Perry: Here’s an old man, he’s probably close to a 100 years of age and he’s had a vision of a flying dragon with seven heads and ten horns, a woman that’s pregnant in the heaven with the dragon trying to eat her and he has all this weird symbolism of a seven sealed book and a Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes and obviously if the Roman people were reading that and looking at that they’d say this guy must have been smoking something. Give him his old scroll and get out a here. God actually allowed the symbolism to protect the book from its destruction by Romans. Everybody got that? So we always want to know why didn’t God just make it simple why didn’t God just say I’m going to destroy Rome one day. Because if he said it that way that book would have never got off the Isle of Patmos. It would have been considered a political book that would have stirred up passions among the Romans. So that’s why the symbolism in it. But let me go back to the original thought which is about John and the Book of Revelation being written. The Book of Revelation was written in 95 A.D. But here’s what Jesus meant when He said, “Some of you shall not taste death ‘til you see the Kingdom.” John on the Isle of Patmos saw the Kingdom before he died. And that Kingdom was he saw the New Jerusalem that no one else had ever seen in the Old Testament. Abraham looked for a city that had foundations whose Builder and Maker was God. But he never saw the city. John gave a description of the city. John saw the 1000 year reign of Christ which nobody else in the, in the Old Testament, whether it be Moses or the Prophets ever saw. And if you look at the Book of Revelation John saw things that no one saw of how the eternity was going to usher in the New Jerusalem and the Messiah. So John did not die, that’s what Jesus said, ‘til he saw the Kingdom. Now the other thing that we have to cover before we get— and this is just like an introduction here, the other thing we have to cover about the Book of Revelation has to do with this idea in Matthew 24 where Jesus gives all the signs of the times and then He says “this generation shall not pass ‘til all these things are fulfilled.” This confuses a lot of people because in Matthew 24, for example, in verse 1 through 3, he talks about the destruction of the Temple. Then he starts talking about in verse 4, 5, 6 through 8 wars, rumors of wars, famines, pestilence and earthquake and all these are the beginning of sorrows. That’s the English translation, the actual Greek word in Mathew 24:8 is “birth pains.” Then He starts talking about in verse 14 how the gospel is preached and then the end comes. But then the end doesn’t really come because in verse 15 He talks about an abomination that makes Jerusalem desolate. Then He talks about cosmic signs in the heaven, and then He talks about how that things are going to get really bad but the Son of man’s going to come back on the clouds of glory. And then He, then He says this statement that honestly has confused people: “But this generation shall not pass ‘til ALL these things are fulfilled.” Now all of these things would imply the destruction of the Temple, all of the signs of deception, wars, earthquakes, pestilence. And then the cosmic activity that would happen in the heaven, and suddenly the Son of man appearing in the, in the heavens.
