December 29th

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Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Chris.

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Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is the 365 Bible reading plan. Today is December the 29th, and our passage for today is the Book of Revelation, chapter 20. Well, we are coming to the close of the entire Bible, the close of the book of Revelation, the last and final book of God's revelation. And we have now come through the great tribulation. Jesus Himself is standing on the earth, just as the prophet Zechariah had predicted the Messiah would do. Israel now has totally been saved. You say, now how can a whole nation be saved? Because God wants them to be, and they were ready. God prepared their hearts, and they responded. The Bible says all Israel will be saved, not all of those down through the ages, but those that will be alive and there when the Lord Jesus comes, the scripture says in the prophet Zechariah again, that they will look upon him whom they've pierced, and they will mourn. They will recognize him as the Messiah, and that is what the prophets have taught. You see, most of the prophecies concerning Messiah are not concerning his first time coming, even though they got into such detail in their prophecies that in Isaiah fifty three, in the book of Psalms, over and over again, it got down to the very words he would say on the cross, what those who were around the cross, both those who were his friends and his foes, what they would say, how they would act, what they would do when he was crucified, the place where he would be buried. All of that was laid out, the day that he would be resurrected, all of that was prophesied. Yet the vast majority of prophecies having to do with Messiah have to do with what we call the return of Christ to earth. And remember, don't get this mixed up with the rapture, which is a movement of earth toward heaven. When we meet the Lord in the air, he's not coming back to the earth. We're going to meet him in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord. So says Paul in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 and verse 18. But now we're talking about the return of Messiah to the earth so that he can set up his kingdom. You see, the Lord had promised David a kingdom. He had promised him that he would rule over all the earth and his descendants, his seeds. And indeed, that's exactly what is going to happen. Every promise that the Lord made is going to be fulfilled. And if they were literal physical promises, they will be literal physical fulfillments. And we have a problem with that sometimes because we can't figure it out in our little peanut brains about how God's going to do it. But you see, what I would recommend to you is just remember this. When people say to me, Pastor, how's that going to happen? And when exactly is that going to happen? What I always say to them is this. I know we've been given a lot about what's going to happen, but we don't have all the plans. And the reason is I was called to be on the reception committee, not on the planning committee. You see, that's God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. And that is all that is in that exclusive committee as to who is going to do what when. You and I are responsible to welcome the Lord and to occupy and serve until he comes. We are at the end of the tribulation period. There will be a kingdom on the earth. Now let me just say from a very practical and hermeneutical standpoint, if that were not the case, why didn't the Lord tell his disciples that? Remember, after the resurrection, not before, but after the resurrection, for forty days he spoke to them about things pertaining to the kingdom. And even after forty days, those disciples still believed it was going to be a literal physical kingdom when the kingdom was going to be restored to David and to the Jewish people. You say, Well, how do you know that? Because in the book of Acts, chapter one, it says, After forty days of showing them with infallible, irrefutable proofs that indeed he was alive and he was the Messiah, and he spoke to them for forty days concerning the things of the kingdom. Now that's what it says. I didn't make that up. It says that after all of this time, if it was just going to be a spiritual kingdom, then why did they ask the next question? Because in Acts chapter one it says, And after forty days of speaking about things pertaining to the kingdom, which by the way, they were on the Mount of Olives, with a resurrected Lord that nobody could kill. And he said, Because I rise from the dead, you will rise from the dead also. So even the disciples were going to participate in the same kind of resurrection that Jesus had, one that, unlike Lazarus, would be raised, never to die again. And Jesus had been talking about the kingdom, and they said, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? Now that's the prophet's language. That is the language of a literal physical kingdom. And there they were on the Mount of Olives, where the prophet Zachariah said, Messiah, when he sets up his kingdom and his earthly rule, will be. And there they were. Jesus had been talking to them about that, and they said, Will you at this time restore the kingdom unto Israel? And Jesus said, No, boys, that's not going to happen. I've just been kind of hanging out with you, but that's all just spiritual. That's all allegory. You see, there's not going to be any kingdom. Jesus might have said, if he is using the parlance of our day, the language of our day, he might have said, Well, I don't know if y'all knew it or not, but I'm a non millennialist. I don't even believe that there's going to be a kingdom. No, no, no. Jesus said it's not for you to know the times or the seasons which the Father has in his own power. But he said, I've got a job for you to do, and that is to be witnesses until I come. And over and over again, this is throughout the Old and New Testament, it is consistent, it's confluent. There is going to be a kingdom, and Jesus is going to rule from Jerusalem, and he's going to do that as a glorified king, and we're going to rule and reign with him throughout the earth. Now, again, I don't know how all of that's going to happen, because there's going to be those of us who are in glorified bodies, but we're going to have the kind of body that Jesus had, and that means that we're going to be able to travel at the speed of thought, not of sound, not Mach I, not the speed of light, but at the speed of thought. That's what Jesus did. And he can walk through walls, he can talk with people, he can appear, he can not appear. This has been the case all the way since the beginning of God's revelation in the book of Genesis. Spiritual beings could appear, not appear, whatever the case is, we will do that. And every time we gather together, angels, supernatural beings are with us in the church of Jesus. If it's a true church of Jesus, according to 1 Corinthians chapter 11, when the church gathers together, the angels are there because it even says, Paul said, Paul said that women, you need to be careful how you dress because of the angels. They're watching. So all of this, we might not understand everything about it, but I don't understand about a lot of things. But I believe and trust God's word that is true. And so here they are. The nations have been judged. And then it says in chapter 20, I saw an angel coming down from heaven having the key to the abuso, the abyss, the abyss. It's translated bottomless pit or something like that in some of the English Bibles. He had the key to this bottomless pit. Evidently, there's a lid on it. And so he said, he laid hold of the dracon, that's the dragon. It's just brought right over into English. And the snake, the archaic one, the one from the beginning, the one from the head of time, is the old serpent. It's just translated old, but it's the word archaic. Who is diabolos, the adversary? Diabolos, dia means through. When you have diametric, it is your measurement through something, dia, and then the word balo here is the word for throw or cast, like casting a javelin. Diabalo, diabolos is the word for the accuser, one who continually is throwing spears through people and accusing them and trying to cut them in two, much like what Saul pinned David, tried to pin him to the wall and kill him. This is what Satan continually tries to do. So his name is Diabolos, and then Satan, the adversary. And he was seized and bound for a thousand years. You say, now wait a minute. Do you honestly believe there's a thousand years, a literal thousand years? Well, the word is Kilia, which in Greek is the word for a thousand. Where do we get the word millennium? Well, that's from the Latin translation, because a meal is a thousand. And look what it says. He bound him for a thousand years. Verse 2. Look at verse 3. And so he set a seal on him that he would not deceive the nations for a thousand years. Look at verse 4 again. We reigned with Christ for a thousand years. Look at verse 5 again. But the rest of the dead did not live until the thousand years were finished. Look at verse 7. Now, when the thousand years, now if it's not going to be a thousand years, then why would the Lord have said that over and over again? Is that all just allegory? Is that all just spiritual? Is that all just illustrative? Well, if you do that and you say that, then everything in there has to be that. There's not going to be any judgment. Why? Because that's all allegory. It's not a literal judgment. There is no book of life. That's all just figurative. There is no Lamb's book of life. That's just all figurative. You see, you can't have it both ways. You either take it as the literal word of God where it is meant to be literal. You say, well, when do you take it literal? Well, it's the old rule of hermeneutics, the first one I teach any Bible student, and that is if the plain sense makes sense, let that be the sense lest it all become nonsense. That is, you read a text, any text. And if the plain sense makes sense, let that be the sense lest it all become nonsense. If words mean anything, I mean we're not going to act like Bill Clinton here and start parsing is, are we? No, is means is. And this is exactly what we get into because we have a theological grid many times that we want to interpret everything with. And that's not the way you interpret scripture. You don't go in with a preconceived idea about what it's going to say. That's isogesis reading into, but exegesis is reading out of. You take the word of God and let it form the grid, you don't go in with a grid or a template or a paradigm and say this is the way it's going to be. And so Satan is bound for a thousand years in the abyss. And God puts a seal on him. Now the word to set a seal is the same word that is used for putting a letter or a scroll and wrapping it up in wax and putting a seal on it. In other words, it's not going to be broken until it's time. It's the idea of putting a jar, like a stone jar, and filling it up with wine and putting its lid on it, and then pouring a wax seal all the way around it, and then putting on that seal a signet ring and giving who can open it and who cannot. And so Satan is going to be put in a bottomless pit. He's going to be sealed up for a thousand years. He and his demons are going to be out of the picture. And the Bible says that there is going to be a lot going on during this time. And you can read about that. We don't have time to go into that right now. But the scripture says in verse 7, now when the thousand years have expired, listen to this, when the thousand years have expired, Satan was released from his prison. And he will go out and deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, oh my goodness, this Gog and Magog, which was at the beginning of the tribulation period, sometime before the tribulation period, it's not the Battle of Armageddon, but here is this Gog and Magog again. This is the way it has been all down through history. And there is a reason that I'll get to in just a moment. And it says that even after a thousand years of peace, prosperity, health, blessing, the Lord himself with us physically, everywhere, omnipresent, and yet he is at the city of Jerusalem ruling as well. All of this for a thousand years, where if a man gets sick and dies at a hundred years of age, he will be considered as a babe. Now this is how wonderful it's going to be. Yet as soon as the tempter is released, as soon as the demons of hell are cut loose again and they are out, they deceive as many as the sands of the sea. Now, how could that be? I'll tell you how, because the human heart is depraved and wicked. God is trying to let us know that it doesn't matter what the circumstances are, you can take people, our government has never understood this. You can take people out of the slums and put them into a palace and they will turn that palace into slums. Why? Because only God can get slums out of the people. You can take people and get them out of the slums and put them in something, but they will still have the slums in their heart, and wherever they are, they'll turn it into a hog pen. But God is showing us that no matter how good people have it, that cannot change the human heart. Only the forgiveness of God and the redemption of God and the new birth can change people's heart. Only God can change people's heart. And you can see that even after a thousand years of peace, prosperity, health, wealth, everything that everybody says they want, that cannot make us better. That cannot make us new. That cannot make us what God created Adam to be. Because you see, God has to get the sin out of our lives, and that is what his desire is in the future, and that's what it is for now. Well, after the judgment of the devil, the beast and the false prophet and all that are evil, the Bible says in verse eleven, then I saw a gray white throne and him who sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away, and there was not found a place for them, and I saw the dead micro micros, small, microscopic, the smallest, and the Megale, the great, the mega people, the Micros people, standing before God. Now have you noticed this? Doesn't matter whether you're small or great, rich or poor, doesn't matter if you're an athlete, not an athlete, doesn't matter if you've got a portfolio the size of Manhattan, or whether you can't even spell portfolio, it doesn't matter. Because you see, what determines where you're going to spend eternity is your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. And this is lost people that are here. These are people that they're going to stand before God Almighty. And the Bible says that the books were open. I believe those are the books of the works that every man has done down through the centuries. And your works are there. They will be seen if you're without Jesus Christ. And you will be judged according to your works, and you're going to be found guilty. You're going to come up short. And then a search will be made in the Lamb's book of life. And if your name is not in that Lamb's book of life, which if you are there, it's not going to be. And the Bible says that those, listen, verse 14, then death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the second separation. Anytime you see the word death in the Bible, in the New Testament specifically, you can just substitute the word separation. You'll get the idea of what it is. Then death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. The first one's the physical one. And anyone not found written in the book of life was cast in the lake of fire. In other words, the criteria upon which will determine whether you spend eternity with the Lord Jesus in heaven or whether you spend eternity in hell, the lake of fire, with the enemy of our souls and all of his followers is whether your name is found written in the book of life. You see, your works can't save you. God will have already proved that in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, you're going to see everything, and you're going to see that no good works you can ever do can take away sin. Only the blood of Jesus Christ can take away sin. Only the blood of the Messiah can take away and cleanse sin. And so this is it, folks. This is the end for those who are lost. And then in the next two chapters, we're going to look at all things made new: a new heaven and a new earth. For on the way, this is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org, then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.