The Winding Up of All Things
Table of Contents
The Winding up of All Things: Part 3
Notes of an Address
Revelation 20, to 21:1-8REV 20 REV 21:1-8
Part 3
I suppose you have heard a great deal about the beast and the false prophet; where are they during that thousand years of blessing on the earth when all the earth is rejoicing? They were consigned immediately to their eternal abode, as we read in the 19th chapter. So we read in chapter 20:10.
“And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night forever and ever.”
After the thousand years, many, many will join their company as we shall see directly, and he who had given to that beast his throne and great authority, is now consigned with them; the deceiver and the deceived are together, and together forever!
“If the blind lead the blind" said the Savior, "both shall fall into the ditch." The leader and the led. What a word of warning!
What a solemn thing to take the place of being a leader of men, or preacher to men. It has to be feared, many a preacher and those he has preached to, will find themselves together in this way. One doesn't let his mind or imagination run (must not do that in Scripture), but there are several scriptures not to develop this, but intimate it.
“All they shall speak and say unto thee, Art thou also become weak as we? art thou become like unto us?" Isa. 14:10.
What a reception we gather from that scripture will be found in the other world. "Where the beast and the false prophet are." Mighty here upon the earth for a short season. One mighty politically, the other mighty religiously. Hand in hand they were here on earth, and hand in hand they are in hell! Hell is a general word there, and it is called the lake of fire.
What is symbolized by the lake of fire burning with fire and brimstone is confinement under the severest judgment of God forever and ever. That is the second death. That is, it is everlasting separation from God under His judgment.
The Millennium is past, the devil is consigned to his everlasting abode, what takes place now? There is an awful scene. I know of no more awful scene in Scripture than that!
“And I saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.”
Who do you think that is? Other readings omit "God". Who is it that sits upon that great white throne? It is the One the gospel presents as Savior. It is Christ.
“For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son." John 5:22.
We have seen and heard this One on another throne in Scripture; the throne of His glory as Son of Man in Matt. 25, and we have heard Him speak blessed and awful words from that throne; we have heard this Son of Man from that throne say,
“Come, ye blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." And we have heard Him say,
“Depart from Me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.”
The righteous go into life eternal, and the wicked into everlasting punishment. It is the judgment of the sheep and the goats.
Here we find that One, not upon a dispensational throne, but upon a great white throne, and such is the terror of His face that earth and heaven flee away,
“From whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them.”
What scenes we get in Scripture! In how many ways the earth-rejected Savior is brought before us, for it is He who is here.
“Before whose face earth and heaven fled away.”
That One is your Savior and mine, if you are a believer in Him. He is our life and righteousness, but He is the sinner's judge.
“And there was found no place for them." There is one thing yet remains in this book, ere God can bring in His own eternity. What is it? Every unsaved soul has remained in death from the beginning down to that hour.
“And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead are judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.”
There they stand, upheld in space by the almighty power of that Judge before whom they stand. What a tremendous sight! Peter tells us that the earth is going to pass away with a great noise, and the elements melt with fervent heat.
Those who believe the Scripture know what is to become of heaven and earth:-and of saint and sinner as instructed by God and His Word.
There they are, small and great-ruler and ruled-prince and pauper; all stand there and as far as we gather from this word, stand there dumb and in awful silence. There sits that Judge upon the judgment throne, and the books are opened, and every man's record as the divine Recorder has kept it, is there, and there is no hiding place like in the end of the 6th chapter where they cry to the mountains and rocks to cover them; every hiding place is gone! Everyone remembers what his life has been, and is judged by it.
There are two books here (there are more, but) one is the book of righteousness, and the other book of grace. The book of righteousness records our deeds. The book of grace is the book of life. Suppose my name isn't in that book of life (that is what saves me), but not a soul that stands there, dear friends, has his name in the book of life! He is a sinner, and as a sinner, is judged. In every dispensation men have had the gospel, not the gospel of the grace of God, but a gospel (1 Peter 4:6).
(To be continued)
The Winding up of All Things: Part 2
Notes of An Address
Revelation 20, to 21:1-8REV 20 REV 21:1-8
Part 2
We were speaking of its winding up, and all this leads to the eternal winding up. What we have said thus far has to do with time.
There is a blessed day coming for this poor world, but not for those who reject the gospel.
“His name (that is the Savior's name) shall be great to the ends of the earth.”
That time of blessing is brought about, not by the grace of God, but, by the righteous judgment of God. That King comes in the nineteenth chapter as a warrior, and "in righteousness doth He judge and make war." All this is near at hand.
This remarkable book (Revelation) begins and ends as no other book in Scripture does:
“The time is at hand." "Things which must shortly come to pass.”
That is what this book is about-what is at hand. The long-suffering mercy of God keeps it back, but that is all. There are no scriptures to be fulfilled, prophetic or otherwise, before the day of the grace of God is closed. There are prophetic scriptures, and they have their place, but not now.
The day of God's patience will come to a close, and His throne and Himself assume another attitude towards the earth. You ask what that attitude is, both of Himself and His throne? His throne becomes what it never has yet been: a throne of judgment! and upon that throne He Himself sits, not as a Savior-God upon a throne of grace, but as God the Judge, as one scripture says, "God, the Judge of all," and as one speaks, he feels the blessedness of having to do with the Word of God, and our individual portion in Christ. Everything in heaven, everything in earth, and everything in hell-all is laid bare and laid bare in this book!
“They lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years." There we are, all glorified. What a scripture that is! How simple how definite; how positive. You and I and every other redeemed one at that time will partake in that life, and reign with Christ a thousand years! We know our future. But this is not the height of our blessing as Christians by any means; this is display.
When at home in the Father's house, we are there as His children, but when He manifests us, it is not as His children, but as His sons. It is relationship that is enjoyed in the Father's house. It seems very precious to think of finding ourselves in the Father's house as His children.
Then we get a remarkable thing: that being, that wicked being, that mighty being, for such a one is Satan, bound, chained for a thousand years, is liberated, but it is for a little season. It is the last test to which man is put, or if you please, the last test to which the world is put. There has been that thousand years' reign under the supremacy of the Lord Jesus and His saints. All creation has rejoiced in the deliverance He brought and maintained for a thousand years.
Why was Satan bound for a thousand years? Why not consign him at once to his eternal abode? God has yet some work for Satan to do, and for that purpose He liberates him. What is that purpose? To test man again. Man has lived under the blessed reign of peace and righteousness in the earth, and now that wicked one is liberated again that God may use him in making manifest those who have been really converted, and those who have not.
Nothing external converts a man. You may take him to Mount Sinai, and give him to see and hear the lightnings and thunderings which make him tremble from head to foot, and entreat that the word be not spoken any more-all filled with terror-but that doesn't convert him. Here has been this reign of peace and righteousness and blessing; we read in the prophets and other scriptures how full the blessing will be, but thousands of them have not been converted, and so this enemy is liberated and he goes out. God makes this test, and he gathers these unconverted ones (I use that term so as to make it simple), and "they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven and devoured them." He gets them together, as we learn from the preceding verse, a multitude as the sand of the sea, and gathers them about and against God's people.
I think it exceedingly important to know that nothing outside man converts him. I do not say he is not responsible by that which is outside, but it doesn't convert him. It has to be a work in the soul, and that is the work of God's grace by His truth and His Spirit.
Look at Nebuchadnezzar as an instance of it. He sees those cast into the furnace of fire walking, and a fourth one, and he saw them come forth out of the midst of the fire with not a hair singed; the only things that were gone, as the result of the fire, were the cords that bound them. In a general way, Nebuchadnezzar acknowledged God as the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. He is an unconverted man. God takes hold of him later to humble him, and there is a work in his soul and he becomes a worshiper.
That is very important for us to remember in preaching the gospel: the need of God's grace in the soul-in the heart.
Well, fire comes down from heaven and consumes them. That is, divine judgment overtakes them- those unconverted ones,-living perhaps some of them nearly a thousand years. There will be very little death during that thousand years:-there is death, but it is a rare thing, and it is when the government of God comes in in a special way for sin. Now divine judgment overtakes those enemies. What a change fore them to go from that blessed earth, that scene of righteousness, that place of peace, overtaken by divine judgment-an awful thing for them.
The great deceiver himself is not shut up again for a time, but forevermore. I speak with reverence in saying, God is done with him!
“And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone.”
(To be continued)
The Winding up of All Things: Part 1
Notes of an Address
Revelation 20; to 21:1-8REV 20 REV 21:1-8
We have in this passage the solemn winding up of everything in earth and in heaven; the saved and the lost, i. e., it is an eternal winding up,-the end of all things.
What a comfort it is to have from the Word of God and so from God Himself, light about all that is past, and all that is present, and all that is to come,-good and evil alike.
Our chapter begins with what we call "the Millennium," a very blessed season of a thousand years of rest and peace, and the reign of righteousness upon the earth. That great source of evil, Satan, himself who is engaged, as we know, only with himself (for his whole being is antagonism to everything that is of God right down to this very session of which we read, and he has marred everything) is bound, Every witness and testimony that God has set up in the earth, save one, he has marred. Of all the witnesses that God has had, there is but One, the Lord Jesus Christ, who has been able to withstand this enemy of God, and enemy of man, called here "the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan.”
In order to bring about that happy state of things in the earth, Satan is imprisoned. An angel comes down from heaven with a great chain in his hand (of course, it is all figurative language), and he lays hold of this-being,-this dreadful being-this destroyer-deceiver-"who deceiveth the whole world." One of his characteristics is that he is a deceiver, and that characteristic is manifested in a special way in our own day, deception; and we and the world all have to do with Satan as the serpent, the beguiler, the deceiver.
What can preserve any from his deception? Just one thing, dear friends, and that one thing is thought continually less and less of. hardly anywhere is it owned, its divine authority. What is that one thing? THE WORD OF GOD. This only can preserve from the deceptions of Satan whether it be an individual, or whether it be a nation.
“By the word of Thy lips have I kept me from the paths of the destroyer." Psa. 17:4.
The angel lays hold of Him, binds him and casts him into the abyss, called farther down "prison," for a period of a thousand years; the abyss there is not his final abode. We have that farther down in the chapter. He is bound and out of the way, no longer to be feared in either of his characteristics.
The next thing is a very blessed sight!-"Thrones, and they sat upon them." They are those we have read of once and again in the former part of this book beginning with the fourth chapter. There are two classes as it were, added to them, brought into the same blessing, priests unto God and to Christ, and what a change for them! They are two classes of martyrs; of these we read in the 6th chapter; the other class we find in the 15th chapter. We do not speak now of detail, but one judges the former class of martyrs for the truth, suffer in the early part of the power of the Antichrist.
The second class suffer later under another power; we do not speak of details, but of the wondrous change for them. Their past is a past, and their present is a present, and what is that present? That present is, they are all glorified now, and they live and reign with Christ a thousand years.
It is remarkable, this is the only scripture of the length of what we call "the Millennium," and I think in this chapter it is mentioned six times-a thousand years. A thousand years of happy association with Christ as King of kings and Lord of lords. What a change for them!
Saved or unsaved, a change, an everlasting change is about to overtake us. The gospel warns people that a change is going to overtake them; how little men think of it!
When and how will that change take place for the people of God, and what is its nature? There is very, very little in Scripture about it, but that little, dear friends, comprehends much!
“Absent from the body and present with the Lord." 2 Cor. 5:8.
“To depart and to be with Christ." Phil. 1:23. That change may overtake any of God's people at any moment.
We wait for the coming of the Lord when we shall be introduced by that coming into all that we are heirs of as the children of God. Scripture says,
“If children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ." Rom. 8:17.
It is the coming of the Lord Jesus that introduces us into that; in the meanwhile, (I speak of it for the refreshment of my own spirit as well as yours), those departed ones are with Christ, and with Christ they wait, but O, how different the circumstances in which they wait. We have very little conception of what those circumstances are in which they wait with the Lord.
The Lord Himself is waiting, you know; in this very book we read, "kingdom and patience of Jesus Christ." "Kept the word of My patience." In that way, patience will come to an end by the realization of that for which patience has waited, both on the part of believers and on the part of the Redeemer. How happy and blessed is the portion of the child of God, whether he be here or there.
This is a little aside from what is before me; it was rather the latter part of the chapter and the opening of the next, but there is this happiness and the earth rejoicing under the sway of that once despised and rejected One. He has come as the "Sun of righteousness with healing in His wings," i.e., has come in that way at the time of which this scripture speaks.
He doesn't come in that way at all when He comes to gather His saints to be with Him. Then He leaves the world in a worse plight than before. How is that? Because He, the Holy Spirit, who now restrains, and in whose energy and grace the gospel is preached, is gone, and the poor world is left in sadder and darker circumstances than before, and only to reap at length the fruit of rejecting, not only Christ here on earth, but Christ presented as a heavenly Savior and the giver of eternal life.
Darkness follows the light, in the way of the government of God, and earth now enters as it were, her hour of travail when the time comes of which we speak. How little the poor world in its wisdom, pride and folly, knows there is a day at hand of which the Savior, when He was here said, The like of which never has been known nor ever shall be, since the day God created man. This is what awaits this poor world.
(To be continued)
The Winding up of All Things: Part 4
Notes of an Address
Revelation 20, to 21:1-8REV 20 REV 21:1-8
Part 4
There they are; that book of life is opened, and that is their ruin. O, sinner, your sins and mine need not be the damnation of our souls. There is that book of life, and in that book of life every believer's name is recorded. In what way? As one who receives Christ as his Savior.
There is that innumerable, awful company; there is not one whose name is in that book of life; had it been, they would not be there, and it is opened just to show them. What a blessed and solemn thing it is.
Men go on regardless of their state before God; regardless of the provision God has made for them in the gospel. Dear friends, see to it that your name is written in the book of life, and you will never have to face that record before God as a Judge.
What becomes of them? This is the final clearing up-winding up-of everything. It is given in general terms here,
“And the sea gave up the dead which were in it: and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works." No escape.
“And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.”
“And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.”
Unsaved one, hear that! That is bringing it down to close quarters. One hopes there is not one here whose name is not at this moment written in the book of life.
“The sea gave up the dead"-none can escape. "Death and hell" means that unseen world. "There shall be a resurrection of the just and of the unjust," and it is the resurrection of the unjust we have here. The contents of the unseen world and the grave are emptied into that place of confinement, the lake of fire, and cease to be.
“No more death" means this: the second death remains; no more such thing as a man being in one place and his body in another, either saint or sinner. Death overtakes both and separates soul from body; that ceases, forever when eternity comes.
Now the way is cleared, perfectly cleared; the Millennium is over, Satan is in his eternal place, and the wicked are judged and consigned to the same quarters-all is cleared now, and we get what follows, and that is as blessed as the other was awful,
“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”
A new heaven and a new earth in which God can rejoice, and will forever. We learn from another Scripture, God will joy and rejoice in His people in that new creation, and His people will joy and rejoice in Him.
That is the winding up, happy, blessed, wondrous winding up for all those who have part in it, whether in heaven or on earth. How blessed it will be! I do not speak of details now; a new heaven and a new earth. No more tears; no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are passed away. The former things are former things.
That is, they are not present; they are passed away, and thank God! passed away for eternity!
“And God shall wipe away all tears"-we get that in different scriptures. How little the blessed God is known as the wiper away of tears. We find the blessed Savior when here, mingled tears with the tears of others, and we find Him wiping them away, saying to that poor widow, "Weep not," and drying her tears and stilling her sobs by returning to her the cause of all those tears and sorrows.
This blessed view of eternity! What a wondrous winding up, and how near it is we know not, but it will come. How good of God to bring this matter before us in the symbolic way, symbolic language, and then graciously help us to understand it, that is, where there is patient, lowly, inquiry.
Now we come to the present scene. In the 6th verse we come back to time and our own time. It is the settled purpose of God,
“And He said unto me, It is done. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely.”
That is the gospel, dear friends. Who is the fountain of the water of life? Who was it that said, and says, "If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink"? The fountain of the water of life was down here in the Person of the Son of God.
"What will it be to dwell above,
And with the Lord of glory reign,
Since the blest knowledge of His love,
So brightens all this dreary plain?
No heart can think, no tongue can tell,
What joy 'twill be with Christ to dwell.
When left this. scene of faith and strife,
The flesh and sense deceive no more,
When we shall see the Prince of life,
And all His works of grace explore,
What heights and depths of love divine
Will there through endless ages shine!
And God has fixed the happy day
When the last tear shall dim our eyes,
When He will wipe these tears away,
And fill our hearts with glad surprise;
To hear His voice, and see His face,
And know the fullness of His grace.”
(Concluded)