Revelation 18:21-24

March 7, 2021

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

The sermon starts around 19:00 in the audio file.

Or, When Silence Falls on the Great City

Series: Just Conquer Part 49

Introduction

Revelation is not only the last book in God’s Word, it is God’s Word on the last things. Revelation is the apocalypse, which at least in Greek (and before all our modern novel accoutrements) means unveiling. This is an apostle-written, Spirit-given unveiling of eschatology: the last things.

Future things can be hard to study. Men have proven themselves more than capable of ignoring and even intentionally misreading finished events, which are already laid out on the table, let alone showing awe-inspiring ineptitude at reading our own times. Christians who read the Bible want to get it right, past and present and future, and often that results in a theological fight. Doctrines about the future have certain caused confusion, consternation, even conflict. But God didn’t provide this prophetic word to cause conflict, He revealed it to us so that we wouldn’t be cowards (Revelation 21:8).

I’ve made a few tongue-in-cheek comments about there being an eagerness of some to be finished with this series, and soon. It is sooner now than ever. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus. It really has, though, been a blessing. Reading Revelation is a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near” (Revelation 1:3). We may not all agree on certain points of interpretation, but we have disagreed as those who are on the same side. We’ve disagreed as brothers, and we’ve not “punted” to the jest of pan-millennials, that it will all just pan out in the end.

As I’ve been studying through Revelation these last couple years I have been unimpressed with evidence and arguments that all of this was fulfilled in AD 70 with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. But I have been even more unimpressed with the dispassionate and discouraged tone among those who think the worst is yet to come. God didn’t provide these prophecies for our internal conflict, nor did He provide them for us to complain that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, though it is. He’s given revelation so that we could see wickedness uncovered, so that we could see deception uncovered, so that we could see, out in the open, the futility and the shame of all who reject God as God and Jesus as Lord.

When we think about the Antichrist, we’re to think of him as a desperate character, thin and full of Lamb-envy. When we think about the false prophet we’re to think about how, no matter the number of people who believe him, he still is a fraud, a con-artist, a quack. When we think about the slendor of a global economy, we’re to think of her like a great prostitute. Those who give themselves to her will have given themselves to a comet, bright only as long as she is burning out. This is like reading the plot of of a movie on IMDB and seeing at what point the bad guys are identified and exposed.

God keeps giving believers encouragement in the apocalypse. It is not as much a warning to the wicked, it is not as much a call to repentance. It is a blessing that strengthens God’s people to keep living holy lives, no mater the cost, and to have faith in God who sees. The seals and the trumpets and the bowls are not merely repetitions of one another, but even if that’s all they were, what an impression they make. In the last paragraph of chapter 18 God recaps the fall of Babylon “the great.” Yet her fall has already been portrayed (17:1-18), proclaimed (18:1-8), and cried over (18:9-20). Do we really need more? Apparently, yes. It isn’t just rubbing the rebels’ faces in judgment, it is food for the faith of those who fear Him. The[...]