The fall of Jerusalem, although forgotten by most of the Western world, was a very dramatic event in the history of the world. Its impact was felt far beyond Israel and the Roman Empire, and far beyond the time period of its occurrence.

Nero ruled for 14 years from the year 54 AD to the year 68 AD. This was a time of rising to instability in the empire, not only in connection with the ruler of Rome, but also in connection with the entire Roman world. Because of course, as leaders go, civilizations tend to go and the more unstable the leader, the more unstable you’re going to find the culture. And that certainly was the case. And so these years during Nero and even going clear back to Caligula, there is a kind of rising, tumultuous instability that’s characterizing at least some parts of the Roman world. This really culminates with the most dramatic expression of this instability at the time, which was called the Jewish Wars. The term “the Jewish Wars” was given by Josephus, who is the most important historian of the history of the, of the Jewish people from outside the New Testament during that time.

Josephus writes extensively on this period of time that goes from about 66 to 70 AD. And so we’re going to call it by that name, the Jewish Wars. There had been, this kind of rising to instability. Rome was not falling apart, but some people feared that that might be what was happening. There were many voices commenting on the state of Rome during those years who wondered if they were actually going to survive. And in some ways it was because of this really conspicuous deterioration of the quality of the leadership that was in the royal capacity in Rome. Israel herself was also deeply divided. Israel was feeling pressure from outside, but also at the same time she was locked in the throes of an internal conflict between those who were more liberal, who really wanted to remain in the good graces of Rome and the zealots who wanted to throw off Rome.

And you were finding by the time we reached this era that there was really nobody in the middle anymore. It was a deeply polarized community of the Jewish people, most of whom probably tilted in a more moderate direction. But there was a very vocal, powerful and indeed violent, minority, but a pretty good size minority, that was militating more for violent overthrow. So there was instability outside and also in the Jewish world, instability inside, which is working together to create this kind of culture. This was all exacerbated somewhat by a series of rather corrupt Roman procuraters, that is a Roman governors, who had been the political representatives of Rome there in the Jewish world.

One procurator was Festus. He was a pretty good guy. He was the one that Paul appeared before, just before he was shipped off to Rome. But his immediate predecessor was Felix, who was notoriously corrupt. And there had been a string of others before Felix, who had also more or less put the Jewish people into a rather hostile disposition toward Rome because of their corrupt practices. aAter Festus, the next guy that came along a couple of years later was a fella named Gessius Florus. He ruled as procurator from 64 to 66 AD. He really pushed Israel to the boiling point. He’d stolen money from the temple treasury. We learned that from Tacitus. Interestingly, the Roman historian, not the Jewish historian. He plundered the temple. That was bad enough. He also, on one occasion in the year 66, he just gratuitously killed about 3,600 peaceful Jewish people.

They weren’t rabble rousers. They weren’t troublemakers, but just to sort of keep the nation and a state of instability. Almost like he was trying to incite some sort of violent, a revolt. He did this and it was considered to be something like a reign of terror during those years and other actions that he took really were inspiring and giving additional traction to this group that were commonly called the zealots. The zealots were the very ultra conservative. They were really committed to a traditional Jewish religion, but they were also committed to violent revolution against the Roman presence. And the more people like Gessius Florus were out there doing the things they were doing. The more that characters like the zealots in general, were getting additional credibility and support among the Jewish people.

In the fall of 66, the revolt of the Jewish people broke out. It’s a fairly complicated set of events that I’m not going to trouble you with. It’s a fairly readily available if you want to look it up. But it essentially what took took place was a few incidents in Cesarea spread to Jerusalem. And finally the Jewish people had enough and they actually broke out in open revolt rather unexpectedly and drove out the Roman presence from Jerusalem in a rather dramatic kind of display, a force, even Herod Agrippa II and his wife Bernice were forced to flee to Rome. Agrippa II was the last, the seventh of the Herrods. He and Bernice has wife had to flee to Rome and that’s where they lived out the rest of their days.

The governor in Syria, the Roman Governor marshalled an army at the direction of Rome to go down and put down this rebellion. His name was Cestius Gallus. He marched into Judea with an army of over 30,000 men and came down and put Jerusalem under siege. Gallus was successful in conquering Beit She’arim in the Lower Galilee. Then with his army shrunk by detachments sent to occupy Galilee and the Judean coast, Gallus directd his forces to Jerusalem. And so in a rather swift response to this revolt and the fact that Jerusalem had now been arrested from Roman control by the Jewish kind of militant forces there, Jerusalem was put under siege. However, interestingly, and for really reasons that have never been very clear, he left after six days.

Nobody knows why it remains something of a historical mystery. But he had the city locked up tight and it looked like he was just going to just starve them out. Then six days later he just up and goes home and his Roman forces go with him. The zealot forces in Jerusalem took that as divine intervention. They believed that God was going to step in and fight on their behalf and that they were going to be able to establish Jewish independence and throw off the Roman rule. And so the zealot forces, as they saw the Romans departing, saw this as their big chance. And they gathered military forces from out of Jerusalem, chased them down. At the battle of Beth Heron, the Jewish zealot force defeated the Romans and left several thousand bodies out there in the desert and came home.

As that happened, the moderates in Jerusalem were fully discredited. The interpretation that was attached to all of this, is God is going to fight our battles for us. This is the time where God has ordained that the Jewish people can realize their full independence from Rome. That was the way it was interpreted in Jerusalem except for one minority group. The Christians looked at this and took a very different view of it. The Christian people who were living in Jerusalem at that time remembered, Jesus had said back in the Olivet Discourse, when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies flee to the hills.

That’s actually a rather curious statement. When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, how exactly are you supposed to flee to the hills? After all, Jerusalem is surrounded by armies it makes it difficult to escape. And then for inexplicable reasons, the Romans left and the Christians in Jerusalem said, “pack your bags. We’re out of here.” And they quickly, taking seriously Jesus’ command, put together the modest belongings they could and got out of town. Many went north towards Syria, toward Antioch, many went out into the desert. Most of them went south into the Judean wilderness. Some went to Egypt. But all of them got away from Jerusalem, believing that Jesus had been accurate in his predictions.

This was not the mark of God coming to the salvation of Israel. This was the mark of the coming judgment on Israel for her repudiation of Messiah. Jesus himself had said, don’t weep for me, weep for yourselves, when he was being led out to be crucified, because the days are coming when embankments will be piled up against the walls of Jerusalem. Jesus had predicted it repeatedly, and these Christian people recognized that and took it that way.

Nero who is in the last year of his reign realizes that he has a huge problem with a major revolt of a major region of the Roman world and the Jewish area. There was already instability in Rome and he wants to deal with these people ferociously. Nero summoned the most competent military character in the Roman world at the time.

A man by the name of Vespasian and Nero instructs Vespasian put down the revolt in Judah. Vespasian put together an army of some 60,000 troops. These are not hired guns. This is a crack, highly disciplined a military force and it’s 60,000. That is a huge rather overwhelming force Vespasian brings to the region of Israel at that time. He started up in the region of Galilee and just systematically worked his way down through heading towards Jerusalem, each little town, each little burg, each little village is crushed. It is a bloodbath. The descriptions that we have from Josephus are absolutely horrific. He talks about the Sea of Galilee. You could see conspicuously as you looked out over at bloated bodies, and blood was in the streets of these villages and flowing down the Jordan river.

Very, very comparable to the descriptions we hear of such things in the book of Revelation. And so this description that we have from Josephus indicates that this was not by any means a gentle move on the part of Vespasian. He was working his way relentlessly down towards Jerusalem, thousands of Jewish people who were able to ahead of Vespasian’s attack fled for Jerusalem. So as the Christians were leaving, the Jewish people were heading to Jerusalem because they believed that once there, they would be safe. Jerusalem was well provisioned to sustain, to survive for several years under a siege condition. And that was the best option they seem to have. And so thousands of them fled to Jerusalem, meaning Jerusalem became bloated and overpopulated. Virtually everybody in the Jewish world was fleeing there to find safe harbor in that city.

When they arrived, they found Jerusalem itself was locked in civil war. There were the moderates in Jerusalem who were saying, “Let’s make peace with Rome. Let’s put up the white flag.” But the prevailing power was vested more in these militant forces who wanted to continue to campaign. And so Jerusalem was locked in civil war and it was also a bloated and overpopulated. Virtually every Jewish person who could escape there was there at that time. Vespasian was working his way toward Rome through this time, from the year 67 to 68 but in the year 68 kind of halfway through, his campaign is interrupted by what’s called “the year of four emperors.” This was largely related to the meltdown that was taking place, connected with Nero. Nero was forced to commit suicide.

Vespasian, one of the major leaders in the Roman world, realized that this was a time when strong leadership was necessary and he wasn’t so sure the Jewish revolt was as important as securing things in Rome. But as it turns out, there were a series of rulers who tried to take over Rome. Each one assumed the position of ruler and then was cut short by the next one. And so it came to be called the year of four emperors. The first of these was a guy named Galba, he had been a well known, highly respected military character. He was basically retired at this time. He was probably in his late sixties, seventies, pretty old for those standards in those days.

But with the death of Nero, he realize somebody needed to step up and there was a fair amount of support in the military for him to do so. So he went to Rome immediately and asserted himself as the successor to Nero and was attempting to bring some degree of stability there in Rome. However, there was another character named Ortho who was formerly closely associated to nero. In fact, there’s strong support that they had been homosexual lovers. Ortho has also had a wife that was taken by Nero and became one of the wives of Nero along the way. Ortho was banished but also at the same time it always entertained the idea that he was really the one who should be the successor.

When Galba became emporer instead, Ortho got mad and gathered a force and attacked and Galba was assassinated. Ortho was on the throne for about four months from January 15th to April 16th. A more credible successor was a man by the name of Vitellius. He was a Roman military general in the Germanic regions. His military strongly supported that he should go in and challenge Ortho, which he did. There were a series of skirmishes. Ortho then committed suicide.

And as a result of that Vitellius became the next emporer and he rulled from April down to about December. All this time, Vespasian, who has been involved in the Jewish wars is gradually, carefully, methodically assembling what was going to be an overwhelming force, believing that this was a time when Rome needed strong leadership with a strong military support. He arrived in Rome in December, challenging Vitellius and successfully defeating him. And so Vespasian who has been responsible for the Jewish campaign is now the emperor. Vespasian rules for the next 10 years. It’s called “the year of four emperors.” What it should say to you is that Rome was convulsing.

And it’s interesting that Rome is convulsing just as Jerusalem is convulsing, and this is the culmination of several years of a growing kind of crisis politically in the Roman world. Tacitus himself frankly, acknowledges that at the time he did not think Rome would survive. He thought this was the meltdown. He thought Rome was going to fragment and that the great Roman world that had been there for a thousand years was at this point simply going to fall apart. He had despaired as he was observing what was going on. Jesus said in the all of it discourse, you’ll hear of wars and rumors of wars and believe me, that’s exactly what was going on in the culture. There were wars, there were rumors of wars. It was a tumultuous and a time of upheaval and it really culminated both in Jerusalem and in Rome with the kind of evidence that we see right here.

Vespasian is the Roman emperor that actually brings a certain degree of stability back to Rome. However, of course the problem in Judah still remained. He left care for dealing with the remaining revolt in Jerusalem, with his son whose name was Titus. Titus is the son of Vespasian and Titus will eventually himself be a Roman emperor about 10 years later. So Vespasian leaves his son Titus there to mop up as it were, the remainder of the problems in Jerusalem. The problem is that Vespasian took the best of his military forces with him back to Rome. And it’s so it left Titus with a job, but not the same kind of quality military that his father had enjoyed.

Titus was required to go out and hire a whole bunch of mercenaries. Mercenaries are not the most wonderful military force. They are less dependable, they’re less disciplined, they’re in it for the money. They’re not as reliable and everybody knows that, if he’s ever studied mercenary warfare. And so Titus hires a bunch of mercenaries to carry out the rest of the campaign against the Jewish revolt. With this army, he lays siege to Jerusalem in April of 70 AD.

Jerusalem is now for the second time under a complete siege. Of course, the city is heavily overpopulated. All of these people have come from the entire Jewish world in that region and they’re now holed up in Jerusalem. But even at that, they probably could have survived a siege for some years. Jerusalem was heavily provisioned to withstand siege warfare. And so there was at least some hope that they could hang on for a while and just see how this thing shook out. However, as it turns out, Jerusalem fell to Titus only five months later. The Book of Revelation makes prominent mention of a five month period of time, presumably referring to this five months siege. The reason the siege didn’t last longer is because the zealot forces in Jerusalem wanted to provoke violent response. They didn’t want to sit in Jerusalem and simply wait for whatever it was going to happen. So to force the issue, they burned all the food.

What could have been, you know, reasonably comfortable circumstances for a protracted period of time became a crisis. Overnight.

People went for a week, two weeks, three weeks, a month, no food. And of course, what happens, when you have a concentrated population of people in famine conditions, this kind of artificial famine that’s created by siege, is things become unspeakably, ghastly and ugly. And that is exactly what happened in Jerusalem, almost beyond description with cannibalism, well documented cases of parents eating their children, the kind of things. It got so ugly that it almost defies description. Josephus gives us extensive recitation of it, and he was there. He was an eye witness to the whole thing. He was a Jewish historian, but he happened to be on the Roman side. He was right there and he saw all the things that happen. Josephus gives us a remarkable description of the catastrophe that came to Jerusalem.

Jerusalem finally fell to the seige, the walls being breached in August. And of course the Romans broke in and they found this horrific situation inside the walls of people just in a starvation condition and the most ghastly kinds of circumstances. And of course the mercenaries that were there with Titus saw this as a huge opportunity for plunder. Roman disciplined soldiers would have been a little bit more guarded at this point, waiting for commands, but these mercenaries just went crazy. And so they were going through looting, burning, stealing, raping, pillaging and everything you can imagine. And it actually got to the temple and the temple itself was set on fire and was fully destroyed. And as Jesus graphically says, in the Oliveti Discourse, not one stone was left upon another, it will all be laid waste. Jesus also said, “look, your house is left to you desolate.”

And this was when it happened. And so in a just remarkable, breathtaking fulfillment of what Jesus himself had predicted, these things took place. Titus was very upset that the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. He had wanted to preserve it. He believed that it was one of the most magnificent structures of the ancient world, which indeed it was, at least by every report it was, this was Herod’s Temple. Great expense had been expended to build this structure. He was very upset that it was destroyed, but there was not much he could do about it once the damage was done. He likely wanted to turn it into a great temple to the Roman gods, a pagan temple. I’m speculating this was his plan. And I think God in his providence was not going to permit such a thing to happen. And so the temple was destroyed.

It was the end of the temple. The temple, of course, has never been rebuilt. That was the paradigm changing moment in history when in fact, that Old Covenant era and the Temple centric worship was brought to its definitive conclusion.

According to Tacitus, Titus did not view this as a great victory. And very interestingly, and intriguingly, Titus himself felt that the catastrophe that befelled Jerusalem was so horrific that it must have represented the very judgment of the Jewish God against those people. That’s the way he viewed it. It was so much more horrific than even anything he could have anticipated or planned that he himself took that view of it. And that’s the Roman historian Tacitus tells us.

There are lots of different views of the meaning of the Book of Revelation. But one that has always been with us, and I would say at least in the early years of the Church’s history, may have been a dominant view, was that the Book of Revelation is not reporting events that are going to take place way out in the future. But as Revelation repeatedly says in its own terms, “things that are about to happen.” It was probably written in about the year 65 AD and certainly written under the persecution that was launched by Nero. It seems to be describing events that would be connected to this tumultuous moment in which you have both Jerusalem and also Rome sort of convulsed. And so if you read it in that light, at least it’s an interesting hypothesis and that’s the way I’m going to suggest it to you.

Revelation is in four major parts. The first part is the introduction to Messiah. The Book of Revelation begins by saying the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant, John, and so on. It’s the Revelation of Christ. That’s the first thing we know about this book. It’s the apocalypse, the unveiling of Christ and chapter one gives it to us. That’s the first part of the, of the book.

The next part is of course, the letters to the seven churches. John was responsible for seven churches in Asia Minor. These are the churches that John was responsible for: Ephesus, Smyrna, pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia Laodicea. John writes letters to each one of them and highlights in each one of them the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of each.

The third part is of course, the substantial message. We’ll leave that for a moment.

The fourth part of the Book of Revelation is the benediction conclusion, which we find at the end in chapter 22.

Back to the third part, what’s the message? If you’ve read Revelation recently, you know that Revelation is basically in three broad movements. Each of them organized around a seven. There are many sevens in the book of revelation, but the three most prominent and conspicuous ones are seven seals, seven trumpets, seven chalices or seven bowls or vials. You’ll read at the seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls the backbone of the organization, of the message of the Book of Revelation.

The seven seals. What are they? There’s a scroll. You’re familiar with this. It’s written on both sides but sealed with seven seals. If we lived in the Roman world and the first century, it wouldn’t take us a nanosecond to know that what’s being described there is a last will and testament. That’s the way wealthy royalty bequeath their property. They would have a document written on both sides so it could not be later amended and it would be sealed with seven witnesses and only in the presence of those witnesses after the death of the testater could that document be unraveled.

The New Testament is called a New Testament for a reason. It’s a document that was generated and authorized based on the death of the testater, namely Christ himself. The entire New Testament makes it clear that Christ is the one who is creating this new covenant or New Testament based on his death and his resurrection. How does the new covenant era get started? It gets started as the seals are broken and it unleashes the events that surrounded this last generation, that generation. So that’s the inauguration of the covenant. The trumpets are instruments of announcement, trumpets sound in order to make announcements to people. And so they are in a sense of the announcement, both of the dreadful judgments that are coming, but also the redemption that is coming in this new covenant era. And then the bowls actually represent the execution of these. So we have the covenant itself.

We have it announced in the trumpets and we have an executed in the bowls or chalices. So that’s kind of the basic imagery of the book. The seven seals of course, give us exactly what was happening in the Roman world at that time. The white horse is Messiah, as we find in chapter 19, he’s going out as a king, conquering and to conquer. He’s on a white horse. He must reign until he has put every enemy under his feet. You see, he is the conquering Lord of history, riding out into the pages of history. And that’s the first one. The other three are descriptive of the tumultuous times; the Red Horse wars and rumors of wars, the black horse, the famine, especially in Jerusalem, the Pale horse, the pestilence and plague that comes in the face of famine.

The last three of the seals on the other hand are the redemptive side. So we have the judgment side in a sense, in the first four followed by the redemptive side. The fifth seal is the cry of the martyrs for vindication. Already there have been many, many Christian martyrs who’s blood is crying out from under the altar for vindication. “How long o Lord, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” And they were told just to wait a little longer until the full number of their brothers and sisters who were to be killed with them was completed and they were given white robes and told to just anticipate. Now this is the moment when their lives and their death is going to be vindicated in history.

You have the sixth seal, which is the collapse of political authority. It’s described apocalyptically. As the sun turned dark, the moon turned to sack cloth. The stars in the sky fell to the earth. That is typical Old Testament prophetic language to describe the collapse of the political order essentially into anarchy. The same kind of descriptive language is used by Isaiah to describe the fall of Babylon, for example. It’s the sort of thing you find. It’s not describing actual celestial events. It’s describing apocalyptically and symbolically a time of great collapse here of the ordering powers in history. That’s exactly what happens with the collapse of Jerusalem and with the upheaval in Rome. You’ll see it’s exactly the way it would have seen by those living at the time.

Chapter Seven is an interlude. Chapter Seven is the protection of God’s people. It’s very interesting. In Chapter Seven, you’ve got two groups of people. The first 144,000 who are from all the tribes of Israel are sealed. A seal means they’re protected. They go into a time of great tribulation. Out the other end of the tribulation is the innumerable crowd that no one can number of every nation, tribe, language and people. You have a kind of a Jewish population going in and an explosion to a gentile population coming out of a time of great tribulation.

All of that is laid out as saying that this moment in history is the moment when God’s people are going to take on an entirely different look. It’s you might say demographically when it’s no longer going to be largely Jewish. It’s now going to catapulted to all the nations, peoples, languages of the world.

Then finally the seventh seal is actually itself, the trumpets, which are brought next. These announced the new covenants. Again, we have a four and then three kind of arrangement.

The first four talk about catastrophe on land, on sea and in the air. The catastrophe on land and sea as largely described in terms of fire, in terms of blood, in terms of the sea running rich with blood. The air is filled with smoke. If you’d been standing there seeing Vespasian come, you would’ve said that’s what’s being described. That’s exactly what’s going on. They’re coming from the north and indeed the text says these forces will come across the Euphrates from the north heading for Jerusalem. You have a rather stunning kind of description of what actually took place there. Then you have what are called the three woes. The first woe is said to be locusts. This is destruction, diabolic and archaic destruction from within. These creatures are said to come out of the abyss and a you have to know a little bit of the local lore to appreciate this.

I’m just going to give you the real short version that this is descriptive of a complete breakdown of any kind of ordered life together inside the city as if it had been invaded. It said to last for precisely five months, which happens to be the length of time the siege was carried on in Jerusalem and I think it basically represents the complete collapse of any sort of social order within the city. Feeling very diabolical as if these creatures were coming right out of hell itself at the same time. The second woe, in chapter nine of Revelation are horses, fire-breathing horses that are coming from the north across the Euphrates. These are the Roman forces, of course, coming now and coming from the north to attack. So you’ve got destruction from inside destruction, from outside, and then another interlude. And this interlude is not the protection of God’s people.

It’s the witness of God’s people. The texts that I recited to you a moment ago is in this context, John is told to eat a scroll. The Christian witness is not something we speak into something we are. You are what you eat. You eat the scroll, it becomes you. Your DNA is filled with the word of God. We aren’t simply people delivering a message. We are a message. You see, and John is now called to go and preach that message. And then we here in chapter 11 of the two witnesses, the two witnesses in Jerusalem, which are of course the law and the prophets, Moses and Elijah. This was the witness against God’s people. This was the great warning to them that if they were unfaithful to their covenant responsibilities, sooner or later, God would judge them. In Deuteronomy 28 and Leviticus 26 it’s spelled out in graphic terms and so this is it.

These are the witnesses. They are killed in the streets and their bodies are left in the street, everybody’s rejoicing. Look, we escaped it. We’re going to win, God’s judgement will not come. But no, God raises them to life. This is in fact the moment when that witness against them is going to be fully realized, and by the way, it’s in chapter 11 that we are told expressly that Jerusalem is the city under discussion here, the city where their Lord was crucified. John says, and he says, it is figuratively called Sodom and Egypt, but it is in fact the place of Christ’s crucifixion. It can be no other place than Jerusalem.
Then the third is regime change. This is the wonderful texts that we sing every year in the Messiah. The Kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. This is the moment when King Jesus having ascended to the throne, having declared to his followers, “all authority is given unto me,” is now in a sense making good on the promises he himself made.

It’s called in Revelation, the wrath of the lamb. Yyou don’t think of lambs as being very wrathful do you, but that’s precisely the term that’s used. The lamb that had been slaughtered in Jerusalem now comes back for those who repudiated him in wrath. It’s regime change that’s taking place.

Finally, the third seven, the seven bowls or chalices. There are three little stories that run up to this. Chapters 12 and 13 give us, first of all, in chapter 12 the woman and the Dragon, the woman has said to give birth to a son who will rule the nations with a rod of iron. He has caught up to heaven, but he is attacked just as he is born by a dragon that has seven heads and 10 horns. It’s a red dragon. My own opinion is that’s descriptive apocalyptically of Herod.

The whole family was hostile to the birth of Christ starting with the first of the seven Herods, the seven heads of this red dragon. The red, the color red was in fact, the family color of the Herods, just by way of interesting side point. They attack God’s people. They attack all the way through trying of course to get this victory, but God’s people are protected. They’re carried into a safe place. All of that is in chapter 12. In chapter 13 we get the two beasts. There’s a beast from the sea and the beast from the land. The beast from the sea stands for gentile power. The Sea always stands for gentile authority. In the Old Testament and through the new, the land stands for Jewish authority. The land of Israel we think of the land is as God’s people to see as the gentile world.

Two beasts, you might say corrupt politics married to corrupt religion. The two of them support each other. In chapter 13, we are told definitively who the beast of the sea is because the number of his name is six six six. You know, people in the early church didn’t have to spend five minutes figuring that out because in the ancient world letters had numeric value and all they had to do was do a little bit of mathematics and figure out that the one name that had the number six six six was the name Nero. And so it was virtually universally understood in the early years of the church, Nero is the six six six. We don’t remember that so well because we aren’t familiar with the ancient language or the number of value of the letters.

Chapter 13 chapter 14 are the two harvests, the harvest of the Grapes of Wrath in Chapter 14. Steinbeck got his wonderful title from that. There’s also the harvest of Gods of redemption. So that’s the picture there. This is all describing what God is doing in a sense in the background leading up now to what we have at this point, the final judgments, the seven chalices poured out in chapters 15 and 16.

This leads us then to the latter part of Revelation, which I’m calling a tale of two cities. Beginning of Chapter 17 going through 22 you have two cities described. The first of these is said to be a harlot city. It’s said to be Babylon. It’s said to be the great city. By the way, the great city implies that there’s only one, not multiple.

And we’ve already been told in Revelation the great city is the city where also their Lord was crucified. So the great city has got to be Jerusalem and Jerusalem is called a harlot city because it was once the wife, the spouse of Yahweh. You can’t be a harlot and adulterous in a sense, unless you have once been in the status of a legitimate and faithful spouse. That’s why it cannot be Rome as some people would say. Rome was never a faithful spouse of Yahweh in the first place. How could it become an adulterous? Jerusalem was. And so Jerusalem is the one that turns away. And this is the old Jerusalem described in graphic terms in chapter 17 and chapter 18. The merchants of the earth throw dust on their heads. Woe to us. What will we do? Because Jerusalem had been a center of worldwide commerce and of immense wealth and now the city was destroyed and fortunes were lost.

And people who had been involved in international trade with Jerusalem were destroyed and devastated and wiped out by this great city. It happened in history just the way it’s described there in chapter 18. On the other hand, the other city that’s described at this time is the New Jerusalem. A New Jerusalem implies an old Jerusalem, doesn’t it? This New Jerusalem is said to be the wife of the lamb. This is the one who is the faithful wife. She’s described as this wonderful creation coming down from heaven. It is the pure temple. It’s a cubic structure because the inner sanctuary of the temple was a cube in shape and so it’s symbolically standing for the people of God.

There’s no need for a temple there because we are the temple. We are the dwelling place of God in his presence on this earth.

This is my understanding of the Book of Revelation. I am open to correction. I’m not saying I have this perfect, but when we look at when Jesus said the things would happen, “the time is at hand,” and we look at history, we see it being fulfilled. I realize I have left a lot of unanswered questions and I welcome your questions.