This is Living Waters of Grace, the teaching ministry of Clark
Wofford, senior pastor of Calvary Chapel of Westmoreland,
County of Greensburg, PA. Now here's Pastor Clark as he
continues teaching through God's Word.
This wrath is a passionate anger and it's one day going to be
poured out in such a degree that the world has never known.
As horrible as Hiroshima was, as horrible as tsunami and some
other devastations, the Holocaust, things that we have
read about in history, nothing is going to compare to what is
going to come upon this world through these prophecies of the
Book of Revelation. The world we live in has seen
some truly horrific events in its history.
The volcanic eruption of Pompeii that wiped out an entire
civilization. The Holocaust where 6,000,000
Jews were murdered. Many other tragedies where lives
were lost. In today's message, Pastor Clark
warned you about an even greater devastation that will come upon
the earth during the Great Tribulation as a result of sin.
Jesus died for your sin so that you don't have to have you
turned to Him to receive forgiveness now.
Here's Pastor Clark in Revelation chapter 15 with
today's edition of Living Waters of Grace.
Revelation 15 verse one. Then I saw another sign in
heaven, great and marvelous, 7 angels having the seven last
plagues, for in them the wrath of God is complete.
And I saw something like a sea of glass mingled with fire.
And those who have the victory over the beast, over his image
and over his mark, and over the number of his name, standing on
the sea of glass, having harps of God, they sing the song of
Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying,
Great and marvelous are your works, Lord God Almighty, just
and true are your ways, O King of the Saints, who shall not
fear you, O Lord, and glorify your name.
For you alone our holy, for all nations shall come and worship
before you, for your judgments have been manifested.
After these things I looked and behold, the temple, the
Tabernacle, the testimony in heaven was open, and out of the
temple came the seven angels, having the seven plagues clothed
in pure bright linen and having their chests girded with golden
bands. Then one of the four living
creatures gave to the seven angels 7 golden bowls full of
the wrath of God who lives forever and ever.
The temple was filled with smoke from the glory of God and from
His power, and no one was able to enter the temple till the
seven plagues of the seven angels were completed.
As we study today, this is taking us back to a place to
realize that there is a time that's going to come upon this
world that is called Armageddon. Many of you have studied that,
read about it. There was a movie I think a
while back called Armageddon, and the world is moving towards
that final battle on earth between good and evil prior to
the second coming of Jesus Christ when he comes to roll and
reign on this earth. So where we're picking up today
is the scene as we move through the Book of Revelation.
The seal judgments have already been dealt with.
They were horrible enough in and of themselves.
The trumpet judgments were also poured out upon the earth, very
cataclysmic and unbelievable to have to deal with.
The 7th trumpet is about to blow and the bulls of wrath now are
going to be poured out upon the earth.
So God will finally bring His righteous judgment upon the evil
wicked people of the world who refused to acknowledge Christ as
Lord and also to spare the people He loves and bring them
into the eternal realm with Him. After this last, last
consequential outpouring of of His anger and His wrath upon the
earth, we see in verse 1, he talks about another sign in
heaven, the signs of heaven marvelous.
He says, now John has the privilege of being able to see
what you and I can't see. He he sees something that's
indescribable, but he's doing what he's able to do by the
Spirit of God, writing these things down that we too might be
able to have some degree of insight and vision into what he
saw. And he says that what he's
experiencing and seeing is marvelous. 7 angels having the
seven last plagues, for in them the wrath of God is complete.
It's describing the end of the Tribulation with a horror, as I
said, at the battle of Armageddon.
Now John's going back to describe God's judgment in more
detail. Whenever we study the Book of
Revelation, we have to understand it's not a
chronological study. It's it's shifting back and
forth into different time periods to give us more
illumination and more insight, more clarification in regard to
these prophecies as we compare this various scripture in the
Book of Revelation along with Daniel and Ezekiel.
As we look at this particular section today, the plan of the
prophet, he's reviewing, he's recapitulating and he's
enlarging upon the scene. He is already sketched out.
We already read about the end of time in Revelation chapter 6 if
you flip over there for a minute.
This is for a review 12 to 17. He says I looked when he opened
the 6th sea. And behold, there was a great
earthquake. And the sun became black as
sackcloth of hair. And the moon became like blood.
And the stars of heaven fell to the earth as fig tree drops its
late figs when it is shaken by a mighty wind.
And the sky receded as a scroll when it is rolled up, and every
mountain and island was moved out of its place.
And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the
commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man,
hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains,
and said to the mountains. And the rocks fall on us, and
hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne, and from the
wrath of the Lamb. For the great day of His wrath
has come, and who is able to stand?
John takes us over the same material again, but in greater
detail in Revelation Chapter 15, reminding us that again, this is
not set up chronologically. And this is what makes this book
difficult to study and also to teach.
Believe me, this is the hardest book I've ever taught on.
You can't wing it. Not that I try to wing anything
anyway, but you can be a little bit more extemporaneous when
you're teaching to be attitudes. You got a lot of illustrations
that you can make common to people about praying for enemies
or loving people who hate you. We all got illustrations of how
to work that out at times. But Revelation is a is a very
specific book about specific subjects.
So you don't dare try to make comments that aren't rooted in
what has been clearly given. You don't want to make it up and
you don't want to add to it. The Bible warns us at the end of
that book that God help the person.
It adds to the book, the words to the Book of Revelation.
Now we see in verse one these 7 angels.
They have the seven last plagues.
And God has been waiting patiently throughout the history
of civilization to bring righteous judgment upon the
earth to an ungodly world. Now some people might think,
well that's not fair. Why would a God of love be so
angry? We can't understand.
Maybe as we're growing and maturing in our Christian life,
we can understand the horror, the devastation of sin and what
it does to people, what it has done to your own life and mine
as we've done things against God's law and His Word.
The Bible says whatever you sow, you will reap.
Anybody in here in the process of reaping anything, raise your
hand. We've all sown things that we
shouldn't have sown. And you think that you'll never
see him again when you're young, you think, well, I did that no
one else knows about it. And I'll never have to deal with
that again and forget about it. And as life goes on and the Holy
Spirit's working to purify your heart, God bring something out
that maybe you did when you were 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 or 30.
And all of a sudden, man, I thought that was gone, you know,
and God doesn't bring it on you to condemn you.
He brings it on you to free you and to cleanse you and to purify
you and to and to transform your life.
You know and but as God looks upon the horror of sin, there's
a difference between what we see sin like as believers and what
the lost or unconverted or doomed See.
When you're a Christian, sin bothers you.
It disturbs you. You want to repent of it.
You want to get it off your chest.
You want to confess it. You want to ask the Lord for
mercy and cleansing and forgiveness.
But when you're a Pagan, you just seem to relish in sin.
The more sin the better. You don't think about the
consequences or the the the outcome of what that might cost
you one day. You're just thinking you're
having a lot of fun, you know, on the highway to hell.
And people don't understand that God is holy.
God is perfect. This is his world, this is his
universe, this is his creation. And he has every right to demand
of his creation allegiance and worship and holiness.
But we're not holy until Christ comes into our life.
We're not holy until the blood of Jesus Christ is applied to
our bankrupt souls. When Christ comes into a
sinner's life, He washes away our sins.
He cleanses us. He declares us righteous and
pure and just, and it's a marvelous thing.
We don't realize all the ramifications of justification.
It's one thing to know, well, if I die today, I'm going to go to
heaven. And and that's a good thing if
you're trusting in Christ to know.
But it's so much deeper than that, because what Christ has
done for us at the cross in atonement, remitting our sins,
is that we have this benefit now because of the blood of Christ
and because of what Jesus Christ has done.
That as a father looks upon us, he doesn't see an enemy of God
anymore. He sees a son and daughter of
God. He sees us as being part of his
family. His wrath, his judgement has
passed over us. But all those who are still on
the earth who don't have Christ, his judgement is waiting to be
poured out upon them. And he's been more than patient,
hasn't he? How many thousands of years has
he waited and patiently has to everyday look upon the sordid
heart of the human race, the heart of man that perpetually
desires to do evil continually? You might remember a day before
you knew Christ where your thoughts every day was.
What kind of evil stuff can I do today?
What kind of sin can I get into? Who can I RIP off, or who can I
take advantage of, or who can I put the move on, or whatever it
was that might have been our agenda.
And God has to look on that every day and see the heart of
men and women and children who are rebelling and hating and
refusing to follow Him. And then he looks down upon His
church, His bride all around the world.
And that's what gives him pleasure.
That's what gives him glory and praise and honor, because he can
look at all the brothers and sisters all around the world who
have been washed in the blood of the Lamb.
And that's what keeps Him from destroying this earth, the
remnant that is upon the face of this earth, that He's blessing
to continually do His will until He comes again.
All of us here today, I trust our Christians.
We know Christ, and if we know Him today, we can relax in the
sense of having peace and knowing it is well with our soul
and that if tomorrow is the end of the world, it's not going to
be a big problem for us, is it? The best is yet to come for the
Christian. But if you're here today and
you're without Christ, Jesus says in John 336, He that hath
the Son hath life. That means you have life, his
life. He that hath not the Son of God
hath not life, but what the wrath of God abideth on them.
And it's a horrible thing once you get a heads up that God is
angry with you because of your sin, that every day you should
be a nervous wreck because you don't want to leave this world
with God's wrath upon you. You don't want to leave this
life without a Savior. And this is the whole purpose of
the Book of Revelation. It's a prophetical book for the
world to understand that this is the consequences of a sinful,
ungodly world that will have to come to grips with the reality
of a holy God having his just righteousness and his due time.
And so the wrath of God is being stored up.
And some people see it and it's described in the Scriptures as a
cup of trembling. Jesus took that cup as I spoke
briefly last week on the night of his betrayal prior to his
crucifixion. He said it, if it is possible,
let this cup pass from me. He asked for this to pass from
him three times. The cup of God's anger, the cup
of God's wrath that was poured out on our Savior Jesus Christ,
who took our sins upon himself and took our punishment and
everything we deserved upon himself that we might go free.
And the Son of God, God Incarnate, had to take upon
himself and experience that horrible, horrible wrath of God.
But Hallelujah, when he was on that cross, He was able to say
it is finished. He completed it for the glory of
the Father and for the sake of those he died for and cleanse
from their sin. But this wrath is a passionate
anger and it's one day going to be poured out in such a degree
that the world has never known as horrible as Hiroshima was, as
horrible as tsunami and some other devastations, the
Holocaust, things that we have read about in history.
Nothing is going to compare to what is going to come upon this
world through these prophecies of the Book of Revelation.
And this anger of God will come to a point of completion.
It will it says in verse one. For in them the wrath of God is
complete. In other words, finally it is at
the top and, and, and, and the timing is perfect and everything
that God has waited for all these years will finally be
poured out. And he's not pouring it out
because he's an evil God. He's a loving God.
But enough is enough. He's waited over 6000 years so
patiently. And he waits because he says
he's not willing that any should perish, but that all should come
to repentance. God's righteous anger and His
wrath will fulfill his eternal purpose.
And verse 2, he talks about this vision of this sea of glass, a
multitude of standing on the sea like a crystal.
In Revelation 4, it describes a sea representing the holiness of
God, the purity of God. And in the midst of the sea,
there's this element of brightness and and some
commentators see this as the fire being mingled within the
purity of the glass, representing the fires of God's
judgment that are waiting for those who don't repent and come
to Christ. Now, it's beyond me outside of
understanding that there was a time that I was like, forget
this, I'm not interested in this stuff.
Anybody would tell me about it. I want to go the other way.
If I saw a religious tract somewhere, I just like, you
know, didn't want to deal with it.
You know, I was doing everything I could to resist this love of
God because I was comfortable in my sin.
I love my sin. The Bible say men love sin.
Men love darkness rather than light.
Why? Because their deeds are evil.
I remember a day. Is anybody remember a day when
you love sin? Raise your hand.
There's about all of us in here and maybe some of you are still
loving your sin. I pray by the day time you get
out of here today, you're going to want to flee from your sin
and run from your sin. As we read in verse 2, he talks
about this sea glass being mingled with fire.
Those who have victory over the beast, His image, His mark, the
number of His name. These are the ones that endured
the consequences of the persecution of the Antichrist.
They were martyred, they suffered the consequences
because they refused to take the mark of the beast and give
homage to Antichrist. But now they're in this
wonderful state in the Kingdom, experiencing the beauty of, of,
of the, of the Kingdom of God. And they are standing on the sea
of glass and they have harps. They are able to, to play music
unto the Lord. What a wonderful worship time
that these people are encountering and experiencing
now as we look at the images that we're studying in this Book
of Revelation, Many of these things remind us of things we've
read about or studied about in the book of the Exodus.
And the Revelation speaks of Moses in verse 3.
Here they sing the song of Moses.
And Moses was a prototype of Christ in a way, and the sense
of being the deliverer, the one who took the people out of the
bondage of Egypt under an ungodly ruler, Pharaoh, who
abused and took advantage of the children of Israel.
They prayed for a deliverer. God sent Moses as a deliverer,
and Moses delivered the children of Israel out of the bondage of
Pharaoh through great signs and wonders that the Lord allowed
him to bring forth for his glory and for his honor.
He delivered the children of Israel through the Red Sea.
He brought plagues upon Egypt to get Pharaoh to realize he needed
to let the people go. He warned them through the
plagues and the seal judgments and the trumpet judgments and
even the bowl of wrath that's going to be poured out.
The intention of God the whole time he's doing this.
Yeah, justice and righteousness. But will someone wake up when
judgment comes? Will someone finally say I need
to repent, I need to turn for my sin, I need a savior?
And many people do come to know Christ during this time of
consequence of tribulation. But the plagues are beyond
anything that anyone could imagine.
And we know as we study the book of the Exodus, how horrible they
were. And we'll get into more detail
on these plagues next week. But the plagues also, we we read
in here that he talks about a Tabernacle in heaven, a temple
in heaven. The cloud of God's glory as
Moses experienced that and the Old Testament as they took the
tent of meeting and God met with the children of Israel through
the cloud that enshrouded the tent and it represented the
divine presence and manifestation of God's living
reality among the people. The ultimate exodus.
So in Revelation is that God is delivering his people out of
this fallen world and we won't have to deal with it anymore.
Deliverance from a sinful and persecuting world.
I think about what Janine Janine shared today that should strike
some degree of terror in our hearts, that we can't be too far
from the time of the Lord's return, that this kind of agenda
is being perpetrated upon the the world, our our country,
nations. The UN, quite frankly, seems to
be a entity that is being set up to establish A1 world
government, A1 world roller, one world currency.
It has tremendous impact, tremendous power.
It's pretty much anti God as a as a an organization that is
directing the affairs of the nations.
Some of the most scandalous people are involved in the
leadership of the organization, some people who have brought
atrocities against other nations and people groups that are
allowed to continually develop their own agendas.
And and we're like the frogs in the frying pan.
We don't know about this stuff again, unless people like Janine
or others bring stuff into pastors.
You guys are responsible, as I am, for the truth of God.
In these last days, you read something, you hear about
something, you're upset about something, something isn't
right. You know, I don't care a
politician or a presidential candidate or anybody that is
perpetrating and bringing upon this country and upon the rights
of the citizens things that are unconstitutional or things that
are against the word of God. We have every right given by God
in this nation under God to stand up and say enough's
enough. But if we just keep ignoring
this stuff and not voting and thinking it's too late, what can
anybody do? God help us in our country.
God help the churches in this country.
We're not to be that way. We're to be outspoken.
We're to be lovingly and humbly aggressive about righteousness
in this land. Verse 2, it talks about those
who had the victory over the beast.
And this is again the the tribulation martyrs and they
were also described in Revelation Chapter 7, nine
through 17. You can check that out later.
These we're reading about now though, the completion of those
who survive the tribulation because that that tribulation
isn't over yet until after the bowls of wrath are poured out
and the battle of Armageddon is over and then the second coming
of Christ occurs. But this period is we're reading
about right now is within the time parameters of the
tribulation. And as I said, that the bowl
judgements are still waiting to be poured out.
This has been Living Waters of Grace with Pastor Clark.
We're going through the challenging and also intriguing
Book of Revelation. Whether you're a fan of reading
ahead in books of fiction, there's such a benefit to
reading ahead in the Bible to read about how it all ends.
But in an interesting turn of events, the Book of Revelation
is not really the end, but rather the beginning.
It's the end of life as we know it here on earth, but there's so
much to look forward to. But what comes after all?
The judgement of the earth and those who reject God.
There's a lot to work through, and it can be heartbreaking to
read through the intense judgements and wrath that will
come on those who hate God with all their might.
The thing is, God has given chance upon chance to these
people. They don't want it.
So the outcome is that there are judgments and consequences for
those who've rejected the good news and the gift of salvation
that's offered through Jesus's death and resurrection.
Are you one who has heard about these things but doesn't really
want it because you want to live life on your terms?
Trust me, living for Jesus is so much better.
That doesn't mean it will be easy, but as you listen and read
through Revelation with us, you'll come to a stark
realization that you don't want to be on earth when the
apocalypse happens. So check out Calvary Chapel
online.com to learn how to come to a saving grace through faith
that will allow you to be with Jesus for eternity.
We'd also love to meet you in person at Calvary Chapel
Westmoreland. Come join us at 400 E Pittsburgh
St. Ste. 6B in Greensburg, PA 15601.
This has been living waters of grace.