In Daniel 9, the prophet was given a great prophecy of events, that spanned more than 2000 years, from his own day on into our own future. Marked out on this prophecy, is a period of seventy “weeks” of years or 490 years.

The 490-year period began with the building of the wall of Jerusalem, in the days of Nehemiah, until the end of the age.

Before His crucifixion, as Jesus talked with His disciples on the Mount of Olives, He told them what would happen in the period just before His Second Coming. In that passage, He refers several times to what He calls “the end of the age”. This is the same final seven year period of Daniel’s prophecy that Jesus refers to when He speaks of “the end of the age.”

This seven-year period of both Daniel’s prophecy and Jesus’ prophecy contains the fascinating – and frightening – series of events we are currently exploring in Revelation 6 through 19.

Every part of creation fulfils the intention which God had for it since the beginning. Even inanimate objects like stars, stones, trees, flowers and water – all give Him praise. Nature worships whenever any part of nature fulfils the intention God had created it for.

Nature always gives praise and glory to God, its Creator. For instance, look at a flower closely and see how you can marvel at the beauty and complexity of its design, conceived and executed by the power and wisdom of God. All of nature is as amazing as that flower, and the looking at and appreciating nature should lead us to worship and praise God.

The 4 living creature that stand before the Throne of God are the embodiment of worship that comes from an understanding and appreciation of God’s Creation.

However human beings are thankless and unappreciative creatures.

Think about the creation for a moment. God worked without tools to create the universe. He worked without elements or materials, and He worked without help.

God controls everything in His creation at all times, and no one can assist Him, and no one can stop Him. He is sovereign in everything, and absolutely competent and absolutely powerful to control it all.

The right response of any vision of God would be to fall before Him, sensing our sin and our unworthiness, overwhelmed with a holy fear, and a heart of gratitude for His mercy to us as sinners, but do we?

All we need to do, is to turn to the last book of the Bible – Revelation – and what we read there, tells us it is going to work out all right. It does not look that way. In fact, it looks like the devil is having a field day in the world. But God is going to work everything out according to His will. God Himself will gain control – in fact, He has never lost control – and He is moving to the time when He will place His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, on the throne of the universe.

Every one of 7 letters to the 7 Churches that are found in Revelation Chapters 2 and 3, ends with the same phrase. “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” It does not say “what the Spirit says to the church” but “what the Spirit says to the churches”.

Jesus Christ, the author of these letters and the book of Revelation, did not write these letters to go separately to each church. All 7 letters went to all of the churches, so they all read what the Lord Jesus was saying about the church just down the road, so they must have been anxious about the one that was addressed to them.

Laodicea is a church that is characterized by lukewarmness that is typical of unsaved or unregenerate people.

Laodicea has the grim distinction of being the only church where Christ has nothing good to say about anything. The church has simply no redeeming feature. This is the false church, an unredeemed church.

It should be obvious to most of us, that there is no such thing as a perfect church, and that is because there is no such thing as a perfect Christian.

Every church then, is a collection of imperfect Christians and therefore it is in itself, imperfect.

Secondly there is no such thing as a perfect pastor. Everyone is imperfect. They all fall short of the absolute standard of holiness that God has set.

So if there is no such thing as a perfect Christian, or a perfect pastor, or a perfect church and no individual or group of individuals can be everything that Jesus desires, is it at all possible to be faithful, to be obedient, to be diligent, and to please the Lord Jesus as a congregation?

It is possible to be a church that the Lord blesses because that church is genuinely faithful to Him, and that is the case of this little church in Philadelphia, in Asia Minor.

The letter to the church at Sardis is a gloomy and a heartbreaking letter, to a very gloomy and a heartbreaking church because this church, according to Jesus, is dead. At the end of Revelation 3, Verse 1 Jesus says, “You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.”

This has to be the ultimate shame, to have the Lord Jesus Himself, declare that you are dead. By definition the church is a place where God lives, a place where Christ lives, a place where the Holy Spirit lives, a place where Christians are alive, but not in this church.

This church had a reputation that it was alive, but in fact it was dead.

Thyatira was a city where guilds were very important. You might think that trade unions originated in the factories and coal mines of nineteenth-century England and America, but the truth is that carpenters, masons, merchants, cloth makers, and other trade workers had organized into guilds even before the time of Christ.

In Thyatira the trades were so strongly unionised that it was difficult to make a living without being a guild member – and this is an important fact to remember when studying the letter to the fourth church

I came across a wonderful definition of the word “compromise”. It comes from the pen of Merrit Malloy in his book “Things I Meant to Say to You When We Were Old” He defines compromise as simply changing the question to fit the answer.

This is how most believers want it today – a life of compromise.

This is the subtle deception, a compromising with the world. It happens when we begin to embrace the values of the world more than we embrace God’s values.

These were the kinds of false teachings and compromise with the world that were found in the church at Pergamum. The message from Jesus to the church at Pergamum – and to us – is not to compromise.

While the newspaper (or the Internet) records the visible events that are taking place upon the earth at this moment, the Bible looks beyond to the invisible realm where the sovereign will of God determines what will take place on earth.

We cannot really understand life until we see both realms – the visible and the invisible.

This is what the book of Revelation does for us. It opens that invisible realm to us. As we study this last book of the Bible, we will learn much about what is going to happen on earth, as well as what is happening right now.