The Tribulation Period, No. 1

RV46-01

The physical descent is not enough to make one a child of God. The Philadelphia believers who trusted in Jesus Christ are the real representatives of God on earth. Today that group is known as fundamentalists. They're known as biblical Christians. They have one thing in common. They use the Word of God as being the inerrant revelation from God, and they receive it as the final authority in all that it touches and all that it deals with. What it reveals about the person of Jesus Christ is that He is indeed the God-man. Consequently, they receive Him and as such.

These people possess then the truth of the deity of Jesus Christ. The Philadelphia type possesses the completed canon of Scripture, and they evaluate it. They value it as the Word of God. They possess a bride relationship to Jesus Christ, which you remember was never true before of any other group of saints, and never will be again. It's only those born within the restrictions of the church age that have this relationship to the Son of God. They possess the means of justification which Abraham possessed: justification by faith. They are now members of the royal family of God.

The Lord Jesus promises that when He returns to this earth, the Christ-rejecting Jews, as well as the gentiles, will do homage at the feet of these Christians. Then everyone will learn how dear the Philadelphia fundamental type Christian is to the Lord Jesus Christ. He may not appear to value them that highly. These Christians may not appear to be that dear to Him at this point. All the world now is going to be asking the question: why should a Christian like Chester Bitterman have to die in the prime of life, with great potential linguistic capacities and great contributions to make to the church? Why should a group of mangy stinking terrorists, who have nothing to offer the world but their own foul concepts and ideas, cut down one of the representatives of the Philadelphia type church? But, indeed, the time is coming when it will be demonstrated that nothing has happened to Mr. Bitterman. There is a temporary break in his status and his relationship. There is a fracture in his family relationship. There is a certain basic upsetting. But nothing has happened to Chet Bitterman. He is in the finest state that he'll ever be in. And when he returns, the people who took his life will be licking the dust of the ground at his feet. Don't ever forget that that's the relationship that Jesus Christ is trying to convey to us today.

We may suffer rejection and ridicule, and indeed we do, from a sophisticated and powerful humanist society. But we are going to experience an exaltation later, as the personal bride of Jesus Christ, that is hard even now to imagine.

Now, I direct your attention to Revelation 3:10: "Because you have kept the word of my patience." John continues in quoting the dictation of the Lord Jesus Christ. The word "because" is the Greek word "hoti." This expresses a cause. It explains why the church saints are to be preserved from something that He is about to announce that they are going to be preserved from. This is a very fascinating verse in the Bible because it answers one of the major questions that everybody who knows anything at all about church history inevitably asks. If you know anything about where society is moving today, where the world is moving today, sooner or later, as a Christian, this question will come to your mind, and I'm happy to say that the Lord Jesus answers it here in this verse.

He says, "Because there was something about them, and that is that they kept something. The word kept is the Greek word "tereo." The word "tereo" here actually means "to obey." It's aorist tense – at the point when they came into contact with the Word of God. It is active. These believers themselves were the positive volition type. It's indicative – a statement of fact. What they kept is called the "word." That's the Greek word "logos," which is a noun that is used as a symbol for a thought – the expression of a thought, and particularly, this is described as "the word of patience." The word "patience" looks like this: "hupomone." This word means "a patient enduring," or "a standing firm under pressure. In the Greek, again, Jesus Christ includes the personal word for "I" – the word "ego." He wants to stress that He is referring to something about Himself: My perseverance. They have kept the word relative to the perseverance of Jesus Christ. The word of patience refers to the patient enduring which was demonstrated by the Lord Jesus Christ under a variety of satanic pressures. It refers to the teachings of the Lord to His believers relative to maintaining spiritual stability in the face of opposition to divine viewpoint truth.

That is one of the hardest times to maintain spiritual civility – when people are fighting you; and, when people are striking back at divine viewpoint truth that you're trying to share with them. Many times (and it happens so regularly), people come to me and I can see that they have a certain sense of disappointment and discouragement. They tell me they've been dealing with some family member; they've been dealing with some students at school; or, they've been dealing with somebody at their work, and the reaction is contempt and indifference and the cold shoulder that they get for what they're giving to these people. What are they giving? They're giving these people a chance to escape the lake of fire, and yet they reject that opportunity. It is very tempting for a Christian to be turned off when cold water is thrown upon him, such that he just quits talking about the Lord. And, of course, there are some believers that just never would talk about the Lord. I don't care what situation they're in, they would never be discussing Jesus Christ. There are some believers that if they were the only people in the world, nobody would ever hear the gospel. So, they never get discouraged. They never have the blues. But for those of you who are willing to open your mouths, and who have a sense of obligation to announce what the Lord has done for the soul that's headed for hell, you're going to get the blues sometimes because your divine viewpoint truth is so rejected.

However, you and I have to put our eyes on the Lord. We cannot be intimidated by the fact that we are in a minority position. So, we do not get discouraged by active attacks or by the cold treatment of being ignored. That's another way the devil works. Outright attack is not quite as hard to deal with as when people just coldly ignore you. That is a time when a Christian tends to be unstable. The Lord Jesus is the example. He patiently endured that kind of abuse at the hands of sinners, and the reason He did it was to give them time to repent. That's a very important point for us to remember: even when Jesus Christ was personally blasphemed, He didn't strike people down dead. He could have done it. Instead, He took it because He was patiently waiting to give them a chance. There's plenty of time for judgment; there's plenty of time for the wrath of God; and, there's plenty of time for punishment.

I was listening recently to an interview on an evening news program. The lady that was being interviewed was one of the correspondents for The Washington Post. The Washington Post is, of course, a cold-blooded, liberal, secular humanist newspaper in just about any viewpoint it has. You can count on it being contrary to the Word of God, and anti-biblical, and fouled up to all of the basic concepts of human relationships. This lady was on there as a feminist. What she was talking about (the thing that was in the news) was the lady who had been jilted by the doctor, so she decided to deal with it by shooting and killing the doctor. They were discussing about whether this lady should have to be punished for the fact that she was jilted and was so upset that she just killed this man. They went back and forth, and it was almost hard to believe that you're living in 20th century Christian-oriented America to be discussing as to whether somebody deserves punishment for walking up and overriding somebody else's volition by taking that person's life.

She said that the thing that upset her was that this has been a blow to the feminist movement, because here is this woman, and she was sort of a leader in our group, and she demonstrated she couldn't live without a man. If there's anything the feminist people want to demonstrate, it's that they can live without men. The funny thing is that they want to be so much like men. If they can't have a man to live with, then they try to be like one. But this woman really demonstrated the quality of her own debasement as a woman, because the interviewer posed the question to her that was a little bit difficult for her to answer. She thought a moment. Then after he gave her the question, the first thing she said was, "Oh, Jesus." This was national television. Here's Ted Koppel interviewing; here's big ABC; and, here's this woman. You already felt the jadedness and harshness coming through. It was so typical of the strong-arm feminist type. She was thinking, and she just was natural.

Now, what should the Lord Jesus Christ, whose name she had blasphemed in such a foul way, have done? He should have struck her dead, but He didn't. Why? Because the old rule in the Ten Commandments about blaspheming by using the name of God in curse words of any kind has now been disbanded? Is it no longer in effect? Has it been repealed? The fact that you can now use "hells" and "damns", which call upon the orientation of the power base of Satan, and that God says that's alright? You know that that's covered by the commandment against taking the Lord's name in vain. It is calling upon an evil power base.

So, who is she kidding? She's kidding herself if she thinks that she can speak the name of Jesus in that way and ultimately get away with it. The time is coming when judgment is going to come. But why not now? Because of the patient enduring of Jesus Christ. That's exactly what the Lord is talking about here. These Philadelphia saints had caught the picture of being able to follow in the patient enduring capacity that even the Son of God had when He, as God, was being humiliated and blasphemed. The Lord Jesus Christ will not tolerate man's abuse forever. When the time comes, when His patient enduring his come to an end (and there will be a time when it comes to an end), then there literally will be all hell to pay. You can count on it.

Part of the Lord's patient enduring that He is referring to here is in connection with His return to rule the earth. If there's anything that's made fun of today, it's the idea that Jesus Christ is ever going to come back from heaven to rule this earth. Right now, Revelation 3:21 tells us that He shares His Father's throne. He is not on His own throne which is the throne that comes to Him in the royal line of King David, and which He will occupy as He rules this world during the millennium. He shares His Father's throne. He's up there waiting until the Father turns to Him and tells Him that the time has come for Him to return. 2 Peter 3:4-9 tell us how the world speaks with contempt about the idea of Jesus Christ returning. They point to the fact that the world has gone on, and century after century has gone by, and nothing has changed. And Peter points out that it's only because Jesus Christ is a patient enduring God who is waiting to give you a chance to escape the consequences of being out of Christ – the consequences of your evil.

So, the believers await the return of the Lord with full expectation that He will return, and that He will vindicate their testimony. 2 Thessalonians 3:5 speaks about our joy someday in that great anticipation: "And the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God, and into the patient waiting for Christ. That's what we're doing. We're patiently waiting for Christ.

So, the Philadelphia believers, while patiently waiting for Christ, expecting His return, endure the world's contempt; the world's indifference; and, the world's rejection rather than retreating from service. The Lord Jesus Christ Himself is the classic example of patient endurance.

In Hebrews 12:3, we find it put this way: "And consider Him (that is, Jesus Christ) that endured such contradiction of sinners against Himself, lest you be weary and faint in your minds." So, that's the example. One of the things that the Lord is commending these Philadelphia saints for is that they had caught the spirit of the patient endurance of the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Word of God as it slowly is grinding away to its ultimate goals.

The idea is, "Because you have functioned, and kept My teaching relative to patient endurance, I also." And here again, the Lord stresses the word "I." Actually, the Greek looks like: "kago," which is combining the word "and" and the word "I" ("ego"). The word is "kaiego." Those are combined. He is stressing the fact that "I also am going to do something for you." The "I" is there to stress the personal dealing of Jesus Christ. We have the word "tereo" which means "to guard:" "I also will keep you. I'm going to guard you." The idea here is "to preserve" from something. This is in the future when the tribulation period arrives, as we'll see in a moment. It's Jesus Christ who does the guarding. And it's a statement of fact.

Then again, the Greek language puts in the word "su" which is "you," stressing, particularly, that "I" (which He didn't have to include in terms of the grammar) and "you" are specifically identified as the ones that He's concerned for. He's going to keep us (for we're going to share this with the Philadelphia saints) "ek" something. "Ek" means this: Here is a circle. It needs to be preserved from within something. You never have to get into it. It isn't just that you're going to be preserved through this thing as you go in and out of it. It means you're going to be preserved from ever having to enter that thing. And that is called here an "hour." The Greek word is "hora." This is a noun. It denotes a period of time. The word "hora" is used in a variety of ways. It's used in the Bible sometimes for part of a day, as in Matthew 8:13. It's sometimes used for a period more or less extended, as in 1 John 2:18. Sometimes it's used for a definite period of time, as in Matthew 26:45. Here it is used for an extended period of time.

This is an extended period of time, which he calls the "peirasmos." This is a noun, and what it means is "trial" or "tribulation." This word "peirasmos" is used in Luke 8:13. When we compare that to Matthew's account and Mark's account of that same incident about the sower and the seed, Matthew 13:21 and Mark 4:17 use Greek words which mean "tribulation" and "persecution." So, tribulation and persecution and "peirasmos" are all talking about the same thing. They all deal with the same stage of the sowing of the seed, where it falls on stony ground. The writers Matthew and Mark use the Greek words that convey the thought of tribulation and persecution. Luke uses the word "peirasmos," and the indication there is very clear that what he is referring to is a time of great suffering. It is a time when people are under great pressures of one kind and another.

The Tribulation

What we have here is a promise to the Philadelphia believers that they're going to be preserved from this time of terrific punishment that God is going to pour out upon the human beings that are on planet earth. And they shall be preserved from the time of tribulation. He clarifies that to confirm that this is the time He's talking about, because He identifies it as "The one which shall come upon all the world." The expression which shall come is made up of two words. One of them is "mello." That means "about to." It's present tense, indicating a continuous coming. It's active. The event itself is near. It's a participle – a statement. And then the normal word for coming: "erchomai" – "about to come" is the idea. This is the word for the act of coming. It's present tense – continuous coming. It's active in meaning. It's the event that is at hand. But it's infinitive, indicating divine purpose.

So, we would translate this: "Which is about to come." So, the Lord says, "Because you have kept the word of My patience (my teaching about hanging in there, though you have little influence in your society in being a clean cut testimony for Me), I also am now going to do something for you. I'm going to keep you (that is, guard you) from the extended period of time (the hour of the tribulation period) which is about to come upon all the world." The reason He says "is about to come" is because once the rapture takes place, then the tribulation begins, and there is nothing that has to be fulfilled prophetically before the rapture takes place. The rapture is the next event of prophecy. Tonight, before you wake up in the morning, or immediately in the week before us, it is at hand. So, 2,000 years ago, He could say it is about to happen, because that is true. In God's reckoning, time has a totally different frame of reference than it does for us. Thousands of years are nothing but a few days with God.

But He's talking about a specific time of tribulation (of a divine judgment) which is to "come upon." That's the Greek word "epi:" "to come upon all." The Greek word for "all" is "holos," which means "entire" or "complete." The word "epi" indicates location. The word "holos" indicates "the whole entire," and what He calls "the world" is actually in the Greek "oikoumena." "Oikoumena" is a noun, and it means "the inhabited earth." It refers to all the places on the planet earth where people are living at the time of the tribulation.

So, what we're talking about is that the whole globe (the whole entire, round planet earth) is going to be struck by judgment from above from God. And it is going to be the worst time in all of human history because, it says that this is a time when God is directing, particularly, "to try them that dwell upon the earth." The word "try" is the Greek word "peirazo." "Peirazo" means "to test in order to make a proof of something." The idea is to reveal the quality of the people who are living in the tribulation. This testing is an expression of divine wrath because of the evil of those people.

Who are those people? They're described by this Greek word which we're going to be running into later in Revelation several times: "katoikeo." "Katoikeo" means "them that dwell:" that is, it means "to inhabit" or "to dwell in." It's constant – present tense. It's their personal status. Its participle – a principle. These are people who are inhabiting certain parts of planet earth. Again, we have the word "epi" (location) upon the earth. The word for "earth" is "ge." That means planet earth. These words are actually technical words. We will run into these several times: "them that dwell upon the earth." That is a technical term for unbelievers. It refers to earth dwellers all around the earth who are under divine judgment, whether they're Jews or gentiles. And these are words that refer to the followers of antichrist.

Let's look at just a few verses coming ahead in Revelation to show you what kind of people He is putting under the gun at this time. In Revelation 9:20-21, they're described with these words: "And the rest of the men who were not killed by these plagues, yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which neither can see, nor hear nor walk. Neither repented they of their murders nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts." And "sorceries," as you know, is related to the concept of drug usage, because it is the word from which we get the English word "pharmacy." Revelation 16:9 describes these who dwell upon the earth: "And men were scorched with great heat and blasphemed the name of God who has power over these plagues. And they repented not to give Him glory." Verse 11: "And blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds.

So, what Revelation 3 is telling the Philadelphia believers, which is what you and I are, is that there is coming a time upon this earth, the Great Tribulation period, when God's wrath is finally going to be poured out upon the earth, and we will escape it. We will be preserved from it. One of the reasons, the Lord says, that He is going to do that for us is because we are willing to hang in there under personal abuse; being treated with contempt; being treated as the garbage of our society; being treated as idiots; being treated as people who simply did not know what was going on; ; people who are simplistic; people who had no intellectual capacity; and, people who did not grasp where history was moving so that they knew how to make decisions for the good of society. The Lord says, "The time is coming. I'm going to take you out of that world. You have hung in there faithfully. You've taken the abuse. You've caught the signal for me how to patiently endure, just as My example to you demonstrated that you should do. You kept working when people didn't appreciate you. You still exercised your gift.

When people were contemptuous, and when somebody came up to you and was snotty to you about something you do for the Lord, what did you do? Cry and feel sorry for yourself? Or did you say, "The wonderful thing about the priesthood of the believer is that you can think anything you want to think about what I do and it's OK with me, because that's your priesthood – to think anything you want to. Just don't get in my way when I'm starting to minister, though. Then I'm going to take you to grips. As long as you stand out there, and you're not in my way when I'm ministering, you can say anything you want, and you can think anything you want, because that's between you and the Lord. I've got a few ideas myself about you, as a matter of fact." You just know how to be relaxed in patient enduring. You know, how to stand under the gun and not be feeling sorry for yourself and wanting to quit.

That's what children do. Did you ever notice your little children when you put two friends together to play? Then when one of them gets mad at the other, what do they do? They want to take their toys and go home. They want to take their dolls and leave: "I don't want to play with you." I've seen them where they pick up their whole train sets, struggling in their arms, and take it home and say, "I'm not going to play with you anymore." That's the pity: when Christians grow up, and they're still taking their toys and running home with them because somebody has abused them in what they're doing for the Lord.

The Lord says, "You hang in there. If you think that's a trial, and if you think that's a burden, I'm going to give you a little picture as to what I'm going to do to the world that has abused you. Do you know what He's going to do to the world that's abused you? It's a long story. I don't know if you have it clear. This word "tribulation" should make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. If it doesn't, then you've forgotten what it's like. So, maybe we better review it.

A Summary of the Tribulation Period

490 Years

483 Years

If that were true, there was a period of seven years of Jewish history that had been predicted to Daniel which was never fulfilled. Of course, we know, as we look back on history, that that's exactly what happened. The word went out to Nehemiah to take a group back to start rebuilding the city of Jerusalem and the temple. The 490 years began clicking off on God's prophetic clock, and it went right on up to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Sir Robert Anderson

What actually happened when the Jews rejected their Messiah Savior was that God stopped dealing with them. The, prophetic clock, so to speak, stopped ticking, and God turned his back upon the Jewish people. That's why we indicated to you in the last session, that the Jews today, as the Jews in the Philadelphia church here, tried to call themselves the synagogue of God, and God said, "I've got nothing in the world to do with you. You're not a synagogue of God. You're a synagogue of Satan. You are not dealing with Me because the only way you can deal with Me is through my Son, Jesus Christ, whom you reject. When you reject Him and His deity, there is no other way for you to approach Me."

A Mystery

A Gap in Time

Well, we've seen that this has been almost 2,000 years since Jesus Christ was crucified. The prophetic Jewish clock has stopped ticking, and the Lord has been calling out from Jew and gentile a special group of people which are to be His Son's bride for all eternity, united to Jesus Christ in a personal intimacy that no other group of saints has ever experienced. You are the royal family of God. You are the special chosen ones relative to the person of Jesus Christ. No Jew of the Old Testament will ever enjoy the relationship to Jesus Christ that you will enjoy. None of them will have the access to Him that you and I will.

Therefore, the final seven years, of the timetable given to Daniel has never been fulfilled. This is the period that the Bible calls the tribulation. This is a period that Revelation 3:10 is referring to when it says that the church (we believers) will be preserved from that time here upon this earth. This period is yet ahead. It is going to be fulfilled once the rapture takes place. When the church has been taken out, the prophetic clock again begins ticking, and things begin now to be fulfilled in these last seven years.

The Book of the Revelation

The Second Coming

The Two Parts of the Tribulation Period

The Day of the Lord

The Order of Events

The First Half of the Tribulation Period

The European Economic Community

A Mystery

It's going to take a little time to get ten nations together, isn't it? It has been happening. You can't jump into the tribulation and have all this happen. The sense of Israel to need somebody to protect her is very clear now. The only source she has of that protection today is the United States, and the United States, more and more, is having to ask itself whether its interests are best served by always standing up for Israel, and opposing the Arabs who now have a stranglehold upon our economic lifeline because of the oil situation. So, the United States is no longer a trustworthy ally that Israel can absolutely count on. Now, with the present administration, which is moving in the direction of economic restoration of this nation, we cannot continue this practice of handing out billions of dollars to foreign countries for various reasons that we think are going to help us to secure the world.

The truth of the matter is that we've done very, very poorly. We've had NATO, and we've had SEATO, and we've had all kinds of alliances. We've given billions and billions of dollars in economic aid. We've had the Vietnam War. We've had the Korean War. We've done exactly zilch in preserving the world from communism. It has only gotten stronger. It has only gotten more powerful. So, the United States may, in time, be forced to say, "It's a matter of our personal survival, and we're going to stop at the water's edge. Whatever happens to the rest of the world, we're going to say, "We survived, and we're going to see that we survive under the worst conditions."

Seal Number One

Dr. John E. Danish, 1977

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