Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters. Tonight, we’re going to skip ahead to Revelation 11 and look at some of the judgments in the last of the trumpets and see what we can learn about the nature of God from that chapter. I won’t be showing particular verses as I want to rather show the theme instead. Before we get there, I want to ask for your prayers for my continued Christlikeness. I believe I am growing into the man I need to be and I believe your prayers are playing a part. I need to remind myself that you are praying for me throughout the day. I also ask for your prayers for my finances. I finally ask for prayers in a third area of my life that is related to these two. God knows even if you don’t.
The setting of this one is the temple of God at first. Now is that the temple in 70 A.D. or a future temple? Well you readers know that I do likely have an opinion on this, but that doesn’t matter at this blog. We are not here to debate when these things will take place or did take place but the significance in them to learning about God.
The prophets are speaking in a city where their Lord was crucified. Let’s note this. Jesus is the Lord of the prophets. They are speaking on behalf of him and we can remember back to Matthew 23 where Jesus says that he will send them prophets. The prophets in this case are meant to point back to Jesus.
We often can have these debates in eschatological circles. Who are the two witnesses? Now I do have a position on this, but I think before we ever discuss who they are, which we won’t here, we need to be clear what they do. They testify of Christ. We should spend more time trying to study the message of those who testify of Christ rather than who they are. It is a shame we ask more about who the witnesses are than we do about who Jesus is.
The chapter as a whole ends with glory to God. He is described as eternal. He is the one to receive glory and who judges the living and the dead, which is what Christ had also said he would do. While Jesus is not mentioned particularly in this part, we can be sure John would understand him as being included in the divine identity.
The reign of God would truly begin at this point. What does this mean? Well, I’m going to leave it for you to work out some with your eschatology, but I do want to focus on the concept of reigning as this ties in well with a passage like Daniel 7. It would also tie in with the most quoted OT passage of all in the NT, that of Psalm 110:1. Both passages speak of the reign of Messiah and Paul spoke of this in 1 Cor. 15:24-28.
The ending point here is simply, YHWH reigns. Christ being in that divine identity is reigning as well. His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom with no end.
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