Jesus is the Lamb and the Lion

RV97-01

The Tribulation

A One-World Government

If there's anything that the Tower of Babel taught us, it was that it is the plan of God, until the return of Christ, that nations exercise personal, independent sovereignty from one another – living in peace as much as lies within them, but dealing with tyranny when it is necessary to do so.

So, this is what this whole picture in heaven is all about. It is putting the world together under united political authority. The satanic concept of world government is based on the economic system of socialism today, while the world government of Jesus Christ is clearly based upon the economic system of private ownership of property, and of free enterprise capitalism. Every place that you read descriptions of the millennial kingdom, you cannot put that into a socialistic concept. It is clearly in a free enterprise, personal responsibility, enjoying the fruits of one's own labors, that describe the millennial kingdom.

So, the dire economic straits that the world finds itself in today is in fact a heritage of socialism. If people understood a little more about the Bible, and saw what kind of a world we are moving to, they would say, "If God thinks that that's the kind of a world that His Son will administer as the ideal world, then we must be bonkers today. We must be going crackers to think that what we should do is follow a totally different direction." Instead of going in the direction of personal responsibility and the free enterprise system, we're going in the direction of socialism – the very thing that the millennial kingdom will totally condemn and remove from off the face of the earth. Just knowing a little Bible would have preserved the nations of the world from the economic suffering that they have entered into today.

Socialism

A prime example of that in our world today is Sweden. Sweden has recently passed a law that they will not oppose the preparation of pornographic materials in which children are used to engage in various sex acts, providing (the law says) that they are not Swedish children. As long as they are not Swedish children, then that pornography can be made and distributed. Now that is man in his finest, fallen, human reason. It is that kind of a world such as we see in Sweden today, but carried out to the extreme of social degeneration, that John is going to see dealt with once that scroll is opened. That's what's inside the scroll. It is God's dealing with Satan's world, built upon socialism, and brought to its peak of effectiveness under that system.

So, the glory of the millennial world government will be just the opposite of all that. It won't be the kind of Fabian socialism that we have in the United States today. Incidentally, we as a nation have doomed ourselves to the sufferings nationally of the tribulation era. Fabian socialism, is a creeping socialism of one governmental control and imposition after another; and, one loss of freedom after another, so that you don't notice what is happening. All of us would like to ask the question, "Where is the United States in the prophetic picture?" I can tell you one place it is. It is in suffering the consequences of its Fabian socialistic approach to government.

The opposite of all this will be the glory of the millennial world government. Its glory will lie in its total conformity to the divine institution of human government, and to the role which God has assigned to government. The result of government functioning under its divine structure will be worldwide prosperity and maximum personal freedom. It will indeed be the world's golden age.

That being said, it is hard to believe how the politicians of our world today can think that by going 180 degrees opposite to what God is going to institute in His Son's millennial kingdom, that they can improve the lot of humanity on the face of the earth. But that is the reason of fallen man, and those are the consequences of mentalities which are not informed on doctrinal principles.

Omniscience and Omnipotence

The Sevenfold Ministries of God the Holy Spirit

All of these things enable the humanity of Jesus Christ to fulfill His role as the King of all the earth. These are also the same things that are provided for us. That is what the Lord was referring to when, in Acts 1:8, at the moment of His ascension to heaven, He told the disciples: "But you shall receive power after the Holy Spirit is come upon you." The power that He was talking about is the same power that Isaiah 11:2 describes the humanity of the Messiah possessing. In His humanity, He had this kind of capacity. In our humanity, we have access to this same capacity.

So, these ministries of the Holy Spirit provide Jesus Christ with complete capacity as the God-man to exercise political authority over the whole world. These are the very identical qualities which politicians like so much today, and which make the politician of our day a failure. When there is a politician who arises, and there certainly are some, who has a grasp of doctrinal understanding (of biblical economic principles, and where the world is going) he finds himself in such a minority that he cannot do a thing about changing the direction of our society.

So, John is standing, waiting for Jesus Christ to claim the title deed to the earth, and to remove Satan from his role of the world usurper. In Revelation 5:7, then, we read, "And He came and took the scroll out of the right hand of Him that sat upon the throne." The word "came" is the Greek word "erchomai." This word indicates that now the Lamb approaches the Father's throne. What probably happened is that in John's vision, the Lamb was transformed into the person of Jesus Christ. The Lamb symbol has fulfilled its purpose. Now, in John's vision, the Lamb becomes the person of Christ. As you know, the Lord Jesus Christ has been standing, waiting for the moment to make His move between the circle of the four living creatures around the Father's throne, and the circle of the 24 elders on their throne. John sees the Lamb become the person of Christ, and move forward to the Father, in order to receive that scroll from the Father.

This word "erchomai" is in the aorist tense, referring to the point of Christ moving to the throne. It's active. Jesus Christ is responding to the call for someone to do it. It's indicative mood. It's a statement of fact. The symbols of the throne room come through in some way to John's mind in their real meanings. It says that when He gets to the throne, He takes ("lambano"). This word indicates that Jesus Christ takes the scroll from the Father's hand. This is in the perfect tense which indicates a past action which will have lasting results. When Christ takes that title deed, there isn't anybody who is ever again going to take control of this earth from Him. He has the right to secure it. He is the kinsman redeemer. He has paid the price.

So, this perfect tense tells us that it's going to continue forever. It is active. Jesus Christ does the taking because he's the only one qualified to do so. It is indicative mood again. John is making a statement of fact. He takes that scroll "out of." That is the Greek preposition "ek." He takes it "out of the right hand of Him that sat upon the throne." "Him that sat upon the throne" is the word "kathemai." "Kathemai" describes the normal position of a person who is sitting on the throne. As we've already indicated, Jesus Christ has now, obviously, gotten up from sharing the Father's throne. He's no longer seated on the throne. He is ready now to take action.

The Father, who sits in supreme authority over the universe, is described in the present tense – His constant position of authority. It is middle voice, but it has active meaning here. It means that the Father does the sitting. It is a participle, indicating a spiritual principle. He is seated upon the throne, and the Greek has "the throne" – the one that we've been describing in this context.

The taking of the scroll from the Father's hand indicates that the judgment and power over the earth are committed to Jesus Christ as the Son of God. That's what caused John to weep, because he thought there was nobody who would be qualified to bring earth's history to a successful climax with Satan removed, and mankind back in authority, as he once was under Adam.

So, what you have described is Jesus Christ moving into His position of authority. The same principle is described in Daniel 7:13-14. All of these things that we're reading here in the Revelation were, of course, predicted and described in Daniel in the Old Testament prophets: "I saw in the night visions, and behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days. And they brought Him near before Him. And there was given Him dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and His kingdom: that which shall not be destroyed." This is the exact identical scene that John is seeing described here to Daniel. The problem was that Daniel couldn't put it all together. Daniel did not fully understand how all of this was going to come about, but he understood that somehow the Messiah was going to become the one who was going to replace all of the kingdoms of the earth.

So, that's what taking the scroll out of the Father's hand indicates. It is the act which activates the 70th week of Daniel's timetable. As you remember, there is the last week of those seven weeks of years that Daniel predicted for God's dealing with His nation. The timetable was fulfilled perfectly for the first 69 weeks, and then Jesus Christ was crucified. Sir Robert Anderson has written a book entitled The Coming Prince in which he did the monumental work in following the chronology from the time that Artaxerxes gave the order to go back and rebuild Jerusalem and the temple walls, and the prophetic clock started ticking right down to the week that Jesus Christ was finally rejected and crucified. It was precisely 69 weeks of years, or 483 years – to the day. It makes goosebumps all over you when you see a prophetic Scripture fulfilled with such precision.

Well, that seven years is still what's waiting in the future. When John sees Jesus Christ take the scroll, he knows that once the seals are broken, that last week of events is going to start taking place. In other words, John "Lamb" is the same as Daniel's "Son of Man." They are both describing the same event. The Lion of Judah is God's Lamb.

The Reformers

Along with that was a scholar named Erasmus who was a Roman Catholic, but who was a born-again man who God took hold of, and laid it upon his heart to put together a collection of Greek New Testament manuscripts, and to put together the first Greek New Testament. When that came together, with Gutenberg's printing press, the scene was set for all that spiritual darkness of the Middle Ages to be wiped out with one blow. When Martin Luther walked up; grabbed the main switch; and, pulled it down, when he nailed those 95 propositions of debate concerning errors in the Roman Catholic church on that door of that castle church in the city of Wittenburg, Germany, he was pulling the switch that threw on the illumination of the Word of God because Luther studied the Greek New Testament.

When he got to the book of Romans, in teaching that series to his university students, he finally put it together, and realized that millions of human beings had been sent to hell by the Roman Catholic Church, as they are being sent to hell by the Roman Catholic Church today, because they were taught a works system of salvation. God makes it clear that He doesn't save anybody on the basis of your filthy rags that you come up to offer Him in exchange for your sin.

The Two Diverse Roles of Jesus Christ

So, the result is that there was confusion. The reformation did not correct the confusion. The great tragedy is that great churches and great denominations came out of the Reformation with this misconception at the heart of their theological system. It has caused enormous consequences and enormous spiritual damage over these centuries since the Reformation because this was not corrected. It was not until the 19th century, when the great movement arose of back-to-the-Bible studies. Men went back to studying the Scriptures. When those movements arose, then these prophetic Scriptures began to be brought together and related, so that they did not contradict each other.

Up to that time, on the basis of reformation theology, they would read these Scriptures, and they would say, "The only way we can handle them is to say that the words cannot be treated literally. These words must be speaking of something symbolic and spiritual. So, that's how we must treat them." Well, the result was that they completely missed the most important thing about the Lord Jesus Christ. The reason Satan did this was to confuse the mission of the local church; the mission of Christianity; and, the mission of the individual believer. If you miss this, you'll be chasing rabbits.

The Church Age

Jesus Christ came, first of all, as the king of the Jews. That's what they put on His cross, and that's why Pilate did that, because that was His mission, and that's what He claimed to come to do. But when He was rejected by the Jewish people, and they crucified their King, then was fulfilled His role as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world, and His role as King was postponed. It was put on hold. Instead, God put into motion on the day of Pentecost the secret mission that He had never revealed – to draw from Jews and gentiles a group of humanity which would be intimately related to His Son when He came into His earthly millennial kingdom. They would be intimately related as a wife to her husband. So, the era of the church began.

Jesus Reading from the Book of Isaiah

The thing that is important about this, and the significance of all eyes being fastened upon Him, was because Jesus Christ did something startling in the process of reading this Scripture from Isaiah. Here's what he did. The record is in Isaiah 61:1. He opened to the book of Isaiah, and you can see that that's exactly what He read. It is same thing that we have in Luke. However, notice Isaiah 61:2: "To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of vengeance of our God to comfort all that mourn." The thing that startled the people in the synagogue in Nazareth that day was the little comma in the middle of verse 2, because you don't stop reading a sentence at a comma. But that day, that's exactly what He did. Everybody was listening to Him. These people were in a habit of memorizing Scripture. They knew what the rest of the passage was supposed to say. And all of a sudden, He rolls up the scroll, and stops right there at that comma.

The reason that is significant is because of what he said when He returned the scroll. He said, "This day this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." Had He read past that comma, He could not have made that statement truthfully. He could not have said that this Scripture was fulfilled that day in their hearing, because Isaiah 61:1, and through the middle of verse two, deals with His mission as the Lamb of God – the first part of His calling. And everything up to that comma describes what He was going to do as the Lamb of God – in that particular role.

Heal the Broken-Hearted

It's hard for you and me to enter into that, but the thing that had been forgiven there was the death sentence, which was the penalty for adultery. Jesus is saying, "You've got a clean slate with Me. Move out, and live according to the Word of God." That broken-hearted woman, shaking with tears, and sobbing in the midst of that self-righteous group of men who were ready to stone her to death, found her heart leaping with joy. He knew how to heal broken-hearted people. When He walks by and sees a mother in the tragedy of a son who has died (and that's all she has), the Lord Jesus Christ stops and gets the ire of the mortician's association by raising the son to life, so that they don't even need the grave that they had dug. And the mortician says, "How are we going to deal with the grave?" The mother says, "I don't care what you do with it. Hang it on your nose. My son is alive," and her broken-heart was healed.

The gospels are constantly reiterating for us these occasions where He healed the broken-hearted and preached deliverance to the captives – people who were victims and slaves of sin. Jesus Christ said, "I can tell you how to get on top of the sin nature and how to beat it, so that you are not its slave.

He also recovered sight to the blind. This is one of the hardest physical healings one could imagine. People not only received their physical sight, but all the other physical ailments that He healed in them. He set at liberty them that are bruised. He set people free who were in emotional traumas because of the Word of God that He taught them. And He preached the acceptable year of the Lord, and so on – the fact that now there had come enlightenment.

And then He stopped reading. He read, "... the acceptable year of the Lord," and then he stopped. Why? Because that was His first mission. For Him to go on, He would have talked about the vengeance of God. If you take time to run your eyes through Isaiah 61 at your leisure, you will see that it describes Israel coming into enormous, tremendous blessings – a whole marvelous era in their kingdom on this earth. This was something that He had not fulfilled (and was not going to) in that first mission, and certainly something which was not fulfilled at that point in time.

So, the first part deals with His coming as the Lamb of God. The second part deals with His mission as King of Kings and Lord of Lords. The rest is about that kingdom of millennial blessings.

Isaiah was not the only one who described this kind of a period when Jesus Christ, the Messiah, would be leading Israel in tremendous blessings. Just one example of that is in Jeremiah 31:31-34: "'Behold, the day is come,' says the Lord, 'that I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel and with the House of Judah; not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, when they broke My covenant, although I was a husband unto them,' says the Lord. 'But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the House of Israel. After those days,' says the Lord, 'I will put My Law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, and will be their God, and they shall be My people. They shall teach no man, every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, 'Know the Lord,' for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them,' says the Lord, 'for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.'"

This is a national promise to the Jewish people which has never been fulfilled. It is a promise where they would know the Lord. There would be a new covenant, in contrast to the Mosaic Covenant, and God's laws would be written on their minds, so that they were able to function according to the principles of the Word of God. That's exactly the thing that Jesus would have been talking about had He gone past the comma in that sentence.

So, the first advent of Jesus Christ (His First Coming) deals with His role as the Lamb of God in the character of meekness. His Second Advent (His Second Coming) is in the role of the Lion of the tribe of Judah, and of the root of David, in His role as majesty.

So, what we're saying is that here in this comma, the whole church age has been placed. This comma has become almost 2,000 years long. That's a long pause. You know that when you read, you're supposed to pause when you get to a comma. That's what commas are for – for you to pause and wait before you go on. That is so that you can break a thought, and then you can grasp the thought. Now, that is one long pause so far. This comma has lasted almost 2,000 years, but I don't think it's going to last much longer. In this comma has been placed the whole church age. That's why this is such an important Scripture, and why it is so important to realize that Jesus Christ had two missions. It is between His mission as the Lamb of God and the King of the Jews that you have the church age. If you don't understand that He has two missions, then you botch up all the Scripture. Then you get some crazy notion that the church is supposed to be bringing in the kingdom.

Then you make the most terrible mistake of all; and, that is that you do not distinguish between Israel, which is God's earthly people (the racial stock of humanity descended genetically from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob), and the church. When you don't distinguish between Israel and the church, then the Bible becomes a very confusing book. You cannot make sense out of the Word of God. You have contradictions like you wouldn't believe, and you cannot treat the Word of God literally. The liberals love it. They reject this whole concept of the fact that there's a difference between Israel and the church. So, they talk about the church as the new Israel of God. They have a problem with the Sabbath Day worship that they're supposed to follow in the Old Testament, so they talk about the Christian Sabbath. These are mutually contradictory terms, and they try to make Sunday as a new Christian Sabbath.

And they impose a system of financing, which is tithing (the religious income tax that was placed upon the Jewish people). It was 10% across the board, rich or poor or whatever. And they say, "Here is how Christians should be today." So, here are Christians who have been mightily blessed by the Lord, and to give a measly, crummy, little 10% because they think that they're still under the old legal system of Israel, instead of giving, as the New Testament points out to us, as God has graced us – so do we exercise the grace of giving.

It is a terrible, terrible confusion of Scripture once you don't respect that there was a reason for the Lord Jesus stopping at that comma. This confusion was understandable with the prophets, and Peter recognized that the prophets who wrote the Scriptures were confused over what they had written. In 1 Peter 1:10-12, Peter tells us about that. He says, "Of which salvation the prophets have inquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come to you, searching what or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ, who was in them, did signify that He testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow." This is the sufferings of Christ as the Lamb; and, the glory which was going to follow is the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. They wrote it down. They looked at what they had written under the Spirit's guidance, and they said, "I wonder how in the world that can be: Unto whom it was revealed that, not unto themselves, but unto us they did minister the things which are now reported unto you by them that have preached the gospel unto you with the Holy Spirit, sent down from heaven, which things the angels desire to look into."

Peter says, "They weren't writing those things for themselves. There was no way for them to understand them, because they didn't know that they should stop at the time of when they were reading in Isaiah 61. But what they were writing was for our information on this side of the day of Pentecost, because we understand that God has interjected a whole new program which was never revealed before; and, that they wrote these things for us."

Furthermore, it's interesting to see that even the angels themselves, who were looking over the shoulder of the prophets while they wrote that, as smart as those angels are, said, "I don't understand how that can be." The angels are very curious. That's why angels attend church services. That's why they're here now, so they can learn about the Word of God. That's how angels learn.

The Wilderness Temptations

In Isaiah 53:7, we have the Lamb described which is representing Jesus Christ: "He was oppressed and He was afflicted. Yet, he did not open His mouth. He is brought as a Lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He did not open His mouth." This lamb of Isaiah 53:7 is the very Lion of the tribe of Judah. He is the one who became the Passover lamb – who fulfilled that whole Passover picture. In 1 Peter 1:18, Peter says, "Forasmuch you know that you were not redeemed with corruptible things like silver and gold from your vain manner of life, received by traditions from your father." It wasn't something such that you bought your way into heaven. It wasn't something in the form of indulgences that an ecclesiastical authority like the Pope could give you (which is what made Luther so mad) in order to get your sins forgiven, and which finally pushed Luther to the point where he said, "Enough is enough, and I'm going to fight that vicious system which the Word of God condemns." Peter tells us, "You are not saved from your sins by something of a material nature that you can use to pay for it."

Then 1 Corinthians 5:7 says, "Purge out, therefore, the old leaven, that you may be a new lump as you are unleavened, for even Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us." There, the Bible makes it very clear that the Old Testament Passover Lamb was representing Jesus Christ, who was to come in one of His roles (one of His missions) as the Lamb of God,

So, the Jesus who ascended into heaven as the sacrificial Lamb is the one who will return to earth as a victorious Lion of the tribe of Judah. Acts 1:11 points that out, among other places.

The problem with the Jews is that they were not able, with Old Testament prophecy, to relate the sufferings of the Lamb to the conquering role of the Messiah. They failed because they did not understand that He had a twofold mission. The idea of a crucified Messiah was a stumbling block to them. They balked at the whole idea. 1 Corinthians 1:23 specifically tells us that they just could not accept the idea that their Messiah could be crucified. But we have the truth of the matter in the gospel of John, from the very beginning. These gospels present the person of Jesus Christ to the society through which the Lord was moving, and the society that He was serving. In John 1:49, Jesus Christ is presented as the King of Israel: "Nathaniel answered and said to Him, 'Rabbi, You are the Son of God. You are the King of Israel.'"

Then back in John 1:29, we read, "The next day, John saw Jesus coming unto him and said, 'Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.'" So, here in the gospel of John, right from the beginning (the very first chapter), you've got both roles again. We tend to sit and look at that, and think a moment, and says, "Those are conflicting roles. You can't be a meek Lamb and a conquering Lion at the same time. They are contradictory." However, they are not contradictory if you put them in their proper order – one after another.

The Lord Jesus Christ, on numerous occasions, stressed to His disciples that He was destined to die. In Luke 24:26, we have one of those statements: "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into His glory."

As Philip is discussing His role with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he related the prophecy of God's suffering servant in salvation to the Lord Jesus Christ. We have that recorded in Acts 8:32-35: "The place of the Scripture which he read was this:" And this is the Ethiopian treasurer reading, and Philippi is going to explain this to him. He reads here from Isaiah: "He was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and like a Lamb, dumb before His shearer, so He did not open His mouth. In His humiliation, His judgment was taken away. Who shall declare his generation, for his life is taken from the earth? And the eunuch answered Philip, and said I pray thee, 'Of whom does the prophet say this? Of himself or some other man?' Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same Scripture, and preached unto him Jesus."

The Ethiopian eunuch is reading the Old Testament Isaiah passage about the coming Messiah who is going to be treated as a suffering Lamb to be slaughtered. The treasurer from Ethiopia says, "I don't understand this. Of whom is he speaking?" Philip says, "I can tell you. He is speaking about Jesus Christ," and he connects Isaiah's description of the suffering Lamb to the person of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So, there's no big secret about this. The Scriptures are very clear. Only by the Lion being slain can the Lamb claim the title of rulership over the earth, which Satan has taken.

So, the Lord Jesus Christ is going to be exalted by the Father in the very earth where the Son accepted a humiliating death. Isaiah 53:12 is His humiliating death. Philippians 2:9-11 is His exaltation.

Symbols

So, it's interesting that the symbols in this heavenly throne room also confirm that Jesus Christ has a twofold mission. He fulfills one, and events take place that God has prescribed; and, then the second is fulfilled.

So, what should you do about this? Is this all this important, or have we just been spinning our wheels on a cute little discussion of some theological point? It is very important. The result of the reformers having missed the difference between Israel and the church; the result of the reformers having missed the difference between Christ coming as the Lamb of God and as the Lion of the tribe of Judah; and, the compromise of Scripture that they had to be guilty of by resorting to spiritualizing, has resulted in huge denominations which have lost their way concerning what God has for them. And the result was that they fell into formalism, and into church services that are meaningless rituals that one goes through like a monkey jumping through a hoop, until you're bored to the end of your brain cells, and which has no effective control and impact on the life. It gives your emotions a big kick, but it has no quality upon the life.

As Christianity lost its concept of Christ in His twofold mission, the simple surroundings in which Christians gathered could no longer carry the crowd. You have to start creating enormous rituals; surroundings; ceremonies; churches; cathedrals; and, external duties to make you feel like something was taking place between you and God. Never forget the principle that I have esteemed and valued because I was taught it as a teenager: The more external features you have to relate you to God, the less internal relationship you will have with Him. The more you have to have in stained-glass windows; the choirs; the robes; the ceremonies; the altars; the candles; the rituals; and, the whole liturgical system, the less you will have inside, in your connection with God.

That's why those systems became cold. They became ineffective, and Satan quickly stamped out the warmth of the fire with which they began. It is important to understand, when John sees Jesus Christ as Lamb and Lion, he is telling us something that is at the heart of what we must understand if we are not to follow in the same trap that so many religious groups before us have done. He does come in this role, and therefore, we fit in between, and we know what our job is as His ambassadors; His priests; and, His soldiers. Once we know where we belong, we can execute.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1982

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