REVELATION 35 – The Winepress of Wrath

       Last week we talked about the Lamb upon Mt. Zion. We talked about the fact that the vision symbolizes the absolute subjection of the world by Christ. With him are the 144,000. They are chaste men, men who have kept themselves chaste and not necessarily in a sexual or virginal sense, but in a sense of not chasing after any god but Christ. They were the ones who follow the Lamb wherever He goes and they are the first fruits to God and the Lamb. Then we talked about the end of the chapter from 14:6 following where you have this vision of three angels who are proclaiming. It says:  14:6 And I saw another angel flying in mid-heaven, having an eternal gospel to preach… (7) and he said…  You see these three angels proclaiming something. Then in verse 14 it says: And I looked and behold, a white cloud, and sitting on the cloud was one like a son of man,… So you see this vision of Christ enthroned on the cloud. Remember when you see that cloud idea in Scripture, you should be thinking of the glory cloud, the Shekinah is what it is called in Hebrew. This phenomenon  of the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud which represented the legs of God standing on the earth.

Q: Which one do you think it is here, the glory cloud or judgment?

A: I think it’s both. If you look at the Old Testament it talks about the pillar of cloud and fire. So we tend to think of it in terms of cloud and fire kind of mixed up. But one of my professors, M.G. Kline has studied the Old Testament in the original language for some forty years now. He wrote several books dealing with this spirit image idea. He’s convinced, and I think there is very credible evidence, and Chilton agrees, that actually there were two columns - one of fire and one of cloud. There are other things in Scripture that have to do with that idea. There were the two columns in the front of the temple that had particular names. So we see this double column idea throughout the Old Testament particularly. So I think what it’s talking about here is just the fact that the cloud idea represents where God dwells. We see in Exodus, for instance, that ‘God looked out from the cloud’ and saw the Egyptians and so he was enthroned in the cloud.

Q: Is that Isaiah 19? I remember Isaiah 19, just an interesting note on the whole issue of literalism and symbolism, it says that God is riding on a swift cloud to bring judgment or destruction upon Egypt. The question, as I was discussing this with some dispensational friends, and asking them, is God literally standing on a cloud and zapping lightening bolts down on the ground?

A: It could be. In some cases we do see that kind of an idea in Scripture.

Q: We’re looking at the question of literalism or symbolism, how we’re interpreting what we reading here… when to see it symbolically, when to see it literally.

A: Right. And that’s the key. Look at the context. In Exodus 14:24 it says: And it came about at the morning watch, that YHWH looked down on the army of the Egyptians from the pillar of fire and cloud and brought the army of the Egyptians into confusion. Here’s a case where literally there was the Shekinah glory and it says God was enthroned in the Shekinah glory and that’s clear from other Scriptures too, and He looked out from the cloud and saw the Egyptians and brought them into confusion. So the idea here is that God is enthroned in this glory cloud, He is there. That’s the physical manifestation of where God dwells. Remember when they finished the tabernacle and the arc of the covenant and everything and God had dedicated that the cloud came down and filled the tabernacle and the glory of God in that Shekinah glory phenomenon was between wings of the cherubim. That’s where God dwelt among His people. So it’s this physical manifestation of God’s presence in the midst of His people.

Q: I’ve always really struggled with that thinking that the Bible teaches us that God is omnipresent and Jesus is God - is Jesus omnipresent?.

A: He is.

Q: And yet you say that in some ways He is divine and…

A: Was Jesus omnipresent? Jesus was omnipresent because He is God.

C: He’s omnipresent but in his form of Jesus…

R: But He had a physical form, did He not? He was localized.

Q: He saw Nathaniel. He was not Jesus even though in His body He was not physically limited to knowing what was going on.

A: It’s like the tornado that hit last night. What is a tornado? It’s wind, air. It’s a localized, visible manifestation of air. That’s one way I used to talk about God. God is omnipresent like air is omnipresent, in most cases. Yet there can be a physical manifestation of the presence of God.

Q: Couldn’t you argue that Jesus wasn’t omnipresent but that God was continually speaking to Him and giving Him these things? Because of the idea of Him not having and receiving things from the Father and knowing them because He got it from the Father?

A: Yes. Not even the Son knows the time. Just the Father.

Q: The reason why He knew that was because God had given Him that vision.

A: Yes. But what we need to understand here is there are two things going on and this is the basis of error in the Church. I know we’re off the lesson here but I think this is important. The basis for heresy in the Church is verses that seem to teach one thing contrary to the rest of Scripture. If I say that Jesus did not know all things, what have I done? I’ve stripped Him of His deity. He is now just a man as opposed to fully God. If I say that Jesus the man knew all things, what have I done? I’ve deified the man. I’ve stripped him of his humanity.

Q: But He grew up as a child and He learned.

A: He learned from His obedience, absolutely. What we’ve got to understand is that we can go as far as Scripture, and no further. The Scripture very clearly teaches that Christ learned submission from His obedience. Jesus the man was not perfect in that sense. The Scripture clearly teaches that Christ was perfect in every thing, otherwise we have no hope. So we’ve got to be able to put those things together, and it’s difficult for us because we don’t think in those terms. Remember God’s ways are so far above our ways that we have no hope of ever understanding except by what He has told us. So you find the Arian controversy, one of the first controversies in the church that dealt with this idea of Jesus not being God. You find the Manichean controversy which dealt with the idea that Jesus was actually two separate entities, one God and one human. So all these heresies that the church has dealt with throughout the years come from these exact kinds of things. There’s nothing new here. We’re dealing with the same issues that the church has been struggling with since Paul and John. Remember John particularly is writing against the Gnostics. This group of Jewish professing believers who said you’re got to have our expertise in order to understand these mysteries. Paul says no, the mystery has been revealed.

       So we need to understand that we go as far as Scripture says and no further, and we don’t look at one particular verse and build our theology, because there is no God if that’s the case. That’s a direct quote from the Bible, there is no God.

       So we see then that Christ is enthroned, sitting on the cloud. Remember this idea of sitting was the person who was the leader, the king. It’s not just that he’s kicked back on a cloud because it’s nice and soft, a lazy boy recliner, that’s not what it’s talking about here. It’s a term that has to do with the fact that He was reigning, that He was enthroned and that goes together with this glory cloud phenomena. 

       14:14 one like a son of man having a golden crown on His head, and a sharp sickle in His hand. (15) And another angel came out of the temple… And then you see three angels who are participating, as it were, with Christ in something. So again you’ve got the three angels who are talking, you’ve got the picture of Christ in the center enthroned, and then the three angels on the other side who are doing something.

       14:15 And another angel came out of the temple, crying out with a loud voice to Him who sat on the cloud, “Put in your sickle and reap, because the hour to reap has come, because the harvest of the earth is ripe.” (16) And He who sat on the cloud swung His sickle over the earth; and the earth was reaped. (17) And another angel came out of the temple which is in heaven, and he also had a sharp sickle. (18) And another angel, the one who has power over fire, came out from the altar; and he called with a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle (this is the second angel with the sharp sickle), saying, “Put in your sharp sickle, and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, because her grapes are ripe.” (19) And the angel swung his sickle to the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and threw them into the great wine press of the wrath of God.

       This absolutely contradicts the pre-millennial, dispensational rapture position in the church today. It blows it out of the water. Why?

R: Because the wicked are harvested first, right?

A: No!

R: In the parable of the wheat and the tares, it’s the…

A: Right! Go ahead….

Q: Who is it that gets gathered up first???

A: The wicked. What does this say? It happens at the same time. There’s no 1,000 years here is there? The pre-millennial dispensational teaching is that the righteous will be taken up first and a thousand years later, the wicked. ‘Danger: In case of rapture, this car will be without a driver.’

Q: Could they use the argument that these things do not have any time reference?

A: They could. Except that there are other teachings in Scripture that go along with this. Particularly, I think it’s in Thessalonians in which I can prove in just a very few verses that the rapture, the judgment of the wicked, the reward of the righteous, the destruction of the cosmos all occur, not on the same day but the same hour the Bible says. Jesus says an ‘hour’ is coming when all… So again, this is the lesson. We have to look at what does the whole of Scripture say? It’s not just simply one or two verses, we’ve got to look at what does the whole of Scripture say?

C: In the parable of the wheat and the tariffs the wicked are gathered first.

R: All three of those parables by the way.

C: The point is you can’t deny or can’t object to say that’s not simultaneous. Just to say first get the wicked out then, that could be right at the same time, you know. When a conquering army comes in it takes the prisoners out first then gets the… Say you take over a Nazi concentration camp or whatever, you get the victims out then you line of the Nazis and shoot them or whatever. It’s not all at the same time.

R: Right. Stuart has pointed out what you see in the parable of the wheat and the tares were related to the parable of the fish and the drag net and there’s one other, there’s three of them. Where the wicked are clearly the ones that are taken first. So you say to the pre-millennial dispensationalists, excuse me, what does Jesus say here? They don’t have an answer for that.

C: You just remember that parable. You can say to any dispensationalist the Bible does not teach pre-tribulation. It contradicts it.

       Again here what we’re seeing is the same kind of an idea although this would go along with what they are teaching from some perspective, but again there’s no time difference here. This happens apparently at the same point in time. Now they could argue as Jody has pointed out, well there’s a thousand year gap in here. Excuse me but I don’t see that. It doesn’t say that. So we need to look at what does the whole of Scripture teach.

Q: Are we going to wait until we get to Revelation 20 to get into the whole thousand year controversy?

A: (laughter). I had intended on doing that. You can’t really argue one way or the other on the thousand years. There very clearly is a thousand years. Revelation 20 is very clear that there is a thousand years. The question is what does the thousand years mean.

Q: In verses 14-… it seems like all I really hear about is these grapes… it sounds like it’s the wine press of the wrath of God until… was is it your point that the righteous was in…

A: Yes, and I didn’t point that out clearly. Thank you.

       Verse 15 is the key here: 14:15 And another angel came out of the temple, crying out with a loud voice to Him who sat on the cloud, Who is that? God. “Put in your sickle and reap, because the hour to reap has come, because the harvest of the earth is ripe.” What is the harvest of the earth? The righteous. The salvation of souls. Jesus says look the fields are white for harvest. So that’s the key. The differentiation there is that part is talking about the righteous and Christ is taking them, notice, and then it says: (18) And another angel, the one who has power over fire, (in Scripture, fire symbolizes God’s judgment - hell, damnation) came out from the altar; and he called with a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle (remember, this is the second angel with the sharp sickle, not Christ. Christ also has a sickle. This angel has another sickle), saying, “Put in your sharp sickle, and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, because her grapes are ripe.” (19) And the angel swung his sickle to the earth, and gathered the vine of the earth, and threw them into the great wine press of the wrath of God. When it says the vine of the earth, it’s talking about Satan’s fellow worshippers. That’s not the church. So what we tend to see when we see ‘vine,’ we normally think of Christ. We are the vineyard. But very clearly there is a differentiation here when you look at it closely. It’s the followers of Satan, it’s the ungodly.

Q: When is it that he’s speaking of? What’s the time text or the time that the earth is ripe for harvesting of souls?

A: I think it’s the end of the world, in some sense, in principle. But I think, in context, it’s the destruction of Jerusalem.

C: If the wrath of God is against their apostasy and the whole argument that this is judgment against them in the context of wheat harvest it would have to be at the same time.

R: Right. What’s the context of Revelation? What have I been teaching for the last 30 weeks? It’s the destruction of Jerusalem. It happened in 70 AD. Now if that’s true, then what’s being talked about here is contemporary to 70 AD. Now how can I prove that from this passage from 13-20? How can I prove that that’s not the end of the world contextually? There’s a key phrase in there.

A: One thing that comes to mind in support of the idea of what God is saying here, is you had incredible conversions early on in Acts. So to say that He was saying it was right, it was.

R: Right! The church blossomed. It just exploded. But there’s a key phrase in verse 13. Read it closely. “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on!” If this is the end of the world, there won’t be anymore. So how in the world can this be talking about the end of the world?

Q: Following this verse then, is the rest of it future? Or are we still going to go in and out?

R: I think that the wrath, the one in context, is against apostate Israel.

A: Yes. The context is, this is God’s judgment upon Israel. So Christ can say “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on!” because there’s going to be a now on. There still is a now on. We don’t know when the now on is going to stop. We’re still in the now on.

C: That sounds like a premillennialist argument. In Matthew they say that in context it was talking about Jesus’ day but it was also talking about… when He says these things this generation shall not pass… they’re saying that’s a double prophecy.

R: I’m not saying it’s a double prophecy. I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying that contextually it has to do with the destruction of Jerusalem. Principally we can show from other Scriptures that God will save the righteous and the wicked will suffer the wrath of God, principally.

C: It’s also talking about Babylon as well.

R: Yes. It’s talking about Babylon. Who is Babylon? Israel. Jerusalem.

C: This may have nothing to do with it but you know how things that seem either vague or come out of the middle of nowhere, I always found it interesting too that probably for Jesus to come out of the most obscure places and never seem to… We were reading Isaiah last night, the virgin shall be with child, it seemed to come in the middle of this passage where it doesn’t seem to fit.

C: In the context of it all, it’s really not fair to Jews back then to say “Oh, that means that…”

C: We know it now because we look back. You know what I’m saying? Because it’s in Scripture tells us that then they’ll bring these obscure verses in the New Testament examples that’s talking about Jesus. You wonder how they must have thought back then looking at it before it happened.

R: That’s the key. Jesus says to the Pharisees: ‘you search the Scriptures to learn of eternal life, but they testify of Me.’ How did the wise men know when to come to Jerusalem? From the Scriptures. From the stars. From the consonance of what they had been studying. When Jesus was becoming popular and people said, “How can anything good come out of Nazareth?” What were they saying? They knew the Messiah was supposed to be born in Bethlehem. And they thought Jesus had been born in Nazareth. But if they had studied, if they had listened, if they had learned, they would have known that He was born in Bethlehem but lived in Nazareth. You see the problem that we see with the Jews and we see with people today, we see these “cafeteria Christians.” They pick and choose. They go down the line and say “I want some of that. I don’t want any of that. Predestination, no. Pre-millennial rapture, I’ll have a lot of that. That’s yummy!” You see this idea of people picking and choosing what they want from Scripture.

C: You get predisposed to a certain kind of a Messiah. So it colored what they read.

R: Absolutely.

C: White horse. King-like. Sword, the whole bit.

R: Brian is absolutely right. The Jews, by and large, the majority had this idea of Jesus as the knight in shining armor on the white horse who was coming to lead them back to their former glory. They didn’t want somebody who was willing to wash feet. They wanted somebody who would demand his feet be washed.

       What do we see in the church today? Don’t we see exactly the same thing? People have an idea of the kind of God they want. The kind of Jesus they want. They want a Jesus who says, ‘I love you all. Come unto Me.’ They don’t want a conquering Jesus. In fact Chilton talks about a commentator having to do with these verses, “As we saw in verse 8 the word rendered wrath is really heat. Those who desire Babylon’s cup of heat will get a hotter drink than they bargained for. The cup of God’s undiluted wrath. Those who fornicate with the beast will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, (those who are apostate, those who are worshipping. The Bible uses fornicate to describe them) and in the presence of the Lamb and the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever. (That’s in verse 11. Verse 10 says) …they will be tormented in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. The imagery of their permanent doom was taken from the utter destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone. When the smoke of the Lamb ascended like the smoke of a furnace (Genesis 28).” Incredibly, this commentator claims that the illusion to the Lamb is embarrassing for the Christian!” Why does she say that? We don’t want to think of Jesus standing there watching the wicked being tormented forever. That’s contrary to our idea of Jesus. He’s the loving little baby born in the manger. He’s the Jesus that says to everybody “Come unto Me.” He’s not the Jesus with fire coming out of His eyes who calls down eternal destruction upon those who refuse to believe in Him.

C: I distinctly remember him flipping a table or two of the moneychangers.

R: And something about a whip in His hand driving people out of the temple.

       You see what we’ve got to understand here is to get away from the “popular” idea of who Jesus is and look at the “Biblical” idea of who Jesus is.

C: Or even to tell someone, it’s politically correct today to say to someone religion is wrong, and there’s Jesus saying ‘you’re father is Satan.’ I can’t imagine they’d look over that. That’s not nice.

R: I’ve probably told you this story before, but it reminds me of this idea, I don’t know how many of you are familiar with Walter Martin. I had the pleasure of seeing him in Hawaii right after I became a Christian. He came over and did a presentation at one of the schools there. He was talking about having been on TV with a famous lady preacher, who shall remain nameless, but she always had a big smile plastered on her face and everybody in the audience knew who it was. It was a lady by the name of Terry Cole Whittaker, who was really popular in Southern California years ago. She married Darrin McGavin, went off to Hawaii and took most of the funds from her church with her. But he was saying he was on a TV show with her and she always talked about love and how Jesus was love. You’ve got to love everybody. She said, “Mr. Martin, the only thing wrong with what you teach is that what you say is so unloving. Jesus was love. He loved everybody.” He said, “On the contrary my dear. I’m probably the most loving person here.” She said, ‘Oh, what do you mean?”  He said, “Would you agree that Jesus was a loving person?” “Oh yes, He was the epitome of love.”, she responded. He launched, he recited a whole group of verses, “You generation of vipers… You white washed tombs full of dead men’s bones…”  All these verses that Jesus had said. He responded, “That, was the loving Jesus.” She said, “Oh.”

       What was his point? She had been teaching one kind of Jesus. She was a cafeteria Christian. She picked out what she wanted. She didn’t want to deal with Jesus as judge. That’s what people fail to understand in the church today. Jesus has come as Savior, past tense. That happened almost 2,000 years ago. When Jesus comes the next time, how is Jesus going to come? As Judge. He’s not coming with His arms held out wide saying, “Come unto Me.” When that trumpet sounds, it’s too late. That’s why we ought to have this urge, this zeal to tell people about Jesus Christ. To say to them, ‘you’ve got to make a decision. Tomorrow may be too late.’ We don’t know when Jesus is coming back. We’ve got to teach our kids. We’ve got to talk to our friends. We’ve got to talk to the ungodly. Listen to the conversation and think of ways you can bring Jesus into the conversation and say to people in a nice way, ‘have you ever thought about what’s going to happen? Let’s say that 2,000 is the end of the world, have you ever thought about what’s going to happen? You know what the Bible teaches. Jesus is coming back as Judge. Are you ready?’

Q: Looking at verse 20 here, it talks about 1,600 stadia. That seems like a lot of blood. Two hundred miles.

Q: What’s the significance of that difference?

A: It’s a vast amount of blood. Let me read you what Chilton says: “verse 20: And the wine press was trodden outside the city, and blood came out from the wine press up to the horses’ bridles, for a distance of 1,600 stadia. It’s unfortunate the translation such as the New American Standard Version, due to literalist presuppositions, render this measurement into a modern American measurement - 200 miles. While that translation does provide a good idea of the magnitude of the bloodshed it entirely misses the important symbolic figure of 1,600. A number which again emphasis the land.” Remember that most of the time in Revelation when it says ‘the earth,’ (by the way I didn’t point that out but in verse 19 it’s ‘to the land’, it’s not the whole world that’s being talked about. Verse 16 as well. He swung His sickle over the earth, it’s the land. The Greek word there is “Gaes” which is normally used for the land of Israel. So again, that puts it in context that it’s Jerusalem and Palestine that we’re talking about. The modern presupposition is that it’s the whole world. It’s futuristic so they translate it the earth.) He says, “1,600 stadia is slightly more than the length of Palestine. The whole land of Israel is thus represented as overflowing with blood in the coming nationwide judgment. The streams of running blood become a great red sea reaching up to the horses’ bridles in a recapitulation of the overthrow of Pharaoh’s horses and chariots. Zechariah had foretold of a day when all things throughout the land would be holy, when the land would be filled with pure worshippers, when holy to the Lord would be inscribed even on the bells of the horses of Israel. But God had raised up on Mt. Zion a new purer Israel in which the promises would be fulfilled.” In other words, the Old Testament seems to talk of Israel as becoming completely holy to the Lord. We know from our perspective that we are that Israel. We are the church. We are the descendants of Abraham. It’s not the political entity that is in view. It’s the spiritual entity that’s in view. It’s the new Israel, the church.

       “Old Israel had become apostate and unclean. Her horses swimming in blood. The bloodshed covers the land and yet it is outside the city.” Notice that it says And the wine press was trodden outside the city, The historical fulfillment of this was from one perspective when Galilee was all overflowed with fire and blood as the troops of Vespasian and Titus overran the country. The whole land, except for Jerusalem, was covered with death and devastation.”  When the Romans came in 68-70 AD, they literally destroyed everything. So there was this idea of blood flowing throughout the land. They were killing everything. “Theologically however, the fulfillment of this text must also be related to the sacrifice of Christ for that was the definitive blood shedding outside the city. In the Old Testament sacrificial system the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the holy place by the high priest are burned outside the camp.” That’s why Jesus was crucified outside the city. He was the scapegoat. He was the burnt offering, the sin offering that was taken outside the city and burned. Hebrews makes it very clear that Jesus was sacrificed outside the city because he was the sin offering.

       That’s some of the idea that you see going on here. Christ’s blood was shed by rebellious Israel and he goes on to say, “Here is a doctrine of limited atonement and with a vengeance:  blood would flow. If the blood is not Christ’s shed on our behalf, it will be ours. In AD70 the vine of Israel is cut down and trampled in a wine press. But this destruction is a culmination of a process which lasted over 40 years that began outside the city when one whom they despised and rejected trod the wine press alone and of the people there was none with him. It was in that moment that Jerusalem fell.” So he’s pulling together this idea of Christ as a sacrifice. He is the one who suffered the eternal wrath of God. Our blood in Him flowed. But again, in the context it’s rebellious Israel that is in view here, their judgment.

Q: I was noticing here how it talks about how Jesus was watching people suffer, and then Jesus died on the cross, people were watching Him suffer.

A: Absolutely. Again, we don’t have a problem with people watching Jesus suffer, but we do have a problem with the loving Jesus watching people suffer. We don’t like to think of that but God will, Jesus is God. Jesus will come back and He will in some sense watch the wicked suffer eternally the wrath of God.

Q: He complains about changing to the 200 miles, but I still didn’t hear where the 1,600… The significance of that number.

A: Four squared represents the land, is what he is saying, times ten squared which represents largeness.

Q: So it’s 16 times 1,000?

A: Right. Again, you can do a lot with numbers in Scripture, so I was trying to stay away from that.

Q: I thought 1,600 stadia might have been a well known number in terms of describing the land of Israel. ‘This 1,600 stadia is our land.’