Spirit; we have prophecy; we have Miracles that disappeared from Judaism. And I've asked Jews about this, and it's quite striking. There was a a Jewish scholar at the University where I was teaching, and I asked him, I said, "Do Jews believe in miracles, and do Jews pray for miracles?" We would have said, "Well, of course," me—how many miracles are—and they said no. He said no. And I said, "Why not?" He said something changed after 70 when the temple was destroyed, and there's a big argument in Judaism about what changed, but they feel that their relationship with God is different, and they don't. But what do we feel that way? Of course not. What do we see on Pentecost? This outpouring of the Holy Spirit, this outpouring of Miracles, and still experience Miracles every day, right? So I mean, real Miracles. So we're the ones who have inherited these things, and so—and I don't think we should be ashamed to say it. The Jews have their relationship with God; I'm not—we don't advocate in any way um anti-Semitism or anything like this, any kind of discrimination against Jews. Maybe it's because in Western Europe a lot of people did participate in that; maybe that's why they're very sensitive to it. But certainly not in Greece. The Greeks were helping the Jewish people; the Greeks were um protecting the Jewish people during World War II, so we don't have that issue. But go ahead. I was wondering um, so the Jews of the day back then, did they completely give up their identity as being Jewish? Did the Jews of the Roman Empire and just because were they just the Jewish CHR ID?

Yes, the Jewish Christians really still originally or initially thought of themselves as Jews because they said, "We're the real Jews." Of course, didn't give up their idty; they they the Jewish Christians, people like Paul, really saw themselves as both, right? Paul says, "I'm an Israelite; I'm a Hebrew; I'm from The Tribe of Benjamin," but he also called himself a Christian. They didn't reject—because you didn't—today people will say, "Well, if you're Jewish, you can't be a Christian too; you have to—you're no longer Jewish," but that's not the case in the early church. They all—the first Believers were Jewish; they didn't deny; they were proud of their Judaism. And we have many thousands of Jewish Christians today, including some who convert to Orthodox Christianity from Judaism. So they don't give up being Jewish. But um, today what happened is the Jews said, in the year 85, Jews began to gather after the temple was destroyed; they began to gather in a city called Jamnia. They had to read; they had to get together and figure out how they were going to be Jewish without a temple. I'm sure they thought that they would be allowed to rebuild it, but it never happened. So they decided that if you believe that Jesus is the Messiah, you are no longer Jewish. That was the decision of the Jews, but that's not what believers—Christian Believers—thought. A good question though, yes.

So speaking of the Temple, of course, at this point, MOS and so on obviously can't be reil now. Do you believe it will be rebuilt? Will the temple be rebuilt? This is the question because in 2 Thessalonians, St. Paul says that the Antichrist will come and sit in the temple and demand to be worshiped as God. So a lot of people think that this means that the Jewish temple will be rebuilt, but we also call the church the temple or now. Okay, so the fathers of the church were undecided as to whether or not that meant that the Jewish temple would be rebuilt or whether or not the Antichrist will go into a church and demand to be worshiped as God. It's unclear because Church buildings are also called temples. So we don't know. What do I think personally? I don't know. It's going to be very difficult; it's almost impossible to imagine because that bit of territory there in Israel, the Temple Mount, is so sensitive. I don't know if you remember, but Ariel Sharon, who was the Prime Minister of Israel, all he did was walk up to the top of the mountain—Mountain—go to the top of the mountain of the Temple Mount where Pilgrims go, where CH go every day, and that set off such a firestorm; has started a big Revolt in Jerusalem, the last for days. So the Muslims are extremely protective of that space, and it would be Israel against the whole Muslim world. So it's kind of hard to imagine. But hey, none of us imagined the fall of the Soviet Union, did we? So anything's possible. Anybody else? Yes, the U relationship between mus and Christians and the persecution by the Muslims, the Christians in the current state of the Middle East. Um, Michael and I were chatting about the fact that Muslims believe that they have Holy Spirit in in the person of Muhammad. Yes. And my question is um, how does that square with uh Revelations and the current state of of relationships between Christianity and Muslims? We ever—can we ever really square it up? Can we ever—he said that the Muslims believe that the holy spirit is the person of Muhammad. And yes, I I've heard this from the go; that's how they interpret the Gospel of John. So this is what they believe. And can we ever reconcile that with Revelation or Christianity? Of course not, because Jesus is the Fulfillment of the revelation of the Father, the Perfection. So nobody comes after him. Now we can have prophets; there were prophets; there will always be Prophecy in the church, but not one that denies the Divinity of Christ. Okay, so because they deny the Divinity of Christ, then there's no reconciliation there. How can we—that's a fundamental—of course, it's a fundamental difference that they deny that Jesus Christ is God. They—some of them even deny that he died on the cross. Okay, but they believe he was just a prophet. Now here's where they get that from, and if you're ever in this uh situation, they—when Jesus says, "I will send you"—remember that they r Jesus as a prophet. So Jesus says in the Gospel of John, "I will send you the comforter or the paraclet or the advocate," okay, who proceeds from the father, and we understand that this is the Holy Spirit, right? Not um, it's not it's not Muhammad. So they are using the Gospel of John to promote their own ideas. However, it is in the Gospel of John that Jesus says, "The father and I are one." Ask them about that. Okay, ask them about the Virgin birth—how a person who is a mere human being is a product of a virgin birth, which they also believe. But throughout the Gospel of John, it talks about how Jesus, the Son of God, is equal to the Father. "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and he was God." So if you want to use the Gospel of John to prove that Muhammad is the Holy Spirit or the prophet, then you have to use the whole Gospel of John, not just one verse that you're going to twist to suit your own purposes. That's what I would say to that.

In case I have an opinion—just in case I have an opinion—it's it's interesting because you see how we really need to be able to respond to these things in a better way. I saw a some video—somebody showed of some Muslim talking about that—proving him—trying to prove that Jesus is is a prophet and Muhammad is a prophet after Jesus, using the Gospel of John. And I was looking at the Christians in the video saying, "Answer, answer him." How would you answer this? It's so—it's so easy to respond to that, to totally demolish that argument, but they didn't know. So this is the kind of thing that—this is the reason why we need to become more familiar with the Bible, why we need to be able to give responses to these things. Um, and if we're familiar with our the scriptures, we should be able to, and not be shy about it. Listen, somebody's a—I've had Muslim Students; I've had a a lot of Muslims do—I've had everything—atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, every kind of student because I was in a university. Okay, what they believe, that's their business; I'm not going to judge them, and and I'm not here to say what their ultimate end will be; that's not for me; that's for God. That's the Orthodox attitude—when God decides what's going to happen to people. But we have to say what we believe and stand by it, and if somebody has a different belief, they're free to have that belief, but that doesn't mean that we should be shy about expressing ourselves. This is what we believe: We believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God, equal to God the Father and the Holy Spirit. The Trinity is one God, not three Gods, like the Muslims claim, right? But we have to be willing to say so and not be afraid of offending anybody. So I'm coming here—this is an Orthodox church; I'm talking about the church; I'm talking about it very directly; I'm not trying to be careful not to offend anyone. And the reason is because I think we need to speak from a position of Truth and authenticity. And unfortunately, we're so hyper-sensitive about hurting anybody's feelings, and I'm I'm telling you, if I went to a Catholic Church, I exper—expect to hear a Catholic speaker talk about the Catholic faith. I'm not going to believe and accept everything they say, but that's okay; that's what I expect. So I hope that you—some of you are probably not Orthodox in this audience; I'm not saying anything to be offensive to you—but as an Orthodox Christian, this is my perspective. When I go to another church with a speaker of a different background, I expect them to reflect the teachings of their church or their beliefs, and it's not—and I'm not going to get offended by that; that's what I expect. So hopefully, coming here, you're recognizing what you're hearing is the view of The Book of Revelation as it's seen Through The Eyes of the ancient Church, which is the Orthodox Church. Okay, everybody.

So we're beginning our third section here, and we're going to talk about some of the famous images. Obviously, there's a lot we could say; we didn't even talk about the letters to the seven churches, um, but we can't—we only have a four—only have about like three and a half, four hours to devote to Revelation. So we're going to go ahead and talk about some of the famous images because this is, of course, what everybody wants to know about. So the images and symbols of Revelation have to be interpreted, of course, according to their historical context. And a lot of the same images are found in the Old Testament; many of the ideas are found in the Old Testament, but they're never exactly the same because John wasn't copying the Old Testament. And the other reason is that images have a lot of fluidity, and sometimes they can mean more than one thing. Now one of the things that we see a lot of are numbers in Revelation. So the perfect number, of course, is seven. So three and a half is a number that we often see, and um, seven years sometimes becomes 1,260 days or 42 months, and this is a sign indicates a significant period of time, but not too long. 12, of course, is a number that stands for the church; it stands for the disciples; it stands for the tribes of Israel. And 24 is 12 + 12, usually the old and the new. 144,000 is 12 times 12 plus a thousand. So this is a very significant book—that's a that a significant number—that's a number that's going to be saved. And so the Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, believed that when they reached the number of 144,000 adherents, Jesus would come. Of course, they reached that; they surpassed that, and they still haven't uh, Jesus still hasn't come back, and that created a theological problem for them actually because then who are the 144,000? You see how they took it very literally. 1,000 or the thousands as a place is the largest number in the Bible, so 144,000 is just considered a be a very large number, too big to count. And 12 * 12 means all the people who will be saved of the old and of the new.

So I'm going to talk about only two chapters in this section of Revelation because I think they're critical. In chapter 12, we have the woman clothed with the Sun or the woman wrapped with the sun, and it is in this chapter that we find out why the church is being persecuted, and um, that's one reason why we're talking about this, of course. The very famous—and we also get to meet the dragon and the Beast. So John says, "A great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head was a crown of 12 Stars. She was with child, and she cried out in her pangs of birth, anguish for in anguish for delivery." Now in the Catholic church, this woman is identified with Mary. Most of the earlier—that the identification of the woman clothed with the son as the Virgin Mary is a later interpretation, not extremely late, but it's very popular in the Catholic church, and in feasts of the Virgin Mary, like the Immaculate Conception, which is coming up in December, this is the epistle reading that they read. So and first at first glance, it seems like this would be Mary because she it tells us that she gives birth to um to this to the child, right? So here's this other portent in heaven: "A great red dragon with seven heads and 10 horns and seven diadems on its heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and cast them to the earth, and the dragon stood before the woman who was about to Bear a child that he might devour her child when she brought it forth. She brought forth a male child, one who is to rule after all the nations with the rod of iron"—that's the Messiah—"but her child was caught up to God and to his throne, and the woman fled to the Wilderness where she has a place prepared by God for her, which to in which to be nourished for 1,260 days." There's that three and a half years thing. All right, so let's go back and talk about this. So the the woman um was never interpreted as Mary in the early church. It's she is she represents the people of God, even though it seems like it would be Mary because she's the one who gives birth to the Messiah, the one who's quickly taken up to the throne—that means he didn't stay on Earth very long—quickly taken up to the throne. So why is it the people of God? Is the people of God is the Jewish people, and then it is the church that represents her? Well, we have to find out. Later in the same chapter, we see why it's not Mary herself but the church, the people of God, who give birth to the um Messiah. So as she's trying to give birth to the Messiah, the devil is waiting for him so that he can destroy him. That's what we have going on here. So notice the description of the Dragon. We're not even told that the dragon is the serpent; he's the devil; we find out about that later. But right now, we just know there's a dragon; he has seven heads and 10 hordes and seven diadems. Now many heads—is of course, he's a monster; he's fearsome; he's got lots of horns. Horns are on animals that it signifies power, okay, because horns are you know are what they use to fight, okay? And then the diadems are crowns—that means he has a lot of authority; he has a lot of power. Now in this little passage in Revelation, it preserves for us one of the ancient Jewish Traditions about the origin of the devil—where did the devil come from? Because that's nowhere to be found in the Bible. The Jews had this I this tradition that the devil was once an angel of Light, and he wanted to be like God; he rebelled against God, and he fell to Earth. And here we have that tradition, that idea—this has been for centuries, millennia really—with in the Jewish mind about where the devil came from, because God doesn't create evil, right? There is something similar that's hinted at in Isaiah where he says, "How you fell from heaven, how Lucifer fell from heaven," but is that Isaiah statement Jesus mentioning he saw Satan falling like lightning from

Heaven and this are the only places where we learn about the origin of the devil: that he was once an angel who fell, and with him one-third of the angels that became the demons who fight against us. But notice that he wants to devour the child; he wants to prevent the salvation of humanity; he wants to fight against him; he wants to eat it—eat the child—but he's not able to. He wants to just destroy the child. So now the child is up, taken up into to be with God in his throne, and the woman has to flee to the Wilderness—the Wilderness, the desert.

Is where many Christians fled, um, during periods of persecution; or if not to the desert itself, to wooded areas. They left the cities where persecutions were happening, and they went out and they lived in the wilderness; they lived in caves, and this is how they survived until these various waves of persecution ended. So she flees to the Wilderness. Of course, the Virgin Mary never had to do that. But now this war in heaven—there's a flashback that talks about what happened in heaven—and that's one reason why chapter 12 is so important. And this is a flashback; the reason is because Revelation, when John wrote it, could only be about the present and the future when he wrote it. So when John was in Patmos and had this experience and wrote, he had to be talking about what was happening to those Christians, the seven churches, the persecutions they were facing right then and what would happen in the future. In other words, prophecy is never about the past. In this case, there is a flashback where he tells us—and what is he going to tell us? He's going to tell us why the devil hates us, okay? And this is what happened.

So there was a war rose in heaven: Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; the dragon and his armies fought, but they were defeated. There was no place and no longer any place for them in heaven, and the dragon was thrown down—that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. So now we know who the dragon is—that's the devil. He was thrown down to the Earth because he rebelled against God, and His angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, "Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come down, for the accuser of our Brethren has been thrown down—down—who accuses them day and night before our God, and they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death." Rejoice, then, heaven, and you that dwell therein; rejoice, because he's not in heaven. But woe to you, Earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath because he knows his time is short. So he's angry because he was kicked out of heaven.

And so what we find out about here in chapter 12 is that he is making war against us. Remember that God—the devil can't do anything to God. So he wants—the only way he can try to hurt God is to destroy Humanity, whom God loves, you see. So this is telling us—he's giving us the reason for the devil's hatred of humanity. So he's no longer in heaven; so what does he do? He sees that he'd been thrown down to the Earth; he pursues the woman who had born the male child, but the woman was given two wings of a great eagle that she might fly from the serpent into the Wilderness, to the place where she is to be nourished for a time and times and half a time. So that's a year plus two years plus half a year—that's three and a half years. So that kind of language—the time plus time—that comes—it's very similar to, uh, The Book of Daniel, that also has an apocalyptic section. So the dragon is trying to destroy the woman—this is why I'm telling you that it's the church, it's the people of God. The serpent poured water like a river out of his mouth after the woman to sweep her away with a flood, but the Earth came to help the woman, and the Earth opened his mouth and swallowed the river which the dragon had poured out of his mouth. Then the dragon was angry with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her Offspring. So who are they? Those who keep the Commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus. You see, the woman is the church; The Offspring of the church are those who keep the Commandments and testify to Jesus Christ—Jesus is the Messiah. Now that's the end of chapter 12; it ends with a very dramatic scene.

Now he stood on the sand of the sea—this is the dragon now. So let's remind ourselves what happened: We see this woman—she's glorious, she's clothed in the sun, she's shining, she's brilliant, she has the crown of 12 of 12 stars on her head. So she is the Jewish people—then she's the church—and she gives birth—she's the one who produces the the Messiah. He's not here for too long; he's taken up quickly to God and his throne. The devil tries to destroy her; he wasn't able to destroy the Messiah, the one whom she bore. Now he's going to make war on her offspring. And he stood on the sand of the sea—that's the end of 12—the very beginning of chapter 13, where we see one of the most fascinating parts of Revelation for most people—that's the appearance of the Beast.

So after he's standing on the sea—he's standing on the sea because he's calling a beast to rise out of the sea—this is now the dragon who is the devil. And I saw a beast rise rising out of the sea with 10 horns and seven heads and 10 diadems upon its heads and a blasphemous name upon its heads. Now notice that the Beast of the sea has a description that's the same as the devil: the seven heads, 10 diadems—seven horns, seven heads, 10 diadems. So that means he has immense power; he's got the power of the devil because he has that that same power that the devil has, and he's got something else: blasphemous names on its heads. So here's the Beast of the sea—what is the Beast of the sea? The Beast of the sea is the Roman Empire and the Roman Emperor. Why is it called the beast of the sea? Because, as you can see, the Roman Empire was built around the Mediterranean Sea, which they didn't call the Mediterranean; they called it our sea, and that is the center of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire is also personified by the emperor himself, who is the one who insisted on these blasphemous names—like Son of God, my Lord and my God—and these Divine titles—to be fair—weren't something that was just used by Domitian, but earlier Emperors—the Divine Augustus, Son of God, savior of the world. Augustus was called that. That's why when Luke says, "For unto you," he says to the Shepherds, "is born today in the city of David a savior"—that's a direct statement against what people were saying at the time: Augustus Caesar is the savior of the world, you see. So these Divine titles are something that was used—that they they were used by the Roman emperors.

So now he describes the Beast of the Sea: "And the Beast that I saw was like a leopard, and his feet were like a bear's, and its mouth was like a lion's." Okay, so this is a scary monster, okay? So he's using imagery of fierce, uh, creatures that destroy, that kill, that bring out blood, that kill people—that's what he's trying to say. He's not saying that he physically saw something—somebody tried to give us an architectural—I mean, artistic rendition—but remember that John didn't necessarily see this, but this is the impression that he had, and it was like this, it's like this, and it was like this, and it was like a lion, it was like a bear, but it wasn't—okay—but just like it—there was something about it. Now notice what it says here in Revelation—this—we're now in Revelation chapter 13—to it: "The dragon gave his power and his throne and his authority." So the devil has given the power to the Roman Empire. Why is the Roman Empire so strong and powerful? Why is it persecuting us? Because it has its power from the devil—it's very clear, you see, from the historical circumstances.

Now as he continues, he mentions this: "One of its heads seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth followed the Beast with wonder." So first of all, you don't—a mortal wound means you die; you don't recover—you don't get—a mortal wound isn't healed, okay? What's this about? The fifth Roman Emperor, Nero, um, committed suicide. While he had a lot of—he was going to be arrested by the Senate; he was very unstable; he did a lot of things, and he tried to blame the Christians for the fire of Rome, which most likely he caused to be set. He is the first persecutor of the Christian church. Now, um, Nero was very unbalanced, very perverse, very wicked, and finally the Roman senate had enough of him—not just because—not so much because of sexual antics—all those were legion and legendary—um, he was a he was a tremendous embarrassment to the Roman senate. Finally, they decided to arrest him, and he knew that meant that he would be disgraced, he would be put to death, and so he decided to commit suicide. Now because Nero died without a clear heir, there was a battle for the throne, and there was a civil war in Rome over who would be the next Emperor, and it lasted for over a year, and people were worried that perhaps this was the end of the Roman Empire because first Galba seized the throne and said, "I'm the new emperor," because Nero was the end of the Julio-Claudian line—I'm the new emperor. Well, he ruled for a couple of months, and then he was assassinated by Otho. He took the throne and said, "No, I'm the emperor," and then Otho ruled for a few months, and then he was assassinated by somebody else—Vitellius—and Vitellius says, "No, I'm the new emperor." It was was known as the year of four Emperors, and then people became frightened, and it looked like that this might be the end of the Roman Empire—it was over, it was dead. But eventually, right after that came Vespasian, and he was proclaimed the emperor, and he his Reign lasted, and he was a pretty good Emperor too; he was fighting the Jews in Judea when he was proclaimed Emperor. So that started this new—he was the father of Domitian, who is the Emperor we're talking about. So, um, that healed the Empire—it looked like it was over, it looked like the Empire would not survived, it looked like there was a mortal wound, but it was healed, and the whole earth followed the beast in wonder. And what did they say then? "Worshipped the Dragon, for he had given his authority to the Beast, and they worship the beast." In other words, if you worship somebody other than God, you're worshiping the devil. So they're worshiping the dragon because they're worshiping the Roman Emperor and the Empire. And they worship the Beast, saying, "Who is like the Beast, and who can fight against it?" That's what people used to say about Rome: "There's nothing like Rome, and who can fight against Rome?" You see, this is exactly what people were saying, but now he's putting it—putting—John is putting this into perspective: If you worship the Empire, you're worshiping the Devil Himself. Any kind of idolatry is is the worship of the devil.

Now remember, this is still the Beast of the sea that we're talking about—the Roman Empire and the Roman Emperor altogether—because the emperor represents the Empire. And the Beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words—like, "Call me Lord and God," okay? Things like this: "Call me the Divine, uh, Domitian; call me Son of God; call me savior." So he was used to say these things; he was given a mouth to utter these blasphemous words, and he was allowed to exercise Authority for 42 months—there's the three and a half years—it feels like a long time, but it's not really a very long time. It was allowed to open its mouth to utter blasphemies against God, his name and his dwelling—that is, those who live in heaven—and it was allowed to make war on the Saints and conquer them. So notice that this is a past tense—this was happening at the time that John is writing, okay? So—and—and also noticed here, he's saying it was allowed—these things only happen when God allows—the devil can't do anything without the permission of God, okay? So like the Book of Job, remember—he—that's what this is trying to show—not that Job and God are buddies—I mean, not that the devil and God are buddies and made a bet—but this—this idea—the devil is really powerless unless God allows something. So God allowed the Saints to be tested; he allowed the Beast to make war on them and to kill them, to conquer them. And Authority was given to it—remember this is the Beast of the sea—the Roman Empire—over every tribe and people and tongue and nation. In other words, the Roman Empire ruled the world at the time. We think of it as one unit—as the Empire—but it was a an Empire that encompassed hundreds of different kinds of ethnic groups and little tribes and little Nations. We think about the Jews because they're the only ones that seem to be relevant to us, but if you think about all the different tribes and kingdoms and Nations that were part of Gaul, part of what is today Germany, part of what is today England—they were in Spain and in North Africa all the way to Babylon—this is a big area. So yeah, it had authority over every tribe and people and tongue and nation. And all who dwell in the earth will worship it—who won't worship it? Everyone whose name—who—these are the people who worship it—everyone whose name has not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb that was slain before the foundation of the world. "If anyone has ear to hear, let them hear; if anyone is to be taken captive to captivity, he goes; if anyone slays with a sword, with a sword he must be slain. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the Saints." So in other words, whatever is going to happen, it's going to happen. What are you supposed to do? What are you supposed to do? You—you're supposed to endure, and you're supposed to have faith—that's what we're called to do.

So let's go back to the Roman persecution of Christians in Nero, 65 or 66. So the Roman historian Tacitus reported on this—this is how we know about what happened—and here is his report, by the way. So here's what happened—let me tell you why Nero started the fire to begin with. Nero wanted to build a palace for parties—just for parties—but there was no available room in the city of Rome. So he started a fire. Now he wasn't physically the person who started it—this is what the Roman historians say—he started this fire. Now Rome buildings were very close together; they were made of wood. It started in July of the year 64, and it was very hot and dry; it spread rapidly; it destroyed literally to the ground three-fourths of the city of Rome. A lot of people died; they couldn't—they could not escape the flames. The conflagration—Nero had wanted to build his Golden Palace—everybody—it was called the Golden House—and everybody knew it—but there was no land available. Well, Nero was out of town at a summer villa at the time of the fire. After it was extinguished, he came back to town, handed out tents, began to feed the populace, began to plan for the rebuilding of the city, and oh, by the way, there wasn't any available land, but now there is. And not too long after the fire, he built this Golden Palace, which was just for parties, and every square inch of it was covered with gold leaf—that's why it was called the Golden House—and as part of it there was a—there was a 100-acre park complete with an artificial lake and everything, and a 90-foot tall statue of Nero called The Colossus of Nero, and he would have parties there. Now this is within a couple of years after this conflagration that devastated Rome—not only killed a lot of people but destroyed homes and businesses and everything else. So here is what the Roman historians—this is why people began to suspect Nero of setting the fire—this is what they said.

Now Nero, in the meantime, liked the fact that people were blaming him for the fire, so he was looking for someone to blame. So who does he choose? The Christians. "Consequently, to get rid of the report which accused Nero of setting the fire, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations called Christians by the populace." So let's just pause there: Why were they hated, and what kind of abominations were Christians called? Misanthropes—haters of mankind. Why? They were doing all this charitable work and feeding the hungry and caring for the sick. Why? Because they did not participate in Roman life; they were said to be atheists—in other words, they're antisocial. They didn't send their kids to be educated in the schools because they were full of paganism; they didn't—if you had belonged to a guild or a club, you couldn't participate because you always started with a sacrifice or a prayer to the gods, which the Christians couldn't do. So—so because they didn't go to the Gladiator games or other things that involved blood sport, so people said, "These Christians, they're haters of mankind—misanthropy—they hate—they are antisocial." What else do they say? They're cannibals because they talk about eating the body and drinking the blood. Okay, so there were a lot of things that were said about the Christians, but because Christian worship was secretive, nobody was able to see it. There were a lot of wild things were said about them: Also incest—they called each other brother and sister—and so husband and wife would call each other brother and sister because this is what we say—somebody who's in the faith—we're all brothers and sisters—they were said to practice incest. So he decided to, uh, point the finger of blame on the Christians. And accordingly, Tacitus tells us, "An arrest was made first made of all who plead guilty of being Christians—by the way, not of the fire—then upon that information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths; they were covered with the skins of beasts; they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt to serve as a nightly illumination when daylight had expired." So—so you could see the kinds of things that were done to the first Christians here in Rome. Nero offered his Gardens for the spectacle—this is the garden I was telling you about. So when it talks about these people here who were set on fire, they were tied to large poles—like a telephone pole—they were covered with pitch—that's tar—and set on fire to be illumination for Nero's parties in the garden. Just imagine that—there's a human being burning like a tiki torch so that you can have your—because there was no electricity—how are you going to have a party at night in the garden? You have to have a big torch—well, we'll use a Christian for that—and he was exhibiting a show in the circus while he mingled with the people in the dress of a—by the way, this was very embarrassing to the Romans because charioteers were slaves—and by the way, Nero was a megalomaniac, in case you didn't already know that—he wanted to be a charioteer because that was like—everybody loved the charioteers, even though they were slaves. So he literally once dressed up as a charioteer, got in the chariot, and you know you need a lot of strength to control those four horses—in the right hand, four horses in the left hand—and he got involved—he got into the race. Well, guess what happened? He won—why? Because they let him win; he fell out of the chariot twice, okay? Got back in, and of course the smart charioteers stayed way behind him to make sure that he won so that they would keep their lives right.

It was very, very; he was very embarrassing to the Roman senate. So he mingled with the populace in the dress of a charioteer, or stood aloft on a car. Hence, for even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man's cruelty that they were being destroyed. So that's narrow. Okay, this is before the writing of the Book of Revelation. So Nero martyred 977 Christians—almost a thousand—same as were Peter and Paul; the rest are known to God. But that's the Roman Empire and that's Nero; that's the Beast whose wound was healed. Okay, the head of the Beast whose mortal wound was healed, because after he committed suicide he left no heirs, and this caused this civil war for a year. Now that's the Roman Empire.

Then I saw another Beast that rose out of the Earth. This is the Beast of the Earth, or the Beast of the land; it's the word ye. It had two horns like a lamb; so it's got some power, but not a lot of power—only two horns—but it spoke like a dragon. That means it has the power of the devil; it's doing the work of the devil. It exercises all the authority of the first Beast in its presence; makes the earth and its inhabitants worship the first Beast, whose wound was healed. So what's the Beast of the earth? Now think about this: Nero and Emperors are in Rome; most Christians are not in Rome; most Christians are in different parts of the Empire. Who is the person responsible for the persecution of Christians, for making sure that they worship the emperor? The local officials, either the governor or the town officials. The Beast of the earth is the Roman provincial governor; people like Pontius Pilate, but he wasn't around at this time. People—whoever the local governor was—he's the one who carries out the orders that come from Rome. So he exercises—look at verse 12—all the authority of the first Beast; that's the emperor. The provincial governor comes to the province with the power of the emperor, and that's called the Imperium. Okay, and he's the one who makes everybody worship the first Beast. He's the one who is going to go arrest people accused or suspected of being Christians and bringing them before the statue of Domitian and say, "Say, 'My Lord and my God,' bow down and burn incense before the emperor." That's the pro—that would be done by the provincial governor. He's the Beast of the land. So he has power; he's still doing the work of the Dragon, but he's not as powerful because he only has two horns, not seven heads and ten horns.

So what else does he do? He works great signs, even making fire come down from heaven in the sight of men; and by the signs which it was allowed to work in the presence of the Beast. Now what about these signs? Well, there were sorcerers and there were magicians in the era of the Roman Empire, and they had the ability to do things that were kind of magical, kind of impressive. And just like today, if you're a chemist, you know, you combine certain things together and you get, poof, something explodes, or something like this; they knew how to do that too. And they actually had a way of getting people to speak from the inside of a statue. And there were all kinds of tricky ways; they would actually put a person inside the statue, but people outside did not know that there was a person inside the statue. It made it sound like the statue was speaking, and people were very impressed by this and thought that the gods were at work, but they were being deceived, right? So this is the Beast of the earth; it deceives those who dwell in the Earth, bidding them to make an image for the Beast which was wounded by the sword yet lived; that's the Roman Emperor.

Okay, now we're going—here we're to talk about the worshiping the image of the Beast and the 666, and where does that come from? So, um, here's a—here's a nice statue of a Roman Emperor, and the—what is the mark of the beast? This is what everybody's afraid of, right? Everybody's—nobody wants to get the mark of the beast. We don't want to follow the Antichrist. By the way, the word Antichrist is not in the Book of Revelation; that word is used by John in the First Epistle of John, but it's nowhere to be found in Revelation, but we all kind of know what it is. So let's talk about the Beast of the earth and the mark of the beast, because this is—in other words, the local officials who insist on emperor worship; they're the ones who are giving the mark or not giving the mark. So the Beast of the earth is responsible for identifying people with the mark of the beast. What is it, and how do you get it? So let's follow here: It was allowed to give breath to the image of the Beast, so that the image should speak and cause those who would not worship it to be slain. So if you don't worship the emperor through his statue, you will be put to death. Who is doing that? The Beast of the L—who's that? The Roman provincial governor. And also it causes both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark—that is the name of the Beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom; let him who has understanding reckon the number of the Beast, for it is a human number; its number is 666. So now we know that the Beast is a human; so who is it?

Okay, so the mark of the beast, the 666—there have been various interpretations through history. Jehovah's Witnesses believe it stands for human governments; anything having to do with human government—that's why they don't celebrate holidays or salute the flag or things like this. Seventh-Day Adventist believe it is forced Sunday worship, and they believe that one day the government will force them all to worship on Sundays, because their thing is that we're supposed to be praying on Saturdays; so that's their big deal. Martin Luther, of course, thought that the 666 was the Pope, and the Pope thought it was Martin Luther; and of course, after the rise of Islam, there were many Christians who took it to mean Mohammed. So there are different ways that you arrive at these interpretations. But also in politics, we've seen this when Social Security numbers were first given out; that freaked out a lot of people. I should have added here, uh, before I get to that—Social Security numbers, a lot of people didn't want one because they said it was the mark of the beast. When supermarket barcodes first started appearing on packages, we did not know what they were. Okay, um, they started appearing in packages before scanners were really common, and people were saying, "What is this? What is this? What is this?" Well, some people were saying that these are the mark of the beast. And then when Reagan became president, people said, "He's a 666." Well, why? Because there are six letters in each of his three names: Ronald Wilson Reagan. And I should have added here, the COVID vaccine was also considered by some people to be the 666, but it is not. Computer chips is another one; expectations that someday we'll all have a computer chip embedded in our brains, etc.

So what is the mark of the beast, the number of the Beast? Um, first of all, the mark of the beast is a symbol that you belong to the dragon; you belong to the devil. So we write our names; we have our names on things, like inside our books we would write our name; um, in our car there's a registration that has our name; it shows ownership. If you have the mark of the beast, it means you belong to him; he owns you. Of course, you get the question is, how do you get the mark? Well, in the Book of Revelation, it's very clear that you get it by participating in the emperor cult, by worshiping the emperor. And we see this because every single time the mark of the beast is mentioned in the Book of Revelation, it references worshipping the image. Okay, and that's directly tied to Domitian and the emperor cult. All right, so it's very, very clear, if you take it in its historical context, this is what it's talking about: Those who do not worship the image are slain; those who cause those—remember this is what the governor was supposed to do—cause those who would not worship the image of the Beast to be slain; those who do worship it get the mark. It causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave to be marked on the right hand or the forehead. So what's with the right hand and the forehead? Well, the right hand signifies what you do; he owns you; everything you do is of the devil. The forehead is your thoughts; so body and soul—both in your actions and in your deeds and your thoughts—you belong to the devil. Okay, because you have—you've participated in idolatry. Really, it wouldn't matter if it was the Roman Emperor or any other god or supposed god; it's idolatry; you've denied Christ; so you've received the mark of the beast. So every time it's mentioned, you will see it has to do with something. Give you some examples here, so show you that what I'm saying is correct. When we see the pouring out of the seven bowls, it mentions the men who bore the mark of the beast and worshipped its image. Okay, and then again, "I saw the souls of those who were beheaded for testimony to Jesus, the word of God, who had not worshipped the Beast or its image and had not received its mark." Okay, you see the connection there? So we talked about the forehead and the hand, but it was very, very difficult for Christians to avoid participating in the emperor cult, and because people knew who you were. And it doesn't mean that someday there's going to be a tattoo that's put on you in your forehead, 666—nothing that literal—but there may be a time in the future—we can certainly foresee it, maybe not too long from now—just as back in those days, if you were considered antisocial, if you confessed Christ and you did not go along with what the government was insisting that you do, you would be marked—maybe not physically, but recognized for being a part of this other group; you don't belong to our main group. Okay, so what was the consequence? No one can buy or sell unless he has the mark—that is the name or the number of its name. This calls for wisdom; let him who has understanding reckon the number of the Beast; it is a human number; it's number 666.

So here we see a coin with a likeness of Nero. I'm not sure it says Nero Caesar. Okay. Okay, so they have all kinds of divine titles that were put—all the coins were a little bit different—around the head of the person in the coin; they always had various titles for them. So this is Nero when he was not too young and not too old. He became emperor when he was 18, and he was very skinny, and those early coins show him with a very pronounced Adam's apple. Okay, really—really, whatever—see one of these really skinny guys with a big Adam's apple sticking out. So he was a—he was trying to be a good emperor when he was 18. By the way, he became emperor when his mother poisoned Claudius, whom she had married to try to get her son Nero on the throne. And then how did Nero repay his mother? He tried three times to have her murdered. Eventually, he tried to have her killed first; he had some—the ceiling collapse on top of her bed, but she survived that. Then he arranged for her ship to be sunk when she was on a ship, but she survived that, and then he just hired somebody to murder her in her bed. So that was—thanks, Mom. Okay, so that's—that's who he was. And as he gets older, he gets more and more fat, and you can see later images of Nero; he's got like a triple chin. He was very, very carnal, very self-indulgent. So let's talk about the 666, and nobody can buy or sell unless he has the mark—that is the name of the Beast or the number of its name. Again, it represents the fact that if you won't be welcome in society. And this did used to happen to the first Christians, and it's not unlike that little patch with a Jewish star that I showed you—what happened to the Jews during Nazi Germany at the beginning. This is exactly what happened to the Christians; they were pointed out; they were isolated, even when they weren't killed; everybody knew who the Christians were, and they were sized, and it was difficult for them to buy and sell. Okay, that—then at certain points, persecution would break out, and then they would just be killed.

So let's talk about the name of the Beast. Gematria is the practice of giving names a numerical equivalent, and this was something that was very popular in antiquity, because you see the symbol for six here—that's an Arabic numeral, as you know—and the Jews and the Greeks did not have anything to symbolize numbers; instead, they used their alphabet. And you see that today with the church, even the books of the church—the chanting books—use this method. So it'll say 50th Psalm; if you—if you don't recognize this—if you have a book side by side, and it will say 50th Psalm in English, it will say 50th Psalm, Psalm 5, and then on the Greek side you will see the letter N, okay, because that's the Greek sign for the number 50. Okay, so there were these numbers that stood—the numbers were represented by letters of the Greek alphabet, and also the Jews very similarly. So if you take—if you spell out Nero Caesar in Hebrew—these are Hebrew letters—it adds up to 666. Neron Kaisar. Okay, so this is—now it's exquisitely ironic that is 666, because the number six is just shy of seven; so seven being a perfect number, six is not perfect, but it tries to be. So seven is perfection; seven is identified with God; six is evil because it tries to imitate God but it falls short. So the 666 that John is talking about here is representative of Nero Caesar. But I just finished telling you that Revelation was written during the era of Domitian, so how can the beast that's being worshipped be Nero? Because Nero's persecution was—I mean, Domitian's persecution was like the revival of Nero. Remember, prior to Domitian's persecution, the only person who had ever persecuted the Christians was Nero—I mean, of the Roman Empire; the Jews had, of course, but of the Romans, it was Nero. So it was as though Nero had come back, and there was a legend that Nero never really died and he was going to come back, and that legend was called Nero redivivus. But John is not saying that Nero physically came back, that Nero is alive or never died; what he means is it's—we're starting all over again what the church went through in the 60s with a persecution by the Romans. I mean, Nero has come back. So Nero represents evil. Okay, Nero is the epitome of evil. All right, just like—just like—whenever somebody wants to malign a politician that they think is assuming too much power, they will say, "He's Hitler." We know he's not really Hitler, but that's our 20th-century equivalent of Nero. If you say Hitler, everybody knows what you're trying to say about that. Nero epitomized evil and Roman persecution of Christians. Okay, now Nero did not demand to be worshipped, but he did reinstate the use of divine symbols and titles on coins. Augustus Caesar did not, but Nero did. So he's the one who's beginning this trend toward them. So Nero was rather infamous among the Christians that he was going to—that he was because he had initiated this first Christian persecution, and that's why they're associating this persecution with him. Okay, so that's the 666. It's—I wish I—I'm sure I hope you're not too disappointed that I'm not telling you it's, you know, Biden or Trump, you know, because somebody—but that—that's what John is promoting.

Now let's talk about Armageddon, because this is another one that people are very curious about; we're little—it's past times, so I want to go through this. Okay, Armageddon—this is nothing—thing that freaks people—I said so. Um, there is no place called Armageddon, but there is a place called Megiddo, and there's a mountain that overlooks it called Har Megiddo, and this is what most scholars think Armageddon is referring to—Mount Megiddo. And the reason is because this was a vast plain—a very, very wide plain—where a lot of battles were fought, because battles are usually fought—you know, back in those days—they were fought in big flat areas where you could get chariots and horses and things like this. But what I want you to understand is that Armageddon is not World War III; it's a battle between the Heavenly armies and worldly powers that are opposed to God. So who's going to win? Heaven, of course—God. All right, so we think of—our—beginning, of course, of this World War I—there's all kinds of scenarios. I remember when I was in college, the hot book was *The Late Great Planet Earth* by Hal Lindsey. Okay, and everybody was reading this book, and I said, "Oh my God, this is fantastic! The—the Antichrist has—has to be like this; he has to have a mortal head wound that's healed, and—and first the Soviet Union is going to grow to this size, and then Red China—because that's what they used to call it—it's going to be like this, and the European Common Market"—he said, "When it gets 10 members"—that was before the European Union; they called it the European Common Market—"it's going to be"—then all these things happen, and then the end is going to come, right? So I really wanted to be sure I didn't follow the Antichrist, so I was really reading this book until I took a course on the Gospel of John and Revelation and found out that Hal Lindsey didn't know what he was talking about; he just took these symbols and made them into whatever he wanted. And by the way, that book is in like its 29th or 30th printing, and there's no longer any Soviet Union, and everything has changed; he's been wrong every year, but he's still making money. Okay, I don't know why; I would be embarrassed to show my face if I said, "This is going to happen, then this is going to happen," and then there's not even any Soviet Union anymore. So there have been lots and lots of scenarios that people have created; this is what I'm trying to say: Nobody knows how it's going to play out, but Armageddon is not a war between nations, because there is no such nation that is good. We like to think we're the good guys—well, yes, we're—I think we're a good nation, but we're not pure goodness. Okay, Russia is not the epitome of evil; okay, Russians are not evil; Russia itself as a nation is not evil, even if you don't like its leader. So it's not between good and evil; it's God and the devil, not nations, because there is no nation that's 100% evil or 100% good. Okay, what about this guy? People said, "He's Hitler; end of the world." What about this guy? Depends on what party you're with, right? That you identify them as evil. I remember—was Raven—oh, it's going to be World War III; he's going to start a nuclear war and all this. Anybody remember the Cuban Missile Crisis? You have to be older than me; I don't remember it, but it was in the 60s; that was—that was a real nuclear threat. Okay, there's always been somebody that was considered to be the Antichrist; there's always going to be an end-of-the-world scenario. But if you look at Revelation, it's not describing a war between nations, but between good and evil, between God and his followers and the devil and his followers. So how do we know that they're getting together? It says, "The kings of the world are assembling to fight against God," okay, and the assembly of this place called, in Hebrew, Armageddon—Armageddon. Now who's leading the Heavenly armies? Jesus—not Biden, not Trump, not whoever—you know, the Lord. Who's going to—who's going to prevail against the Lord? So we have this—he's on the White Horse; he's faithful and true; his eyes are like—flame—with fire, etc.; he's the word of God. So we know that he's—and the armies of Heaven are with him; hey, he's got a bunch of angels with him.

All right, so notice that this heavenly battle is being led by the Lord and the Angelic Host. This is not an earthly battle. Okay. Now, of course, it ends with a dispute of Satan, but I'm going to give you one more. Now, when they gather, so it's it's no contest. Look at verse nine here. Okay. The thousand years are ended; we'll talk about this too. Satan will be loosed from his prison, will come to deceive the nations which are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, which are from the Old Testament, traditional enemies of Israel, enemies of the Kingdom, people of God. Gather them for battle, and my goodness, there were so many; they were like the sand of the sea. How can we possibly prevail against so many enemies? And they marched up over the Earth, and they surround the camp of the Saints—that's a smaller group—but what happened? Fire came down from heaven and consumed them. That's it. It says in the scriptures that God destroys his enemies with the breath of his mouth, like this, and they're destroyed. You see what I'm trying to say? So, rather than imagining scenarios—what this going to be World War I?—that doesn't that's not supported here by the text of Revelation.

And, of course, after this final uh battle between good and evil, the devil uh and the beast was thrown into the Lake of Fire where the Beast and the false prophet are; they're tormented forever. So the nature of um Revelation, prophetic fulfillment, is really about the the immediate future first of all, what's going to happen. I pointed that out to you at the beginning, for the time is near; this must take place soon, um because John is writing for the communities at that time, the persecution that they were facing at that moment, and he and Jesus tells him, "Write what you see; this is what's going to take place," what is what's happening now and what's going to happen later. So prophetic books also in the Old Testament, they express the present and the future, and the Book of Revelation also combines the past events and those things that were happening in John's time up until the present and the future. Okay. But very often the meaning of the events, the details, are not recognized until later. So we, you know, it's very difficult to make predictions about—first of all, Jesus, as we're not going to know—it'll be seven—but also it's very difficult for us to recognize prophetic fulfillment while it is happening, and this is why I'm very skeptical of anybody who claims to know, because people even who know the scriptures very well often are not properly understanding what they're seeing. For example, Jesus was the Messiah; he fulfilled all of these amazing prophecies, such as giving sight to the blind, and the lame walked, and the deaf heard. All these amazing things happened—not once, not twice, but day after day after day he did these incredible things—things and he's standing being placed on trial by these Jewish leaders. Did they know the prophecies? Of course, they knew the prophecies. Why didn't they recognize him as the Messiah? Because they said, "We know the prophecies, and although he's done this or this, he can't be this guy. The Messiah can't be him, he's—" because they had already created a scenario in their mind, an idea of what the Messiah would be like. Jesus didn't fit with what they expected, so they rejected him. That's the danger with making a scenario in your mind first: this has to happen, then this has to happen, this has to happen, because you're going to be wrong, and in the meantime, maybe the prophecy is being fulfilled, and you will have missed it. So this is the danger there, you see.

So what's happening today? Are we in the end times today? I think we're moving toward that, but we're not there yet. Okay. Why is that? Because um things change after the sixth seal. With the sixth seal, it means that there will be a dramatic change in earthquake, rolling above the sky like a scroll, and other dramatic changes after the sixth seal. If you read Revelation, you'll see that there are seven trumpets and seven bowls, and the destruction that happens on Earth after those things is catastrophic throughout the Earth: one-third of the green grass, one-third of the ships in the sea are destroyed, one-third of the the fish die, one-third of the trees die. Then so first it's a quarter and then it's a third, so there are there is destruction on a massive scale. Now that could happen, but it's not happening now. So if you start to see that, then you to start to say maybe it's the time of the end, but as for now, we're not there just yet. Okay. I read there was like uh kind of discrepancy between uh some as when the Book of Revelation was written. Yes, some some say it's in the mid-60s or when was The Book of Revelation written? Today it's become popular to say that it was written during the reign of Nero. There's a reason for that; that's usually Evangelical Scholars say this because they don't recognize the uh they they believe it had to be; they don't have the tradition of the church, and they believe that it was written because it's clearly referring to Nero here, but the reason why I'm adamant is because not Nero did not insist on the worship of himself. You see all the verses I showed you about bowing down before the image, whereas we know that happened with Domitian. You see, Nero wasn't insisting that he himself be worshipped, and that's the whole purpose, and and the Nero's persecution was limited to the city of Rome, not in Asia where John was, and there are so many ancient Christian writings that mention John that mention him in Asia that mention the fact that he was on Patmos other than the book of Revelation. So we know that, and also there were uh relatives of Domitian who became Christians, so there's a lot of um support for the ancient Traditions that it was written by John on Patmos during the reign of Domitian. You don't have any support for that. So Nero didn't didn't send him to Patmos. Okay. No Nero; it was it's Domitian that did that. And by the way, after Domitian died—this is how John got out—he was replaced by uh Nerva, and this is when John got out and went back to Ephesus. So um no, it's not, even though there's kind of a trend toward that, all of the evidence in the book and outside of the book is that it was written during the reign of Domitian. Did you have a question? Yes, question, go ahead.

Do so can we go back to um the enemy is not um must have permission from God to do? Yes, other than the from the book of Joel. Everybody knows when I was my teaching, he the enemy is here to kill, steal, and destroy, right? I don't want to believe that the gun violence in Star County that we've been dealing with is—I can understand it to be the enemy's territory or Satan's devil territory because it's here to kill, steal, and destroy—but explain to me or make me understand if the enemy or the devil—I want to call—got permission from God. Now I understand it may be his territory. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm currently in a Bible study; currently in a Bible study we're being—I'm being taught that the enemy has territories; he tries to take over territories and regions. So by that being said, if he needs to have permission from God to do anything to mankind, explain to me how God maybe allowing for this to happen while this is—this is—I'm just saying this problem in St. County; we're dealing with the gun violence. So how is he—how is this—yes, he's trying to take over territories; he's to steal, kill, and destroy, but then how has that—allowing this to happen? And then the second is an easy question: the beginning slide you had something—200 200 BC to 200—is that the apocalypse or the beginning of—that's the—that that date was when apocalyptic literature was popular. Okay. Apocalyptic literature was popular during that period of time. Okay.

Okay, so all right, so this is a very difficult question that you're asking, but the reason why we say that he was given permission is because the devil, him in himself, has no power. Okay. Anything—I'm not saying that God—he's conferring with God on every little thing—"Well, can I go have this guy kill all these kids at a school or whatever?" I'm not saying that he's conferring with God, but the devil used to say he has territory; the whole world is his kingdom. Yes, right. It's not that—that he has to consult with God and get permission, but evil exists because God allows it to exist because he gives us free will. Do you understand what I'm trying to say? I'm not saying that that God is complicit in evil; God forbid; we can't say that, but we do know that that the Devil Himself has no real power if God did not allow him to do it. And why does he allow it? What—why did he allow the persecution of these Christians? He allows it because he is um testing us. So this has always been the case from the very beginning, so that that's the only—it's not a fancy answer; I don't know if it's satisfactory to you—but God allows evil to exist so that we can also choose the good. If we don't—if he doesn't allow evil to exist, if we don't have free will to do evil, then we don't have free will to love him. So God—this is very difficult for a lot of people because they um I don't know why this is coming here because they believe believe that we if if God allows something that he accepts it or endorses it or something like this. In other words, foreknowledge of God and Free Will does not mean that God accepts something or that it's his desire. We pray every day, "Your will be done," but it's up to us to do his will, and that's—I don't know if that answers your question sufficiently. Okay. Yes, sir, would a good version of that just to say he's a god of choice, then he made us with Free Will, and why—why did he give us free will? Because this is a perennial question, right? Why is there evil in the world? Did God make evil? Of course not; God—there's evil in the world because we choose, and he made us with the ability to choose to do evil. So people say, "Well, is there anything God cannot do?" Yes, he cannot make us follow him; he cannot make us love him; he cannot make us obey him. And think about this: when we talk about the the greatest virtue of all is humility, the worst virtue of all—the worst vice of all—is pride; that's what caused the devil to lose—to be kicked out of the Kingdom of Heaven. The greatest virtue is humility, and God practices humility before us; he lets us say, "I don't care about you; I'm going to do what I want." He gave us free will because he has Free Will, and in order to make us—allow us to be like God—to choose to love him, he had to give us the ability to choose to reject him. So anything evil that happens in the world is our doing; it's not God's doing. So that's—that's kind of axiomatic; it's fundamental that he had to make us with free will; otherwise, we would be robots; and in order to have a a relationship with someone, it has to be based on the freedom to love them.

Have seen in the past, of course, whenever the year 1000 came on or then 2000, people became concerned or were really anticipating Jesus to come back. So in what manner is Satan bound by the coming of Jesus Christ? He can no longer exercise unrestrained power; his activities are restricted, which kind of goes to the question that was raised before. So he cannot do whatever he wants, and we can respond to him, why? Because we have Jesus Christ. So we have more power than Satan has because Christ has power over the activities of Satan. So he's not completely—he's bound; that means he's still alive, but he's doesn't have unrestricted activity; he's not completely gone, but he's—so what happens? What happens when Satan is bound? The souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony for to Jesus, the word of God, who had not worshipped the Beast or its image and received the mark on their foreheads, they came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. So this is the origin of this idea of the Millennium, that Jesus will come back to earth and rule for a thousand years. Now look at this verse: does it say they came back to life and reigned with Christ on Earth for a thousand years? No. These people already died. How do they come back to life? Because they're alive in Christ; they—in the resurrection—they come back to life, and how are they ruling with Christ for a thousand years? Remember, it's in—it's an imprecise amount of time, just a very long time. The Saints rule with Christ in heaven; this is the ancient um understanding of the church. Okay. What is the first resurrection and the second death? The rest of the dead did not come into life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he who shares in the first resurrection; over such the second death has no power. The—when is the first resurrection for us? Baptism, Romans 6. When we are baptized, we die and we rise with Christ, just as Christ died by the glory of God, the power and rose from the dead; we too will rise in newness of life. That's what it means when someone goes under the water and comes out again; it means that you are reborn; you're sharing the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's ancient Christian doctrine; that's Romans 6, and and that's here, and it's also in John's gospel, in John chapter 3, and here when you share in the resurrection of Christ, you don't—the second death has no power. What's the second death? Eternal death. The first death is your physical death; everybody's going to die, but there is no second death. You die once; you die in the flesh; your flesh dies; your body dies, but then you share the resurrection of Christ; you come to life, and you don't die again. Okay. So it says that the people over whom death—the second death—has no power will reign with Christ for a thousand years, but it says nothing here about establishing an Earthly Kingdom, and of course there's no hint of a Rapture. So again and again in the letters to the seven churches, we see that the faithful are being encouraged to remain faithful, not to worship worship the Beast and His Image. Okay. The same thing—the opening of the Seven Seals and the bowls—the the people were not taken out of tribulation. The idea behind the Rapture—there are different ideas of rapture—but mostly is that the faithful will be snatched up into heaven before the final tribulation; they're not going to have to suffer for Jesus, but nowhere in the Bible does it tell us that we're not going to suffer for Christ; in fact, we're supposed to suffer for Christ, and we're going to be martyred for Christ. Who are those who are reigning with Christ, the—of the Thousand Years? The ones who have been beheaded, the martyrs, the ones who had not worshipped the Beast. So the thousand years is not a literal reign of Christ on Earth. There were some early Christians who believed this, and this is the belief is called millennialism, that when Christ returns, he's going to establish an Earthly Kingdom. It's also called chiliasm because the Greek word for 1,000 is chilia. However, even though some early Christians believed that, including some early fathers like Justin Martyr, and it was very popular, we don't hold that today. This idea developed and in the early church this idea was held because of Jewish utopian prophecies like Isaiah—the lion shall lay down with the lamb; they will take their swords and turn them into plowshares—things like this. So there was this Jewish tradition that there would be a Utopia when the Lord came, and that kind of came over into the Christian side in the early centuries of the church, and they used to say, "We've suffered on this Earth, and it's only right and fair that we will be rewarded later by God. When the Lord comes back, he's going to establish an Earthly Kingdom." So they were—and also they were uncertain how to interpret some of these passages of Revelation. However, the return of Christ is what we call the second coming, and nowhere when it discusses the second coming of Christ does it say he's going to establish an Earthly Kingdom for what purpose? And as a matter of fact, when Jesus talks about when the son of man comes, he says, "I'm going to separate the sheep from the goats," that means judgment, right? So he's going to come back in glory; he's going to judge the living and the dead; he's not going to come back in glory and set up a kingdom, because then what—when will the Judgment happen? And what's the purpose of the Kingdom? So the millennialism is about an Earthly reign of Jesus Christ, but Jesus never spoke about that; he only spoke about coming back. So what's wrong with it? Nowhere does Revelation or any other book say that Christ is going to establish an Earthly Kingdom. What's the point of that when we have the Heavenly Kingdom? We—that's where we want to go, right? So it says that that the people who were reigning with him returned to life, the ones who had not received the mark because they hadn't worshipped the image; they reigned for a thousand years; it says nothing about Earth. Okay. The same thing that we talked about the first—first resurrection and the first death. So what's wrong with it? Well, it's very sensual, and by the way, so is the Muslim idea of the next life; it's very sensual. There was this idea that—going to be fertility of the earth, lots of wine, lots of food; the Muslims add lots of sex; that's how they perceive the next life, but Jesus said that the next life is not going to be like that—that when he comes back immediately there will be judgment. He says, "The kingdom of God is not food and drink." He says that they are like the monks—are like the Angels—who neither marry nor are given in marriage. So the next life will be a spiritual one, not one in which we indulge ourselves with carnal pleasures.

Okay. Then you have this problem: if you say that he's going to reign for a thousand years, what happens at the end of the Thousand Years? His kingdom comes to an end, of course not; his kingdom is never ending. So millennialism is a false teaching that was rejected by the church in favor of the symbolic meaning of the Thousand-Year reign of Christ. It's the era of the church in which Satan is bound; he's bound because he's restricted because of our faith, because Christ comes to our aid in this life. This is the Thousand Years—the era of the church. When it's over, it's over; there's no reason for him to establish an Earthly Kingdom; there's no reason for that at all. So this is the era of the church, and it was rejected—especially in the Creed—"He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom will have no end." Okay. So after this Thousand Years era, when the church is—is at the end—the same will be destroyed because there's going to be no more need for the church, no more need for sacraments because we're going to be one with Christ in the Kingdom of Heaven. So we talked about that; we talked about the Battle; they're just destroyed outright; nothing else happens. Then we can expect judgment. Now here's the part that we have to pay attention to: on what basis will the dead be judged? The dead were judged by what was written in the books—by what they had done—and then again later they were judged by what they had done. The reason why I'm pointing this out is we tend to be a little bit more um less inclined to think about how we're going to be judged on our deeds, but Revelation is very strong about that. It's not enough for us to say, "Well, I didn't mean to do this, or I always meant to do this; I meant to give money to this poor person; I never did, but I thought about it; I meant to do it; I didn't mean to say those nasty words to so and so." We're going to be judged on our deeds, and we need to take that very seriously. Okay. Notice that there's no faith expressed there; we're going to be judged entirely by our deeds. Does this mean we don't have to be baptized? Does this mean we don't have to believe in Jesus Christ? I'm not saying that; what I am saying is—

That the basis on which we will be judged in our Salvation, there's a lot of things that are mentioned in the Bible. Not just enough to have faith in Jesus Christ, but we have to live a certain kind of way. We're going to be judged on our deeds, okay? The after-judgment, death itself is destroyed, and then we have this beautiful image in Revelation 21 of a new Heaven and a new Earth, of a Heavenly Jerusalem. It's described in a way that just doesn't really make sense, like because of course it's imagery there. It's a--if you ever heard the term streets paved with gold, that comes from the Book of Revelation. The streets of Heaven are paved with gold, but it's clear like glass. How is that possible? Gold is not clear, so what is that? Is trying to show you that it's opulent and it's beautiful and it's splendid, greater than anything you could ever imagine. Glass was very expensive by the--the way, so that it's giving you an image; it's not intended to be taken literally.

So what is life going to be like in the Kingdom of Heaven? God is going to be--will be dwelling with us, and I love this next verse which we read in our prayers: "He will wipe away every tear from their eye, and death will be no more; there will be no mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away." That's kind of an echo of Isaiah, but we say this where sorrow and sighing and mourning and fled away. We say this in the prayers for the Departed. So, um, there's not going to be any sorrow; there's going to be nothing sad; there's going to be no evil; it's going to be beautiful, and God will be there with us, and he's going to be our consolation and our comfort and wipe away every tear from our eye. And of course, it is done. He says, "I make all things new." Everything will be renewed um in Christ, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning of the end, beginning and the end. To the thirsty, I will give the Fountain of the Water of Life without payment, freely. He who conquers shall have this Heritage, not the one who is raptured out of tribulation, but the one who conquers. How do we conquer? By perseverance alone. We conquer by persistence in faith, by persistence in doing the right thing, by perseverance. Does conquering doesn't mean we're not going to die; doesn't mean we're not going to suffer, but we conquer by saying no to the devil who has been allowed to tempt us, yes, but we conquer him. That's why the Saints have crowns; they were victorious over the devil, and the fact that they were tempted by him and yet were victorious is how they got their crowns. So when we talk about why God allows us, he allows us to be tempted so that we will prevail over the enemy, right? If there was no enemy, if there was no contest, there would be no Victory.

So we have seen these promises in the earlier in the book with the letters of the seven churches. So will God save everybody? Is anybody excluded? Unfortunately, yeah, people are excluded: the cowardly, the faithless, polluted murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, etc. So we can't say everybody's going to be saved; that's also clear, okay? So we have to take this seriously, that we have to change our lives; we have to live of a moral and upright life, a faithful life, a life in which we're persistent in faith, even when the consequence is going to hurt us. The consequence for saying yes to Christ, because we know it's happening in our culture: if you affirm anything traditional that of Christian belief, people say you're a hater; you know, they want to take your job away; you you have to agree to all kinds of things that are not um in in keeping with Christian morality. Okay, so this is why we have to be uh take this seriously; we have to be persistent and consistent in our faith. So what's missing from the city? There's no Temple; there's no church. Why? Because God's there. We don't need to encounter God by going to church, by the temple. And there's no sun because it's so bright with the the lamp of God, God and the Lamb; the Lamb is its lamp, and the Nations will walk in the glory, and the gates will never be shut. There's nothing dangerous; you won't have to lock the way you locked your door. The gates of the Cities used to be locked shut at night; that's how people had safety. There's nothing to fear. Okay, so of course we have an image of a beautiful garden with lots of trees and fruit-bearing trees, the water from coming from the Throne of the Lamb, that's eternal life, the water of the River, and there's going to be healing, and this is--there's going to be nothing accursed; everybody's going to be worshiping the Lord, seeing his face day and night, and there's going to be--God is their light, and they're going to reign forever and ever. It's a beautiful image. So he says he's coming soon, and he's going to repay us for what we have done, so let's take that seriously. Again, we have this promise: "I'm the Alpha and the Omega, the first and in the last. Blessed are those who wash their robes." What does that mean? That they're white, that you're pure, that you're clean. How can we wash our robes? Our--we make our souls resplendent with confession, with humility, with almsgiving, with all of these things. Outside the city are the dogs and the sorcerers and all the people who practice falsehood. So again, it's not correct to say that everybody will be saved.

So what's the purpose of the invitation? Now notice it's an invitation here again. We talk about free will: "The spirit and the bride say, 'Come.' Let him who hears say, 'Come.' Let the one who is thirsty come, the one who desires to take the Water of Life without price," that means freely. You can accept Jesus Christ; it doesn't cost anything to be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ. You receive him freely. If you're thirsty for eternal life, come, but that means you have to make the decision to come. There's an invitation; you have to respond. So let's talk about the nature of Prophecy, Revelations fulfillment. We talked about here how it's about the present at the time of of John and the future from the time of John. So John is concerned with things that were happening to his congregation at that time, but since it's prophecy, it also concerns the future, definitely with was happening at the time of John and what is to take place hereafter. So prophecy expresses both the present and the future, and Revelation combines both the past events, that is our past, not John's past, but things that took place during the time of John up until the present and well into the future. So how will those images be fulfilled in the future? We cannot know. After it's fulfilled, we'll recognize it, but it's very difficult to look at the imagery and say, "Oh, this is happening now," but this is what people are saying; they the newspaper they say, "Oh, there's a war in the Middle East; oh, there's something going on in Iraq," this is happening now, this is the Book of Revelation, Ukraine and Russia, all this is Book of Revelation. The fact is we might not recognize it as it is being played out, just as when Jesus Christ came to Earth, people didn't recognize him as the Messiah. They should have, but they didn't. Then we look back at the prophetic pro--at the prophecies like Isaiah 53, we say, "Oh, yeah, it's really obvious," at Psalm 22 and other prophecies, Zechariah 12, we can say, "Oh, it's really obvious," but at the time it wasn't obvious. So I think this is a very difficult thing, the meaning of the details; we won't really really recognize them until after it's concluded.

So what spiritual lessons do we have from Revelation? First, we cannot know when the Lord will return, so we have to always be present to meet him, prepare to meet him, whether he's whether he's present soon, tomorrow, or when we die, and that the end of the world is our death for most of us. Okay, most of us will die rather than be alive when the Lord comes, and God allows suffering in this life to test us and to strengthen us, and Jesus Christ is the greatest example of that. How can we say that uh that God is cruel to allow us to be--I know you weren't saying that; I'm not saying saying this to you--but that when uh people complain to God about difficulties that we have in life, so we can either be conquered by them or we can conquer, and we conquer by our perseverance, by that alone, by perseverance alone we conquer. So this is something that's in the Book of Revelation that a lot of people don't notice that I I want to use to show you what is the purpose of the plagues. In the future there will be a period of tribulation; there will be hardship, and there will be plagues. What is the purpose of the plagues? It's not punishment; it's not hell. The plagues are not happening in Hell. The plagues are are horrible afflictions that befall people on this Earth, some of them followers of Jesus Christ and some of them not, okay? So in some of them the followers of Christ will be afflicted also, but in some of them they will not. But let's take a look at this: why does God send the plagues? They are not for vengeance; they're not for punishment; they are for punishment for a very limited way in a very limited way because he wants to bring us to repentance. God loves Humanity, so he allows the plagues to come upon people so that they will come to their senses, because the fact is that we usually turn to God when we're in trouble. This is when we pray, when we're sick. So a lot of people have serious illnesses like cancer, and they'll say, "Cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me," and everybody else says, "How can you possibly say that?" Well, "I got closer to God; I became a spiritual person; I realize what is really me meaningful in life." So this in fact is exactly what happens; it says in Revelation, this is during the fifth uh trumpet and the sixth trumpet, people were tormented by Locust, and then one-third of humankind is killed by the plagues. Why only one-third? Why why isn't everybody killed? Because God was--would--if this happens in the future, will allow this to happen so that we will come to our senses, so that we will repent. This is what it says: "The rest of mankind who were not killed by the plagues did not repent of the works of their hands or give up worshiping demons or Idols of gold and silver in bronze and stone and wood; they did not repent of their murderers or their sorceries or their immoralities or their thefts," and a third of humanity is going to die, and still people won't repent. But notice that the plagues are sent for the repentance of people. Here's another example: when the sun gets very hot and it burns the people, they curse God, but they did not repent, you see? So this is the reason for all of these different plagues. We're told the purpose of the plagues is to lead people to repentance. God does not want us to go to hell; he's the one who sent the prophets of the Old Testament; he sent John the Forerunner and Baptist; he sent the Lord; he sent the apostles; we have the sacraments; we have saints; we have clergy; we have all kinds of things to lead us to repentance, and still we're not repenting. So at the end he's going to allow these terrible punishments, these terrible plagues, not for vengeance, but to shake us up, to hopefully bring us to repentance. Okay, so we see this; they're cursing; they're in anguish. Here it is again in verse 11: "They cursed the god of heaven and did not repent." So notice that they're blaming God, but the purpose of the plagues, the purpose of all trials and of all Temptations is to to lead us to repentance for our Salvation.

So what do we learn from these passages? That our actions matter; good intentions alone are not enough; that we will suffer bodily for sins that we commit in the body; salvation is not just a matter of faith; we have to do certain things; and God sends the plagues to encourage repentance. So one-third died in the one plague, but two-thirds remained; that's the majority, but they still didn't repent. Okay, what are other spiritual lessons of Revelation? How do we conquer evil, and why should we fight at all? To him who conquers--we didn't look at this part; this is in chapters 2 and 3, the letters to the seven churches. Jesus promises many rewards to the one who conquers: "I will give a new white stone; I will give a new name; I will give to drink from the River of Life; I will give him this; I will give him that." The one who con--conquers. How do we conquer? By being faithful to Jesus Christ, not by compromise, by being remaining firm and faithful regardless of personal consequences. There will be no Rapture to protect us--protect us from suffering during the end times. The Beast and the Antichrist, what are they? Every era has had beasts; every era has had Antichrist, and we have personal ones too. Is there anything in our life that we have made into an idol, and that's anything that we put before God? Have we received the mark of the beast in any way? Are we compromising our faith? Are we compromising our values because we don't want to face social ostracism? We don't want people to say you're a hater. Okay, we don't want people to say that you lack love. Oh, you Christians, Jesus said to love one another, therefore I'm just loving, you know, we're just supposed to love each other; that's all you have to do, accept everything, right? But this is what we have to respond to. So the mark of the beast is something we receive if we sell out Christ; we're worshiping somebody else and something else. We're called to be faithful; we're called to repent. And what else? We can be in the church but lose our Salvation if we are lukewarm; that's in one of the letters to the seven churches. We're going to be judged according to our deeds; there is no predestination. It says he says, "I stand at the door and knock"; he's waiting for us to open the door to let him in, to respond to him. And also at the end of the book, that's at the beginning of the book, at the end of the book says, "Come, if you want eternal life, you want a drink from the River of Life, come." He who has an ear to hear, let him hear. You're listening, but you're not hearing; you're not responding. What that means is you have to respond. This is what we're called to do again and again. God is philanthropist; this is very very strong in the Orthodox tradition; it's the next to the title Christ for Jesus and Lord; this is the number one title. God is philanthropist, the one who loves mankind; that's what the word means. He wants everyone to be saved. God did not create anyone to go to hell; he says instead that the hell that hell was created for the devil and his angels, right? Go to this place; the--he was not created for Humanity, but we won't all go there because we choose not to go there; that's our choice. So God loves Humanity; it says in Ezekiel, "He does not desire the death of the sinner, but that he turned from his wickedness to live," and also First Timothy, "He desires all people to be saved and come to knowledge of the truth." So this means that we are responsible for our response to God, our personal salvation or our damnation. So the Book of Revelation, even though we think of it as as horrible and plagues and disasters and things like this, is it's not really a book of Doom and destruction, but a message of Hope, and in all of those scenes of Destruction on Earth at the time that there's terrible destruction on Earth, the trumpets and the bowls and these terrible plag--plagues, up in Heaven there is glorification of God; there are the Saints and the angels and the elders and the incense and the altars and the martyrs. Those scenes are juxtaposed with the seeds of Destruction on Earth because that's the place where we're supposed to be headed for, and that's the place where we can go if we remain faithful, if we keep our trust in God and we behave in this life as we are supposed to and gain those heavenly crowns that uh are awaiting for us. Some people say they take the crowns off of the the dragon and for themselves.

How the Paul's Vision in Thessalonians about trumpet sounding and being caught up in the air? How does that--okay, so Paul's Vision in Thessalonians, which is how people come up with the idea of the Rapture, is designed to answer this question; that's what we want to talk about, context. The Thessalonians wanted to know what's going to happen to the people who died before the return of Jesus Christ. Remember, they thought he was coming back any day, so Paul said, "Don't worry about the people who have already died. When Christ Returns, the dead will be taken out of their graves to meet the Lord, and then we who are still alive will be taken up to be with him." There's no scenario of tribulation there; he's just talking about what will happen when the Lord comes. What he's trying to say there is that the dead will still be with the Lord even though they weren't alive at his second coming, and those of us who are still who are alive who haven't died will be taken up, and we don't have to die first, right, to go to heaven. If you're alive when the Lord comes, you're not going to have to die first; you're going to be changed and just be taken up with the Lord; that's what that's about. But people use that to support the Rapture, but it's not because there's no--not talking about tribulations; he's just talking about what's going to happen to the dead and those of us who are still alive when the Lord comes, but there's no suggestion that everybody else is going to stay on Earth to go through this hell, but we're going to be taken out of it, and we can just look down and say, "Na na na na, you should have believed." It's nothing like that. Yes, uh, two questions: um, are the plagues literal? Are the plagues literal? Yes. The question was, are the plagues literal? People have tried to spiritualize them, but I think more and more as we see what's happening in the world, the plagues are going to be literal, and even even before recent times, Al--Andrew of Cesaria, who is the most important Greek father for interpretation of the re--Book of Revelation, yes, said yes, they would be literal. Now it's interesting, I read a book that was written in 1920, in the Book of Revelation in 1925, something like this, and World War I was just concluded at that point, and he said, "You know, I a third of the ships of the of Earth were destroyed in World War I, and that's one of the things that's mentioned in Revelation," and he said, "You know what? I never used to think these things were literal, but I think that they can be," and definitely now when what we see what's happening with the climate and other things, is it possible that a third of humanity could die at any one time? Yes, we find that impossible to imagine that a third of all the green grass and and trees would die, yeah, that could really happen. So um, it it is intended to be literal, but this is when you will be sure you're in the end times, okay? That's one of the signs that you're definitely living in the end times, but just to have, you know, tsunamis or earthquakes or disasters, that's a normal thing. When you see 1/4th or one-third, then that's that's why Co--was not a sign of the end times. If we had a fourth of the people dying or a third of people dying, maybe, but not--we didn't have those kinds of numbers. Yes, just de--midd over. Yes, bonic play killed a third of humanity in Europe. [Music] Yes, then you said the plagues are specific. I said the plagues are going to happen literally, not necessarily--again, remember what he's describing; we don't know how that will play out in our times, but is talking about massive destruction on a global scale. How we know that which things are little and which--how do we know which things are literal and which things are spiritual? Because when he's talking about the deaths of people and...

The destruction of the physical Earth—that has to be physical, you see what I mean? So when he’s talking about the plagues, things that were so dramatic, it was designed to cause people to, uh, take notice that maybe something’s happening here. We need to repent. Yes. You have no question. Any of the humans on Earth that have never heard a word? Okay. What, what do you think happens to them? What do you think happens to them? Do you think it would be fair if they never heard of God, they never heard the word of God? Do you think it would be fair for God to send them to hell? Okay. Do you think God is fair? Do you think He knows what He’s doing? That’s where we leave it. We now—the reason why I’m saying that is because we have to trust in God and His mercy and His judgment. That does not mean that means, oh, I don’t have to go to church. If those people could be saved—if I said, because God, God knows who’s going to be saved. God decides, not me, not you, not us. Oh, they can’t be saved; they can’t be saved. We don’t decide. But that does not mean that we who know are off the hook. Oh well, I—because I’ve had people say to me, well, if the thief on the cross was saved, I don’t have to be baptized. He wasn’t baptized. Yeah, but you know—so when you know what you’re supposed to do and you don’t do it, you’re much worse off than the person who’s never heard of Jesus Christ. Okay, because Paul in Romans does talk about, about that. He says they will be those who are without the law will be judged without the law; those who are live under the law will be judged according to the law. But people know right from wrong, no matter who they are. So we just have to trust in God’s mercy. But that is never an excuse to say, well, I don’t have to believe in Jesus Christ.

I’ll tell you something funny—that what one of my—how, how people twist what they hear. One of the professors at school had a student, she—and she says, well, the student said to the professor, who is a Catholic, well, you know, Professor, like you said, uh, you can be—um, how does she—how does she have to phrase this exactly right?—um, you can be a Catholic and be an atheist. And the professor said, when did I ever say you can be Catholic and be an atheist? She said, well, you said that maybe even atheists could be saved. So, you know, the Catholic Church teaches that maybe even an atheist could be saved. That’s very different from saying you can be an atheist and be a Catholic. You can’t be an Orthodox Christian and be an atheist. Okay. You can’t say, I don’t want to do this; I’m not going to live this way because some other person might be saved by God who never knew that they needed to do those things. So we have to be very careful that we don’t create little slippery arguments to get ourselves off the hook from doing things, because that’s what we do, right? So by saying that about salvation, we’re leaving it to the mercy of God. That is not any excuse for us. Yes, go ahead. Back. Doesn’t everybody have to taste death, according to Paul? No. The ones who are alive will be taken up to meet the Lord in the air, and we will always be together with the Lord. That’s what He says. And then later in Corinthians, He says, lo, I tell you a mystery: we will not all die, but in the twinkling of an eye we will all be changed. So that—no, you don’t have to taste death if it’s at the very end and you’re alive when Christ happens to come. May we all be in that situation. I don’t—I don’t know about that, but I mean, that would be something else, wouldn’t it? Yes.

I just want to point out that in Holy Trinity Church in Cleveland, in Parma, that there is—um, you know, just like we read the Book of Revelations outside the church but not in the church—they have an entire hallway leading from the church to the church—of icons, Book of Revelation. I would love to see that sometime. Yeah. Um, there—I saw that in also a mon—there are some monasteries that have that. I saw one in—in northern Greece. This—there’s a—there’s a woman’s Sisterhood called The Sisterhood of St. Lydia, and they had a beautiful Church there in—um, I’m trying to remember the—the city of Greece. It’s up there, northern Greece, and they have a whole series of—of uh—icons of Revelation. We do see scenes of that in some Churches. Anybody else? Yes. Yes, over here. On your slide, uh, the invitation, the Spirit in the Church, I kind of got lost. Are you saying that we’re—the Church is going to go away, and as an individual you’re going to be judged? Is that what that slide was referring to—about judgment? Or you said the Spirit, the invitation—the invitation, the Spirit and the bride say, come. They’re inviting us. The Church is the bride. Yes, they’re inviting us. But were you saying that we’re—we will not be judged? Will we be separated from the Church? No. What we’re talking about there is that the Holy Spirit is inviting you here and now. The Church is the bride of Christ; it’s inviting you now. Do you want eternal life? Come now. Come to the Church. That’s where you get the Spirit; that’s where you get the life. Not separated from the Church, but through the Church. But that’s a good question. Thanks for asking—asking it. Yes. So what changed the Eastern Church’s mind about the Book of—what changed the Eastern Church’s mind about the Book of Revelation? It was kind of—you know, many of the fathers did not accept it. Some of the fathers did. It never really found a place in the Church. But during—um, the Middle Ages, as—especially with the rise of Islam and the persecution that returned to Christians in the Middle East, people became more interested in it. And as the Byzantine Empire shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, there was a lot of interest in it because among many of the fathers they really believed that the Antichrist would be the last king of the Romans. Okay. So there was a belief that the end of the world was coming with the end of the Christian Roman Empire. Of course, that didn’t happen. That goes to show you how nobody knows. So there was a more and more interest, but it was never very, very important in the Orthodox Church.

So I can’t prove this, but what I think happened is this: during the like the 1600s and the 1700s, there were a lot of missionaries that went to Greece and they went to the Middle East. They were Protestant and Catholic missionaries. They wanted to save the Orthodox because we’re all going to hell, don’t you know? Okay, because we’re not thinking like them; we’re not under the Pope or we’re not Protestant. So they literally said, oh, these people, they’re unchurched; they don’t know anything; we’re going to save them—forgetting that the Church was Greek before it was Latin and European. The Church was in Greece and in Cyprus, in Jerusalem and all those places. Orthodox Christianity has never left. But they came there to evangelize the Orthodox and they brought Bibles with them, and the Bible is a complete New Testament. They had the Book of Revelation there, and people started having copies of the New Testament. People never had copies of the Bible; they couldn’t get one. You know why? Because the Muslims wouldn’t allow the printing of any books in Greek. Okay. So we didn’t have any books; we had no religious books that were printed in Greek. Anything that came had to be printed in Amsterdam or or Venice or Paris or someplace like that, you see. So—um, I think what happened is that they saw it and they just accepted that it was part of the canon. But it was never officially accepted. But we don’t have an official canon anyhow. How—Andrew—did Andrew of Caesarea play a huge role in the acceptance? He’s talking about Andrew of Caesarea who wrote the commentary. He did. But for first for the Slavs, for the Armenians, for the Georgians—they—it was translated; his commentary was translated into those languages. But in the—in Greek, most copies of the Book of Revelation, manuscript copies, or a lot of them had the commentary with it. So he gave a spiritual explanation for the book that helped its acceptance. Yes. But mostly I think it was the fact that it was included in the New Testament and people started reading it, you know? Yes. So with that in mind, we—there was no issue or controversy over the Gospels, the Epistles, all those years—except Revelation. What—what does that tell you? Like, does it—you know, does it belong? There’s no controversy said over Gospels and Epistles in the Book of Revelation. Does it belong in the New Testament? I would say yes, because it was accepted in the early Church, but it lost favor. This is kind of—I can’t give you this explanation, but there was—it was never questioned that it was by the Apostle John until the mid-3rd century. But it never really gained traction until a Church writer named Eusebius in the 4th century did not want to keep it in the canon. So he wrote against it, and this is the reason why be—kind of—people began to doubt it. But it was accepted in the early Church. So I think, yeah, it belongs there, even though it is odd. You could say it’s not canonical because we don’t read from it. Is it—can it really be said to be canonical if we never read from it? But it is, you know, de facto canonical. Anybody else? Yes. Last one. Elizabeth, you have studied and obviously taught—short of signing up for one of your classes, if we wanted to continue with the just understanding of Church history, do you have any recommendations of books or things that we could do?

I have any recommendations for books about Church history? Boy, it’s—it’s really hard. I—there—I’m sure Father would have you—well, I mean, the—the—the recently departed Bishop Kallistos—where—um, you know, wrote—wrote that—the book on the Orthodox Church. It’s really hard. You know what? There—there are some more and more—there are more and more books about Church history about the Orthodox faith and the early Church. I don’t know what’s out there, um, but I would look at places like—I would look at Ancient Faith Publishing; their website and see what they have. They may have stuff—they have—they’re coming out with so many books, I can’t really keep track of all of it. I don’t—I never used a history book in my class. I would always use the primary sources. I had people read the actual writings of the fathers rather than a book about them. You see what I mean? But I’m sure there was something. Yes. Very last question. Very, very last question. Yes. Question is, Father Nicholas has introduced us to Father A.R.—Father Barnabas Powell. Did he print any books? He books—yeah. He’s a podcaster and he has a YouTube. Okay. He has a series of classes: Orthodoxy 101. Orthodoxy 101. There’s a lot of—so look—check out Father Barnabas Powell. He’s from the South, and he talks like a good old boy, and he used to be Pentecostal; now he’s Orthodox. So—but he’s a real interesting, very dynamic person. You’ll enjoy—well, G-d, thank you very much for being such a great audience. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Take care.