The Final Hope

Copyright © 2021 by General Conference Corporation of Seventh-day Adventists®
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CONTENTS
Section One
The Big Freeze, Crunch, Rip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Principalities and Powers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The Risk of Love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
The Revelation of Jesus Christ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
A Bit of Context, Please (Part One) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
A Bit of Context, Please (Part Two) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Section Two
Human Angels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
The Thief on the Cross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
The Good News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
The Gospel in Less Than 200 Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
The Sin Problem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
The Everlasting Gospel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
From Heaven to Earth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Mi-Yattan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Section Three
Fear God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Think of the Amoeba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Give Glory to God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Stop Worrying? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Section Four
The Hour of His Judgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
The Gospel and Judgment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Which Came First, the Grapfruit Seed, the Grapefruit, or the
Grapefruit Tree? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
Section Five
“For in Six Days . . .” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Worshipping the Image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
One-Tongue World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
CONTENTS . . .
Section Six
Babylon Is Fallen. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
The Third Angel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
“Think to Change Times and Laws” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
The Mark of the Beast. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
The Patience of the Saints . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
Section One
The Big Freeze, Crunch, Rip
For years Hollywood has cranked out film after film about the
end of the world, or at least the end of the world as we now know it.
Armageddon (1998), Zombieland (2009), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015),
This Is the End (2013), Greenland (2020), just to name a few, depict a
pretty sorry future for us all. And suddenly, with COVID-19 (including
variants, such as B.1.1.7 or B.1.351 and counting) Hollywood’s science
fiction end-of-the-world stuff seems a little too close to home for
comfort.
Science fiction aside, real science presents a future that is, to put
it mildly, rather bleak as well. Sooner or later the universe, scientists
say—not just the earth, but the universe!—is going to end. How?
Depending upon the numbers that these scientists stick in their
physics equations, some theorize that the universe might tear itself
apart (the Big Rip). Others, using different numbers, predict that
it might collapse in on itself (the Big Crunch). The most popular
scenario is that it might burn out (the Big Freeze): “The universe,”
wrote Paul Davies, “currently aglow with the prolific energy of nuclear
power, will eventually exhaust this valuable resource. The era of light
will be forever over.”1
Big Crunch, Big Rip, Big Freeze—long-term, things don’t look
very hopeful for this world, do they?
Interestingly enough, the Bible depicts the end of this world as
well, just quite differently than either Hollywood or science do. A few
biblical excerpts about our long-term prospects: “For behold, I create
new heavens and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered
or come to mind” (Isaiah 65:17). “Nevertheless we, according to His
promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness
1
Paul Davies, The Last Three Minutes (New York: BasicBooks, 1994), pp. 49, 50.
5
The Final Hope
dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). “Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for
the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. Also, there was
no more sea. Then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her
husband” (Revelation 21:1, 2). Or this, one of the most hopeful: “And
God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more
death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the
former things have passed away” (verse 4).
Not quite the Big Freeze or the Big Crunch, is it? Nor the future
depicted in Zombieland, either.
Yes, both science and biblical revelation agree: our world as it is
will not remain this way forever. Everything will change. But what
about us and our loved ones? Is the end of the world the ultimate end
of us all as well? The Big Rip, the Big Freeze—none of these options
offer us any long-term hope, do they?
No. They offer us nothing but the prospect that we and our loved
ones—and, in fact, every person who has ever lived or will live—will
vanish into eternal oblivion. The obvious conclusion of all is that we,
ultimately, mean nothing, and that our lives mean nothing, and that
we are of no more significance than a cloud of cosmic dust. “Must
I again declare to you the supreme vacuity of culture, of science, of
art, of good, of truth, of beauty, of justice,” wrote Spain’s Miguel de
Unamuno, “. . . of all these beautiful conceptions, if at the last, in four
days or in four million of centuries—it matters not which—no human
consciousness shall exist to appropriate this civilization, this science,
art, good, truth, beauty, justice, and all the rest?”2
The Bible, in contrast, presents the promise of a radically different
future for the world and, most important, for us: a new heaven and a
new earth. However, this promise of a new heaven and a new earth
leads to the logical question: What happened to the old heavens and
the old earth? What happens to them, and to us—we who live under
and on them? The answer is full of hope and promise. They, the old
heavens, the old earth, are going to be swept away, replaced by a new
heaven and a new earth, which will be inhabited by people for eternity
in an existence without sin, suffering, sickness, and death. A concept
2
Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1954), p. 96.
6
Three Messages for an Anxious World
hard to imagine for beings like us, who have known only sin, suffering,
sickness, and death.
However, Scripture says that before all this happens, a terrible
crisis will be unleashed upon the world—a crisis that will make
some of these Hollywood end-of-the-world flicks look tame. The
Old Testament prophet Daniel warned: “And there shall be a time of
trouble, such as never was since there was a nation, even to that time”
(Daniel 12:1). And who, since the COVID-19 outbreak, doubts that
the whole world can, overnight, face a crisis? And who doesn’t sense
that this COVID crisis might be only the beginning of woes, and that
something worse could await us?
According to the Bible, something worse does.
The good news, however, is that God, who “so loved the world
that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him
should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16)—this same
God has not left us without a hope, without a warning, without a way
of escape, if not from the trials, at least from the hopeless despair and
destruction these last-day trials will bring for way too many.
From the beginning to the end of the Bible, the prophets, though
they themselves had faced everything—sickness, depression, war,
natural disasters, prison, exile, torture, death—that the fallen world
could throw at them, could nevertheless write again and again about the
love and goodness of God. Isaiah, 2,500 years ago, penned: “ ‘Though
the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing
love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed,’
says the Lord, who has compassion on you” (Isaiah 54:10, NIV). The
psalmist, almost 3,000 years ago, could sing: “Give thanks to the God
of heaven. His love endures forever” (Psalm 136:26, NIV). The apostle
Paul, who experienced prison, physical ailments, hatred, mob violence,
poverty, hunger, cold, could write—in a world almost 2,000 years away
from anaesthetics—that “God demonstrates his own love for us in this:
While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, NIV).
In other words, though some people try to use the evil in this
world as an excuse to reject the existence of God, or certainly the
existence of a loving God, the Bible writers didn’t, couldn’t, because
they knew the Lord and they knew for themselves His love. And one
7
The Final Hope
manifestation of His love is seen when God warns His people about
what is coming, so that they can be prepared for it. And if He would
do that for ancient Israel and Judah (so much of the prophetic writings
are the prophets warning those two nations about what was coming),
relatively small kingdoms compared to the world, how much more
so would He give the whole world itself a warning, a chance to be
prepared for what is coming, for “a time of trouble, such as never was
since there was a nation, even to that time”?
And He has. That warning is found in the book of Revelation, the
last book of the Bible, in what are known as the three angels’ messages
of Revelation 14. Who are these angels? What are these messages?
What warning do they give to a world obviously in trouble? And most
important, what hope do they (as opposed to, for example, the Big
Freeze or any of the other hopeless alternatives that, we’re told, await
us) offer us for the long-term, eternal future?
Principalities and Powers
Who, outside on a cloudless night (away from city lights) and
staring at the stars fiercely burning against the cosmos, hasn’t been
awed? Especially by the sheer number? But even on the clearest night,
when we can see more stars than we can count before the morning sun
washes them away, what are we seeing in contrast to what’s out there?
Please! Less than a drop in an ocean of water.
It’s estimated that there could be as many as 2 trillion galaxies
hurling through the creation. Trillion. And counting. Each galaxy has
an average of about 100 billion stars. One hundred billion multiplied
by 2 trillion add up to a lot of stars. And astronomers are now
discovering what they call “exoplanets.” These are planets that orbit
their stars the way the planets in our solar system do the sun, our star.
According to NASA, about 4,000 exoplanets have been discovered.3
That’s all that they can see, at least for now. If the number of exoplanets
is anywhere near the number of stars, or galaxies even (that is, only
one exoplanet per galaxy?)—the universe is filled with more planets
than we can imagine.
Which means what? That the odds are that we are not alone in
3
https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/faq/6/how-many-exoplanets-are-there/
8
the universe, and that other life exists in the creation. There’s even
an organization, first started by NASA, called SETI, the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence, dedicated to discovering life in another
part of the creation besides earth.
The irony is that while the diligent and faithful seekers at SETI
have been aiming their fancy devices into the sky, hoping for a cosmic
Tweet or whatever from another part of the creation, the Bible,
written thousands of years ago, not only talks about the existence of
“extraterrestrial” life but also gives us some insights into the moral
character of that life, at least some of it. That is, the Bible tells us what
common sense tells us: in all this vast universe, we are not alone.
What follows are a few scriptural excerpts about life existing in
other parts of the creation:
“His intent was that now, through the church, the manifold wisdom
of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the
heavenly realms” (Ephesians 3:10, NIV). Rulers and authorities . . .
where? In heavenly realms—that is, in another part of the creation
other than the earth. Even more fascinating is that according to this
text, these rulers and authorities learn about God from what happens
here on earth with God’s church.
Another text: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but
against the rulers, against the powers, against the world rulers of this
darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens” (Ephesians
6:12, NET). Wow! This is an insight that SETI, so far, hasn’t come close
to uncovering. The text talks about “our struggle.” Against whom? The
spiritual forces of evil in the heavens, that’s whom. The implications
of this verse, along with the others, are stunning. Not only does other
life in the universe exist, but some of it is evil. And that evil is working
against us on earth.
Another biblical text: “For in him all things were created: things
in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or
powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through
him and for him” (Colossians 1:16, NIV). Here the Bible is talking
about Jesus as the Creator of all things (see John 1:1-3) in both the
heavens and the earth, “visible and invisible,” including “thrones or
powers or rulers or authorities.”
9
The Final Hope
Some texts in the book of Revelation flesh out this idea more:
“And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the
dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail,
nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great
dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan,
who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels
were cast out with him. . . . Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who
dwell in them! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the
devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows
that he has a short time” (Revelation 12:7-12).
What is the Bible saying? First, we are not alone in the cosmos.
Other intelligent life exists out there, which, again, considering all size
of the cosmos and all the stars in it, shouldn’t be surprising. It would be
surprising if there weren’t other life out there. Second, some of this life
is hostile, is evil, and has brought their evil to this earth. If “war broke
out in heaven,” and some of the combatants are here, any wonder that
there’s so much strife on earth as well? What these verses, and others
like them, reveal is what has been called the great controversy theme, a
controversy between good and evil that, though beginning in another
part of the creation, is being played out here on earth.
And really—who needs divine revelation to see, if not the source
of this great controversy, its reality? Many people, secular or religious,
even if they don’t know the details or origins of it, can sense the battle
between good and evil in our world.
The poet T. S. Eliot wrote:
“The world turns and the world changes,

But one thing does not change.
In all of my years, one thing does not change,
However you disguise it, this thing does not change:
The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.”4
Even a harsh atheist like German Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: “Let

us conclude. The two opposing values ‘good and bad,’ ‘good and evil,’
4
From T. S. Eliot, The Rock, https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-rock/id837916987.
10
have been engaged in a fearful struggle on earth for thousands of
years; and though the latter value has certainly been on top for a long
time, there are still places where the struggle is as yet undecided.”5
One theologian, Michael Brown, talking about the struggle
between good and evil, called it a “cosmic conflict.”6 Another, John
Peckham, has written a book on the subject called Theodicy of Love:
Cosmic Conflict and the Problem of Evil.7
What is a theodicy? It’s an attempt to answer the question that
everyone who believed in a loving God asks: Why, if God is so good,
and so loving, and so powerful, is there so much evil in the world?
And, as we will see, the three angels’ messages are central to answering
that question, perhaps the most important one that anyone could ask.
The Risk of Love
Unless you’ve had a bad experience with a dog, most people love
them. They are, after all, friendly, affectionate, faithful, loyal, and, to
the degree that a dog can express emotion, loving. Their wagging tails,
often in excitement to see you, make them delightful companions.
In fact, some dogs, called service dogs, are used to help people with
emotional problems. That’s how soothing and comforting dogs can
be. And who doesn’t like petting them?
Of course, dogs can also be trouble. They can bite, soil the carpet,
get sick, chew furniture, shed, and cost money to keep healthy and
to feed. All dog owners, even the most passionate ones, have had
moments when they thought, Is a dog really worth the bother?
Suppose, however, you could have a dog that never soiled the
carpet, never got sick, never bit anyone, and cost no money to keep
healthy? Who wouldn’t jump at getting a dog like that? You can. How
about Sony’s AIBO, for instance? What is AIBO? It means “companion”
in Japanese, and according to Sony, AIBO “is a true companion with
real emotions and instincts. With loving attention from his master, he
will develop into a more mature and fun-loving friend as time passes.”
5
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals (1887), p. 16.
6
Michael Brown, Job: The Faith to Challenge God (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson
Publishers, 2019), p. 30.
7
John C. Peckham, Theodicy of Love: Cosmic Conflict and the Problem of Evil, Kindle edition
(Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2018), p. 4.
11
The Final Hope
What is Sony talking about? A robot dog.
A robot?
“AIBO actually has emotions and instincts programmed into his
brain,” says SONY about its dog. “He acts to fulfill the desires created
by his instincts. If satisfied, his joy level will rise. If not, then he will
get sad or angry. Like any living being, AIBO learns how to get what
he wants. Occasionally he will wave his legs around vigorously or
show signs of anger if he does not receive the kind of attention he
requests from you. The way you respond to his emotional expressions
greatly influences his personality and growth. . . . Even though AIBO
is made from plastic, powered by a battery, and has a nervous system
of integrated circuitry, he is also a fully cognizant, sensing, loving, and
communicative companion.”8
Emotions? Instincts? Desires? Talk about false advertising! Robot
dogs have no more emotions, instincts, and desires than does your
kitchen sink. To claim that AIBO is “also a fully cognizant, sensing,
loving, and communicative companion” is to attribute traits of
intelligent life to plastic and metal. We barely understand how living
tissue, brain cells, can house (create, facilitate, whatever) emotions and
desires, yet we’re supposed to believe that Sony had produced a robot
dog (a dog?) that manifests love and joy and happiness? Just make sure
that the batteries are charged, and love, joy, and affection will flow out
of the circuit boards, silicon chips, and plastic like photons from a light
source. The whole idea is ridiculous. To mistake a computerized dog
wagging a tail as an expression of happiness would be like attributing
moral integrity to the zeroes and ones in a software program that
filters out child porn.
If the idea of a robot dog showing “affection” and “love” leaves
you cold, and if you would not want AIBO to replace your flesh-and-
blood pet, even with all its potential problems—then you understand
the heart and soul of the great controversy. Instead of creating beings
(either in the heavens, such as angels, or on the earth, such as humans)
like robots, God created them with the ability to love. Rather than
robots, He created us as moral beings with the capacity to love both
Him and others, and this moral capacity included freedom, the
8
http://www.robotbooks.com/sony_aibo.htm
12
freedom inherent in the kind of love that only a free being could give.
Love that is forced is not love; if God wanted beings who could love,
He had to create them free, truly free.
And freedom, true freedom, entails risks. For example, the Bible
talks about the abuse of this freedom by an angel called Lucifer. It says:
“You were the anointed cherub who covers;
I established you;
You were on the holy mountain of God;
You walked back and forth in the midst of fiery stones.
You were perfect in your ways from the day you were created,
Till iniquity was found in you” (Ezekiel 28:14, 15).
This was a heavenly being, an angel created by God. And how
did God create him? “You were perfect in your ways from the day you
were created.” Perfect? And yet, what happened to this perfect being?
“Iniquity was found in you.” Iniquity found in a being made “perfect”
by God? How could this be? It’s easy: this perfection included freedom,
moral freedom, and Lucifer violated that freedom.
It’s the same principle here. Genesis 1-2 revealed God creating life on
earth, which concluded with Adam and Eve, both made in God’s image.
“So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created
him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). And when the
creation was done, God Himself declared it “very good” (verse 31).
So we have perfect beings (surely, having been made in God’s image,
they were as “perfect” as Lucifer had been) created by a perfect God on
a perfect earth. And yet, what happened? Genesis 3 reveals, through the
trickery of “the serpent” (verses 1-6) that these perfect beings fell into
sin. How could that happen? Because being perfect included the ability
to love, and love demanded freedom, and freedom includes risk.
In this context, the following texts become clearer: “And war
broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon;
and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was
a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was
cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives
the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out
with him” (Revelation 12:7-9).
Evil, rebellion, war—all these began in heaven, in God’s perfect
13
The Final Hope
heaven, with the fall of Lucifer. Next, Lucifer, now called “the Devil
and Satan,” came to the earth, and here he, “the serpent of old” (see
Genesis 3:1-6), brought his rebellion. In short, though the great
controversy started in another part of the universe, it is being played
out on the earth.
Couldn’t God, however, have stopped all this from happening
from the start?
How?
First, He could have created humans without the capacity to
love. He could have made a race of robots who, whatever else they
did, would not, could not, love. But God wanted a relationship of love
between Him and humans, and had He made us like robots, there
would have been none. We couldn’t love Him back any more than a
toaster can love its owner; any relationship would have been no deeper
than one has with a toaster.
Second, He could have wiped out Lucifer the moment he started
his rebellion. Zap! However, that option doesn’t work either. Suppose
you were a loving, caring leader of a people. Then, for some unfair
and unjust reason, someone started a rebellion, accusing you of being
vicious, selfish, arbitrary, and dictatorial. In response, even before a
trial, before letting them argue their case before you and others—
you just lined them up against a wall and shot them. You might have
quelled the rebellion, yes. But what about the charges made against
you? Your actions would have proved their exact charges: that you
were, in fact, vicious, selfish, arbitrary, and dictatorial. If you were a
vicious leader who ruled by fear, by threats, you would simply scare
them into obedience.
But Scripture teaches that God is a God of love, and He operates
out of love, not fear. “And we have known and believed the love that
God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God,
and God in him” (1 John 4:16). When asked what the most important
commandment was, Jesus answered, “ ‘And you shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind,
and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment” (Mark
12:30). God can command us to love Him; He just can’t force us to. To
love Him, we have to do it freely.
14
So then, without violating the principle of love, how is a God of
love going to solve the great controversy? Imagine the leader who was
accused by rebels of being vicious, selfish, arbitrary, and dictatorial.
Suppose this leader, though still their leader, voluntarily came down to
the level of his people, lived among them, suffered among them, and
even sacrificed his life for them, showing that the charges against him,
that he was vicious, selfish, arbitrary, and dictatorial, were the opposite
of what he was like. In fact, what if the very ones who made the charges
against him were the very ones who had him killed, proving that they
themselves were guilty of the things that they accused the leader of
being?
Though only an analogy, in a very general way this is the big
picture of Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, on the cross. God in the flesh
answered the charges of Satan. Christ, though the Creator (see John
1:13), took upon Himself humanity, and in that humanity revealed
to angels, and to the world, what God was really like. Though the
great controversy continues, as Satan is still in rebellion, his demise
is certain. “Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them!
Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come
down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short
time” (Revelation 12:12).
And the revelation of the character of God, the self-denying, self-
renouncing character of God, as revealed at the cross—here is the
foundation of three angels’ messages, messages of hope, of promise,
and of eternal life offered to a world that’s heading toward dissolution.
The promise is there for all of us, and each one of us—having the
freedom inherent in love—has to choose to claim what has been so
graciously offered in Jesus.
The Revelation of Jesus Christ

What are the three angels’ messages? They read as follows:
“Then I saw another angel flying in the midst of heaven, having
the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on the earth—to
every nation, tribe, tongue, and people—saying with a loud voice, ‘Fear
God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His judgment has come;
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and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of
water.’ And another angel followed, saying, ‘Babylon is fallen, is fallen,
that great city, because she has made all nations drink of the wine of
the wrath of her fornication.’ Then a third angel followed them, saying
with a loud voice, ‘If anyone worships the beast and his image, and
receives his mark on his forehead or on his hand, he himself shall also
drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out full strength
into the cup of His indignation. He shall be tormented with fire and
brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the
Lamb. And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and
they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image,
and whoever receives the mark of his name.’ Here is the patience of the
saints; here are those who keep the commandments of God and the
faith of Jesus” (Revelation 14:6-12).
That’s it. About 220 words in the New King James Version.
And yet in these nouns and verbs and prepositions are “mysteries”
(1 Corinthians 4:1), deep things that “angels desire to look into”
(1 Peter 1:12) but have now been revealed to us. The three angels’
messages are expressions of truths that God had established, not just
“before the foundation of the world” (Ephesians 1:4), but “before
time began” (2 Timothy 1:9)—a long time ago! Embedded in these
texts about specific, earthly things—i.e., nations, people, springs of
water, and the beast—are eternal truths that existed before even time
did and will remain throughout eternity.
The messages appear in the book of Revelation, the last book in the
Christian Bible, which makes sense because the book is about last-day
events. The fancy theological word is “eschatology,” the study of final
events. Just as the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, dealt
with the creation of the world and the first events in it, Revelation, the
last book of the Bible, deals with last events in it, leading up to the end
of this world and the creation of a new one, “a new heaven and a new
earth” (Revelation 21:1).
The word “Revelation” appears in the first line of the book:
“The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show His
servants—things which must shortly take place” (Revelation 1:1). The
word for “revelation” in Greek, apokalypsis, means an “uncovering” or
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a “revealing,” from which we get the word “revelation.”
And it is a revelation of what? The “revelation of Jesus Christ.”
That is, the book teaches us about Jesus, about who He is: “I am the
Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End” (Revelation 1:8),
the eternal God; and yet it also depicts Him as “the Lamb slain from
the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8), the crucified Savior,
the one who died on the cross, slain for the sins of the world.
Though Revelation is a New Testament book, just like the rest
of the New Testament it relies heavily on the Old. Scholar Ranko
Stefanovic argues of the 404 verses in Revelation, 278 refer or allude
to the Old Testament, including such key events as the Creation,
the Flood, and the Exodus. No other New Testament book relies so
heavily on the Old.
This point becomes very important in seeking to understand the
meaning of Revelation, including the three angels’ messages. Many of
its words and phrases—i.e., “Babylon,” “the beast,” “the commandments
of God,” “the wine of wrath,” “forever and ever”—cannot be properly
understood apart from how they are used in the Old Testament. In
fact, the Old Testament is the key to unlocking the important truths
given in this, the final book of the Bible, with its message for those
living in these hard days of earth’s tragic history.
A Bit of Context, Please (Part One)
The book of Revelation, written by the apostle John when he
had been exiled to an island, Patmos, off the coast of modern Turkey,
covers Christian history, basically from the time of Jesus through
the end of our world and the creation of a new one. The book has 22
chapters, with the three angels’ messages appearing in chapter 14, a
little more than halfway through Revelation.
To best understand the messages, one needs a bit of the context in
which they appear. A quick summary of the two preceding chapters,
12 and 13, creates that context.
Revelation 12, like much of Revelation, doesn’t appear in a strict
chronological order. It jumps back and forth between events, even
though a basic flow, a progression, of Christian history does unfold
all through the book of Revelation. That is why, for instance, by the
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time we get to the last chapters of Revelation, the emphasis is on the
redeemed living in a new heaven and a new earth, even though there
are flashbacks to previous events.
We read earlier from Revelation 12, with the depiction of the war
in heaven (verse 7) and the casting to the earth of Satan and his angels.
In other words, central to everything is the great controversy scenario,
which appears all through the chapter. This controversy started, as we
have seen, in heaven. Next, the controversy comes to earth, when the
dragon (Satan) seeks to devour a child (Jesus), “the moment he was
born” (verse 4, NIV). This happened when Satan, using King Herod,
tried to have the infant Jesus killed. Indeed, an angel told Joseph,
Mary’s husband, “Arise, take the young Child and His mother, flee to
Egypt, and stay there until I bring you word; for Herod will seek the
young Child to destroy Him” (Matthew 2:13).
However, just as Satan and his angels failed in their war in
heaven—they were, after all, cast out (Revelation 9)—they failed
also in trying to destroy the infant Jesus. Eventually Jesus, while on
earth, defeated Satan at the cross. Having “disarmed principalities and
powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in
it” (Colossians 2:15). In fact, Jesus rose from death, so that “through
death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the
devil” (Hebrews 2:14).
Revelation 12 depicts Christ’s next victory over Satan like this.
“And her Child was caught up to God and His throne” (verse 5). That
is, after the cross, Jesus ascended to heaven, where He ministers in our
behalf in heaven (see Hebrews 7-10).
Defeated in heaven by Jesus, defeated at the cross by Jesus, Satan
still had not given up in his attack on Christ’s people. All through
the Bible God’s church has been symbolized by a woman, or even a
pure bride (2 Corinthians 11:2; Jeremiah 2:2). After the cross, Satan
is depicted in Revelation 12 as persecuting God’s church, symbolized
by a woman:
“Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth,
he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male Child. But the
woman was given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into
the wilderness to her place, where she is nourished for a time and
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times and half a time, from the presence of the serpent. So the serpent
spewed water out of his mouth like a flood after the woman, that he
might cause her to be carried away by the flood. But the earth helped
the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the
flood which the dragon had spewed out of his mouth” ( verses 13-16).
Again, we’re seeing here symbolism, the kind found all through
Revelation: a dragon, a serpent spewing water, the earth opening its
mouth, and so forth. Here, too, even amid the symbolism, the great
controversy motif prevails, with Satan trying, and yet failing, to destroy
the woman, God’s church. For example, the woman fleeing into the
“wilderness” is an allusion to ancient Israel living in the wilderness,
during which God protected it from its enemies and from destruction
(see Psalm 78:52)—another example of how the Old Testament holds
the key to interpreting Revelation.
Historically, after Jesus ascended to heaven, the Christian church
faced persecution, sometimes massive, from Rome. Who hasn’t heard
stories of Christians being fed to the lions or burned alive as torches
in the Roman Colosseum? Starting with Nero, in A.D. 64, the Romans
attacked Christians in various ways, and with various degrees of
intensity, over the next few centuries. Accused of most dreadful crimes,
Christians were declared to be the cause of many of the calamities—
famine, pestilence, earthquakes—that ravaged the empire. They were
condemned as rebels against Rome and its empire, as foes of religion,
and as detrimental to society. One ancient historian described the
persecution of Christians in Rome this way:
“Christus [Christ], from whom the name had its origin, suffered
the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of
our procurators, Pontius Pilate, and a most mischievous superstition,
thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the
first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous
and shameful from every part of the world find their center and
become popular.
“Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty;
then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted,
not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against
mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered
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The Final Hope
with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were
nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as
a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.”9
Unfortunately, history shows, too, that even after the Roman
Empire became “Christianized,” the persecution didn’t stop. Under the
tutelage of the popes, Rome continued the persecution of those who
didn’t follow its man-made rules and traditions. This, too, went on
in various degrees for more than 1,000 years, becoming particularly
ferocious during the time of the Reformation, and ending only when
secular forces began to dominate Europe, seen in something like the
capture in 1798 of the pope by a French general in the aftermath of the
French Revolution. Revelation 12, using broad symbols, depicted this
history, this attempt by Satan to destroy God’s church.
However, the great controversy continues, as seen in the last
verse of the chapter: “And the dragon was wroth with the woman,
and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep
the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ”
(Revelation 12:17, KJV).
The dragon, Satan, “enraged” with the woman, God’s church,
whom he failed to destroy, now “went to make war with the remnant
of her seed.” That is, even after the centuries of persecution, God still
has people, faithful people, who are the subject of Satan’s wrath—and
they are depicted as those who “keep the commandments of God, and
have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”
A Bit of Context, Please (Part Two)
Revelation 13, like Revelation 12, continues the great controversy
motif. Even without understanding the precise meaning of the
symbols, one can see the dragon (Revelation 13:2, 4, 11), Satan,
attempt to wreak havoc here on earth. The early verses, using imagery
from Daniel 7 (again, more evidence of how the book of Revelation
is heavily tied to the Old Testament), recount the history of church
persecution through the Dark Ages.
However, a point worth remembering, especially amid the
depiction of persecution and suffering that follows, is that by now in the
9
https://www.livius.org/sources/content/tacitus/tacitus-on-the-christians/
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great controversy, Satan (the dragon, the serpent) has already been beaten
three times by Christ: defeated in heaven (Revelation 12:8), defeated
at the cross (Colossians 2:15), and finally, defeated in his attempts to
destroy Christ’s church, because a remnant of His people have survived
(Revelation 12:17). In short, as long as one stays connected to Christ,
one is always on the winning side in the great controversy.
But it doesn’t mean that times won’t be hard. Just as the early
church over the centuries faced persecution, Revelation 13 talks about
more persecution, future persecution on a worldwide scale. And if the
COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it’s about how quickly
the whole world can be brought to heel, how the whole world can
suddenly, dramatically, and in unexpected ways, change—and not for
the good, either.
Revelation 13 depicts what’s coming like this: “All who dwell on
the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the
Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. . . .
He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the
image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not
worship the image of the beast to be killed. He causes all, both small
and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right
hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except
one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his
name” (Revelation 13:8-17).
Over the years all sorts of popular books and movies have come
out about who these powers are and how all these events will be made
manifest. Each book, each movie, however, tells a different story, with
all sorts of wild speculation. If we put aside, for now, an attempt to
explain what these verses, rich in Old Testament symbolism, mean, a
few points come through that are important for understanding what
is going on here and that can help us better understand the three
angels’ messages.
First, as we have already seen, this persecution is worldwide.
Which makes sense in that, as shown in Revelation 12, when Satan
was cast to the earth, his attempts at deception were universal: “So
the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and
Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his
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angels were cast out with him” (verse 9). And again, not to belabor the
point, after COVID-19 who can deny how the world can quickly be
changed and brought into turmoil and trial? It would be the height of
folly to deny that what is depicted here could happen, not after what
“the whole world” has been facing since 2020.
Second, a key theme appears in these verses: worship. Five times
(Revelation 13:4 [twice], 8, 12, 15) worship is shown to be a major
factor behind the turmoil and conflict depicted in the last days.
According to these verses, the dragon, Satan, will attempt to enforce a
certain kind of worship upon the world. In one sense this shouldn’t be
surprising, because, from the beginning of the great controversy, Satan
has wanted to usurp the authority and place of God Himself. An Old
Testament depiction of his attitude has been revealed in these verses:
“For you have said in your heart: ‘I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt
my throne above the stars of God; I will also sit on the mount of the
congregation on the farthest sides of the north; I will ascend above the
heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High’” (Isaiah 14:13, 14).
This point, that about worship and whom people worship, becomes
paramount in understanding the three angels’ messages.
Third, in stark contrast to God, who seeks worship and obedience
only by love and the freedom inherent in love, the forces of evil will
use violence, as well as economic pressure, to enforce worship. The
texts says that they will “cause as many as would not worship the image
of the beast to be killed” (Revelation 13:15), and that “no one may buy
or sell” (verse 17) unless they conform.
In short, Revelation 12-13 provide the context for the three angels’
messages, which follow. Unfortunately, the context, that of worldwide
religious persecution, is not a pretty one, not a hopeful one, in and of
itself. However, the great news of the three angels’ messages is that they
reveal where our hope is, where our promise is. And amid this coming
time of confusion, turmoil, and persecution (in some ways the great
controversy climaxing on the earth), the Lord offers everyone hope
and promise, which, even now, before this persecution has arisen, we
can all surely use, can’t we?
And though the context of the following verse is different, the
sentiment behind them remains an eternal principle, one that each
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one of us can draw comfort from. “For I know the thoughts that I
think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil,
to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11). And the Lord has
proved the truthfulness of that sentiment by the death of Jesus, which
offers everyone who claims it “a future and a hope.” And that future,
and that hope, are revealed in the three angels’ messages.
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Section Two
Human Angels
E ver hear of Helen Keller? She was an American woman born in

1880 who, through a very early illness, lost her sight and hearing.
Nevertheless, she graduated college, wrote books, and traveled the
world advocating for the rights of those with disabilities like hers.
Though two crucial avenues for communication were lost, she was
still able to communicate with others and others with her.
From the cells in our body that communicate with other cells,
to plants that communicate with other plants (sending chemicals
in the air), to animals that communicate with other animals, and
humans, whose civilizations are built upon communication—life is
communication. We need to talk, to listen, to speak, to hear, and even
those who can’t speak or hear can and do still communicate. And,
please, in the day and age of smartphones, which provide a means of
communication that a generation ago would have seemed straight out
of science fiction, our existence today, perhaps more than ever, is built
upon communication. We live in what has been called the information
age. And what good is information if it is not communicated, not
shared?
Thus, the very name, the three angels’ messages—messages—
implies something to be communicated, to be taught, to be revealed,
and because they come from the Bible, the Word of God, we can trust
what they say as true. After all, who hasn’t learned by now that with
the tools of mass communication literally in our hands, not all that’s
taught and communicated is truth. Just as a math problem can have
one right answer and an infinite number of wrong ones, how much of
what pops up on digital screens is true or, in fact, even worth our time
and energy reading and listening to? For every truth out there, only
God knows how many lies circle it like vultures.
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Amid all the misinformation, the book of Revelation early on tells
us, “Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of this
prophecy, and keep those things which are written in it; for the time
is near” (Revelation 1:3). God is communicating with us through His
Word, and we’re blessed not just to hear and read His Word, but to
“keep those things which are written in it.” And among the “things”
written in it are the three angels’ messages, which not only warn us
about the trouble that’s coming but show us the only hope we can
have when it does. Compared to what’s on TikTok or MTV, these are
messages that we need to hear!
The first message begins with these words: “Then I saw another
angel flying in the midst of heaven” (Revelation 14:6). What or who is
this angel?
Both in Hebrew and in Greek, the word “angel” means a
“messenger,” someone with something to communicate with others.
Though angels are supernatural beings from other parts of the cosmos,
often coming with messages, information, to relay to God’s people (see
Daniel 9:20-23; Luke 1:11-38), the Bible at times applies the term to
humans who come bearing messages as well.
Perhaps the most obvious case is John the Baptist. Talking
about John in Matthew 11:9, 10, Jesus Himself, after giving a quick
description of John and calling him not only a prophet but “more than
a prophet,” quoted the Old Testament (Malachi 3:1), saying:
“For this is he of whom it is written:
‘Behold, I send My messenger before Your face,
Who will prepare Your way before You.’ ”
Jesus applies that text to John, even though the Hebrew word for
“messenger” here is the same Hebrew word used all through the Old
Testament for “angel,” in reference to these supernatural beings who,
in most of their appearances, bring messages from heaven to earth. In
other words, both humans and angels are messengers from God.
In the case of the first angel, given the symbolic nature of the book
of Revelation, and the context that follows—that of preaching to the
world—the “angel” here is clearly referring to human messengers,
with, however, a message from heaven. After all, throughout the Bible
it is people whom God uses to witness to the world about Him. In
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the famous Great Commission, Jesus said: “Go therefore and make
disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all
things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even
to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:19, 20). He addressed these words to
His people, His followers, His church. Historically it has been human
beings who preach the gospel, which is what is happening with the
three angels’ messages, kind of the Great Commission contextualized
for the last days.
Also, the text says that John saw “another angel,” implying that
other angels came before. Which makes sense. The book of Revelation
covers the history of the church from Jesus’ first coming to His second,
and during all this time, however many angelic messengers might
have made some appearances in Christian history (see Acts 12:7), the
spread of the gospel around the world has been accomplished almost
exclusively by human agents, human messengers—human angels.
What, then, does this human angel, these human messengers with
a message from heaven, have to say that’s so important, that can offer
us hope in a world that, day by day, seems to offer us less and less?
The Thief on the Cross
One of the most famous accounts in Scripture is that of the thief
on the cross, one of the two men crucified with Jesus by the Romans
in A.D. 31. What happened?
Jesus of Nazareth, after a three-and-a-half-year ministry in the
Holy Land, mostly Galilee in the north and Judea in the south, angered
the religious establishment, who, fearing for its authority, wanted to
have this Jesus killed. After talking about the danger posed by the
Romans, the high priest for that year, Caiaphas, had said: “You know
nothing at all, nor do you consider that it is expedient for us that one
man should die for the people, and not that the whole nation should
perish” (John 11:49, 50). That one man was Jesus, and “from that
day on, they plotted to put Him to death” (verse 53). Their plotting
succeeded, and they had Jesus crucified on a cross.
But Jesus wasn’t alone there. “There were also two others,
criminals, led with Him to be put to death. And when they had come
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to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him, and the criminals,
one on the right hand and the other on the left” (Luke 23:32, 33). The
Gospel of Mark, recounting the same events, gave more information.
“With Him they also crucified two robbers, one on His right and the
other on His left. So the Scripture was fulfilled which says, ‘And He
was numbered with the transgressors’ ” (Mark 15:27, 28).
According to Mark, these men were robbers. However harsh
Roman law could be, the two most likely were not crucified for stealing
bread in order to feed a hungry family. Crucifixion was, generally, for
the worst offenders, especially those who threatened Roman authority.
Mark also portrays what happened with these men as a fulfillment of
an Old Testament messianic prophecy, the famous Isaiah 53 chapter—a
powerful depiction, more than a half century earlier, of Jesus’ death.
Mark quoted from verse 12 of that chapter, which, in talking about
Jesus, said that “He was numbered with the transgressors.” Mark saw
the “transgressors” as the two robbers crucified with Jesus.
Though there are different terms in Hebrew for sins, sinners,
transgression, iniquity, and so forth, the Hebrew noun used in verse 12
for “transgressors,” peshaim, depicts the worst kind of sin and sinner.
The root word often is translated as “rebellion” or “rebel.” Isaiah, for
instance, in another place wrote: “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O
earth! For the Lord has spoken: ‘I have nourished and brought up
children, and they have rebelled [same root as peshaim] against Me’ ”
(Isaiah 1:2).
These men, then, these peshaim, were not innocent bystanders
who, in the heat of the moment, found themselves crucified with
Jesus. They were criminals deemed worthy not just of death but of the
harshest kind of death, crucifixion. One of the two even admitted that
“we receive the due reward of our deeds.”
Luke continues to depict the events. “And the people stood looking
on. But even the rulers with them sneered, saying, ‘He saved others; let
Him save Himself if He is the Christ, the chosen of God.’ The soldiers
also mocked Him, coming and offering Him sour wine, and saying, ‘If
You are the King of the Jews, save Yourself ’ ” (Luke 23:35-37).
The crowd, other Jews, mocked Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah;
the Roman soldiers, not interested in Jewish theology, mocked Him as
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a political figure, the King of the Jews.
Luke then focuses on the two criminals crucified with Jesus. “Then
one of the criminals who were hanged blasphemed Him, saying, ‘If You
are the Christ, save Yourself and us.’ But the other, answering, rebuked
him, saying, ‘Do you not even fear God, seeing you are under the same
condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of
our deeds; but this Man has done nothing wrong’ ” (Luke 23:39-41).
Mark, in depicting the two thieves crucified with Christ, had
them both attacking Jesus at first. “Even those who were crucified with
Him reviled Him” (Mark 15:32). This second thief, however, watching
what was happening—perhaps even hearing Jesus pray, “Father,
forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34)—had
a change of heart, obviously. Somehow, amid the pain, the suffering,
the turmoil, he was able to see Jesus as the crucified Savior. At that
moment, besides Jesus, this dying criminal was the only human
being in the world who knew who Jesus was and what was happening
there, at the cross. This explains the thief ’s next words to Jesus: “Lord,
remember me when You come into Your kingdom” (verse 42).
And what did Jesus say to this dying man, a criminal, a robber,
one of the peshaim, someone who admitted his own guilt?
Well, friend, I’d like to help you, but you violated the eighth
commandment, “Thou shalt not steal”? Or did He say, Well, friend, I’d
like to do something for you, but you were cursing Me when we first got
here, right? Or did Jesus say, Well, friend, I’d like to do something for you,
but people of your character and with your sinful past cannot come into
My kingdom?
Was that, or anything like that, what Jesus said?
Instead, looking at this man who had nothing to offer Him, a man
whose only relationship to God’s law seemed to be to violate it, a man
who even by Roman standards was deemed worthy of death, Jesus,
without any hesitation, waffling, or fine print, declared to him, “You
will be with Me in paradise” (verse 43). In other words: Well, friend,
despite your cursing Me, despite your sinful past, despite your crimes,
your sins, your thievery, and despite pretty much everything about you
and your character—because of your faith in Me I am telling you, right
now, that you have the promise of eternal life.
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How could this be? How could Jesus justly and fairly give such
assurance to a man who had nothing to commend him to God, a man
who by about any standard, even a worldly standard, had nothing
righteous or holy about him? What did that man do to deserve what
Jesus had so clearly and boldly offered him?
The answer is found in the first angel’s message of Revelation 14.
And it is captured with the phrase “the everlasting gospel.”
The Good News
the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on the earth—to
every nation, tribe, tongue, and people” (Revelation 14:6).
Most people have at least heard the word “gospel.” When someone
says “It’s the gospel truth” about anything, even something secular, the
idea is that it’s a certain truth, a sure truth, something reliable. That
concept fits perfectly with the “gospel” as it is revealed in the Bible.
And particularly in the first angel’s message, with its “everlasting”
(NKJV) or “eternal” (NIV) gospel. It is the most certain, the most
reliable, truth in all the creation.
But what does the Bible mean by the term “gospel”? One great
example can be found in Matthew 11:5. John the Baptist, a prophet
who helped announce the coming of Jesus, had been thrown into
prison and wasn’t, it seemed, getting out any time soon (in fact, he
got out only as a headless corpse [see Matthew 14:10]). Discouraged
by his imprisonment, he began to wonder about Jesus, to have doubts
perhaps about Him, and when he had asked Jesus if He really were
the “one who is to come” (Matthew 11:3, NIV), that is, the Messiah,
Jesus responded like this: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the
blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the
deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news
preached to them” (verses 4, 5, ESV).
The “good news” preached to the poor is another way of expressing
“the gospel.” The New King James Version translates it: “And the poor
have the gospel preached to them.”
The “gospel” comes from a Greek word from which the English
words “evangelism” or “evangelize” are derived. But the basic Greek
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meaning is to proclaim good and hopeful news about something.
And in the case of the Bible, the gospel, the good and hopeful news,
is the good and hopeful news about Jesus Christ and His coming to
the earth.
Here are just a few of the almost 100 times the word is used in
the New Testament. (A Hebrew parallel word, bsr, appears in the Old
Testament, such as in Isaiah 61:1, a verse that Jesus Himself used in
reference to His own mission of preaching the gospel [Luke 4:18].)
“And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world
as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come” (Matthew
24:14).
“Now it happened on one of those days, as He taught the people
in the temple and preached the gospel, that the chief priests and the
scribes, together with the elders, confronted Him” (Luke 20:1).
“For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power
of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and
also for the Greek” (Romans 1:16).
“In Him you also trusted, after you heard the word of truth, the
gospel of your salvation; in whom also, having believed, you were
sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise” (Ephesians 1:13).
In each of these verses, one could simply replace the word “gospel”
with the words “good news,” and the message would be the same. The
gospel is the good news of what Jesus Christ has done for everyone,
everyone, in the world.
Which is what? That is, if there ever were a time that everyone, as
in everyone, needed some good news, it would be now, would it not?
And so, what is the good news of the gospel, the “everlasting gospel,”
of the first angel’s message?
The Gospel in Less Than 200 Words
A young man sat in a car, at night, next to a friend who, though
an atheist, was struggling with that belief. At times this backsliding
skeptic started to think that God, some God or another, had to exist.
After all, nothing created itself. To create yourself, you would have to
have already existed, and so anything that once didn’t exist but came
into existence had to have originated from something other than itself.
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The Final Hope
The car that they sat in, for instance, didn’t come from itself,
didn’t create itself. The air that he breathed didn’t come from itself;
something prior to the air had to have created it. The solar system
didn’t create itself either. And even the universe, however it got started,
didn’t start itself. Something had to have made it—and who or what
would that be but God?
And, too, the beauty, the complexity, of life, of nature. Though
society and science and everyone insisted that the universe arose
by chance, and that all the beauty and wonders of life were created
without any intention or forethought at all—it just didn’t seem right to
him. To think that more conscious, planned, and intentional thought
went into someone spray-painting graffiti on the side of a bridge than
went into the creation of life, whether a bumblebee or the human
brain, just seemed too much of a stretch. And all the wonderful fruit
and vegetables, so tasty, so healthy, so beautiful, and so adapted to
human needs—all with their own seeds in them? These, too, spoke to
him of something more than pure chance, more than pure luck. They
spoke to him of a conscious Creator.
And though His Christian friend explained to him about the great
controversy, and the freedom inherent in love, and the risk inherent
in freedom, still the question of evil bothered him. In short, this
struggling atheist wondered what this God, if He existed (and he was
more convinced that He did), was really like.
“Tell me,” he said to his Christian friend, “in less than 200 words,
what your God is like.”
“OK,” his friend said. “The God whom I worship created the entire
universe. Every atom in every star in every one of the 2 trillion galaxies
was not only created by this God but is sustained every moment by
Him as well. This same God, the Creator, 2,000 years ago, ‘shrank
down,’ and became a human infant in the womb of a Jewish peasant
woman in the land of ancient Israel. That infant was born as the baby
Jesus, and though human like us, He nevertheless lived a sinless life,
a perfect life. And then this Jesus, God in the flesh, freely offered
Himself as a sacrifice for sin, for the sin and evil of the whole human
race. In other words, the punishment that each human being deserved
for the evil that each human being has done, Jesus, God Himself, bore
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that punishment in Himself so that none of us have to face it ourselves.
You want to know what God is like. Look at Jesus dying on the cross so
that, in a sense, you don’t have to. That is what God is like—in under
200 words.”
Though knowing something about Christianity, the atheist
never knew what his friend had just said. He was astonished, saying,
“Wow! That sure is incredibly hopeful, isn’t it? It sure gives you some
encouragement about life.”
“Yeah,” the Christian said. “That’s why they call it the ‘good news.’ ”
The Sin Problem
No wonder the atheist was astonished. He should have been. God,
the Creator, not only coming to this earth but offering Himself as a
sacrifice for the humans on it? What was the situation here that was so
dire, so bad, that it took this, the self-sacrifice of the Creator, to solve it?
In one sense it’s not that hard to see how dire things are. Left to
ourselves, we have no hope. Years ago a well-known atheist biologist,
W. D. Hamilton, who loved to study Amazonian beetles, passed away.
At the funeral in England his wife’s eulogy went, in part, like this: “Bill,
now your body is lying in the Wytham woods, but from here you will
reach again your beloved forests. You will live not only in a beetle, but
in billions of spores of fungi and algae. Brought by the wind higher up
in the troposphere, all of you will form the clouds and, wandering across
oceans, will fall down and fly up again and again, till eventually a drop
of rain will join you to the water of the flooded forest of the Amazon.”
Floating around in spores of fungi and algae? Not the most thrilling
of prospects, or the most glorious ending to a human existence, is it?
But what else does life, in and of itself, without something supernatural,
without something divine, offer us?
“I stare,” wrote Japanese author Haruki Murakami, “at this
ceaseless, rushing crowd and imagine a time a hundred years from
now. In a hundred years everybody here—me included—will have
disappeared from the face of the earth and turned into ashes or dust.
A weird thought, but everything in front of me starts to seem unreal,
like a gust of wind could blow it all away.”
Or, as the author of The Book of Dead Philosophers expressed it:
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The Final Hope
“This book begins from the simple assumption: what defines human
life on our corner of the planet at the present time is not just a fear
of death, but an overwhelming terror of annihilation. This is a terror
both of the inevitability of our demise with its future prospect of pain
and possibly meaningless suffering, and the horror of what lies in the
grave other than our body nailed in a box and lowered into the earth
to become worm food.”
But that’s just life, we’re told. That’s just the way it is, and we need
to accept it. But according to the Bible, that’s not just the way it is. It’s not
even close to the way it is. The whole purpose of Jesus Christ coming
to the earth, of God in the flesh “shrinking down” and becoming one
of us, to die for us—the whole purpose was to give every human being
the opportunity for eternal life, the life that we had originally been
created to have from the start.
The world has it all wrong. Radically wrong. Instead of death
being the means of life—that is, through billions of years of violence,
predation extinction, as evolution teaches—death was never meant
to be here to begin with. We, as human beings, had been originally
created to live forever. We were never created nor wired to die. It’s the
most unnatural of all human acts. Death was never supposed to be
part of our equation, never. Death is not, as we are told, “part of life,”
but the opposite of life. It is the undoing of life. Death is an alien, an
intruder who one day will be eradicated.
How, then, did death, this intruder, this “enemy” (1 Corinthians
15:26) that was never supposed to be here, get here? The apostle
Paul makes it plain: “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered
the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men,
because all sinned” (Romans 5:12).
That’s it. Adam brought sin, sin leads to death, and because we all
have been infected by sin and corrupted by sin, we all suffer the death
that sin brings. After Adam and Eve (using the freedom inherent in
love) sinned, everything changed, not only their own physical nature
but nature itself (see Genesis 3:16-19), and death, suffering, corruption
has been the lot of all humanity since. We’re so used to these evils
that we see them as the natural course of things, even though death,
suffering, evil, and pain are no more “natural” than cancer.
34
Someone has said that the one Christian doctrine that you don’t
need to take on faith is the doctrine of human sinfulness. We see it
all over. Look at the world: everything from war, to the growing gap
between the rich and the poor, to human trafficking. Everywhere our
sinfulness, our evil, is on display, as in a horror film.
Paul, writing 2,000 years ago, quoted Old Testament texts written
maybe 1,000 years earlier than when he lived. And what did they say?
“ ‘There is none who understands;
There is none who seeks after God.
They have all turned aside;
They have together become unprofitable;
There is none who does good, no, not one.’
‘Their throat is an open tomb;
With their tongues they have practiced deceit’;
‘The poison of asps is under their lips’;
‘Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.’
‘Their feet are swift to shed blood;
Destruction and misery are in their ways;
And the way of peace they have not known.’
‘There is no fear of God before their eyes’ ” (Romans 3:11-18).
Three thousand years ago, 2,000 years ago, yesterday. It’s all the same.
On December 17, 1903—after millennia of the human quest to
fly—the Wright brothers got us off the ground in the first sustained
flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft. What a feat! By November
1, 1911, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti, flying over a Turkish military camp
in Libya, threw four small grenades, by hand, over the side of the plane
in the world’s first recorded aerial bombardment. What a feat, too!
We learned how to fly, and about eight years later what do we do with
our new wings but drop bombs on each other? If that isn’t humanity,
what is?
Charles Manson was the mastermind behind the murders of the
actress Sharon Tate and others in California in the 1960s. Manson’s
mother had been a prostitute, and allegedly, one day when little
Charlie was about 3, she was in a bar with him, and a barmaid looked
over the bar and said, “What a cute kid. What can I give you for him?”
“How about,” his mother answered, “a pitcher of beer?”
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The Final Hope
Any wonder little Charlie didn’t grow up to be a model citizen?
No, and the sins of the mother reverberated way beyond the bar, too.
But that’s the way it is with sin. And what do you get after 6,000 years
of it? You get our present world.
But, someone says, I’m not that bad.
Probably not. But who would like to one day stand before God, a
God who knows your every wrong thought, your every hidden deed,
every single thing that you might have done in secret, things that you’d
rather die than have revealed? How well, then, would you, covered
in your own filthy garments, fare before a holy, sinless, perfect God?
Sure, you might not be Charles Manson, or even his prostitute mother.
But you’re bad enough.
So bad, in fact, that it took the death of Jesus, of the Creator
Himself, to solve the problem of sin. That is, only the self-sacrifice
of the Creator—the one who made the heavens and the earth—could
atone for human evil. If we could somehow work our way out of it,
wouldn’t that have been better than God crucified on the cross?
The severity of the sin problem, of the death problem, of the evil
problem, is best revealed by the severity of what it cost to solve it:
Jesus crucified.
“Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being
in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God,
but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant,
and coming in the likeness of men.
And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself
and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross”
(Philippians 2:5-8).
The gospel, the sacrifice of Jesus, the Son of God—the one
“through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of
His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things
by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:2, 3)—that is the solution. Only
God, only someone greater than the creation, outside of the creation,
transcendent to the creation—only His own self-sacrifice could atone
for the creation. And that’s what we have with Jesus. And what He did
for us is known as the “everlasting gospel.”
36
The Everlasting Gospel

The first angel’s message begins with the “everlasting” gospel. Or
the “eternal” gospel. The eternal good news. However often the word
“gospel” itself appears in the Bible, this is the only time it was modified
with the word “everlasting” (aiōnios), a term that John uses in other
places with the word “life”; that is, in reference to the “eternal life” that
we can have in Jesus. Such as: “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who
believes in Me has everlasting life” (John 6:47).
The gospel is eternal because it was formulated by God in eternity,
and it remained hidden until made manifest in Jesus. In fact, the
gospel, the hope of eternal life for us all, had been formulated even
before the world began. Look at these words, from Paul: “Blessed be
the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with
every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He
chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be
holy and without blame before Him in love” (Ephesians 1:3, 4).
Chosen in Him before the foundation of the world! Before we
even existed, God’s plan was for all of us to have salvation in Him.
This isn’t predestination, the idea that God chooses some to be saved,
some to be lost. No, everyone, every human being, was predestined for
salvation. God’s plan, even before the world began, was for everyone to
have eternal life in His Son.
“But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for
the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honour; that he by the
grace of God should taste death for every man” (Hebrews 2:9, KJV).
Why die for every “man” if it weren’t planned for every man to be
saved, even if every man in the end won’t be?
“All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his
own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah
53:6, KJV). Why take the iniquity “of us all” if the intention wasn’t
to pardon “us all”? People not availing themselves of the provision
doesn’t limit the provision any more than people starving themselves
to death in a rich marketplace means there’s not enough food.
It goes back to the idea, stressed earlier, that we had originally
been created for eternal life. From the start we were to have lived
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The Final Hope
forever. But even before God created this world, He knew what was
going to happen; He knew that humanity would fall. And so, even
before He had created us, He instituted the plan by which we all, every
one of us, could be saved. That was the everlasting gospel.
“Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ to further
the faith of God’s elect and their knowledge of the truth that leads to
godliness—in the hope of eternal life, which God, who does not lie,
promised before the beginning of time” (Titus 1:1, 2, NIV). Before the
foundation of the world was one thing; Paul, though, pushes it back
further: We were promised eternal life before the beginning of time. Of
time? How interesting in light of modern science, which teaches that
billions of years ago matter, energy, space, and time were created at
once. Time itself had a beginning; it once did not exist. And, according
to Paul, it was then—before its beginning, before time itself—that God
promised us the hope of eternal life. Whenever exactly that was, who
knows? We can be sure, though, that it was long ago. No wonder it’s
called the everlasting gospel.
“Forasmuch as ye know that ye were not redeemed with
corruptible things, as silver and gold, from your vain conversation
received by tradition from your fathers; but with the precious blood of
Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot: Who verily was
foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in
these last times for you” (1 Peter 1:18-20, KJV).
Before the foundation of the world the promise of salvation was
given because, before the foundation of the world, the plan of salvation
was too. Before time itself the Godhead planned that Jesus, the Son of
God, would shed His blood for the human race. No wonder Jesus is
called “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation
13:8). The plan of salvation was laid out before we needed it, in order
that it would be there when we did. It was the warranty on our souls.
And it has been the same gospel, the same plan of salvation, from
before time began to the gospel being proclaimed in the first angel’s
message. There is only one gospel, and it first formulated in eternity
past, and its fruits will last for eternity future. Paul himself stated, even
warned, that “even if we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other
gospel to you than what we have preached to you, let him be accursed.
38
As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone preaches any
other gospel to you than what you have received, let him be accursed”
(Galatians 1:8, 9).
This gospel was first proclaimed to Adam and Eve in Eden
(Genesis 3:15), after they fell and brought sin and death to our world.
This same gospel was preached to Abraham. “And the Scripture,
foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the
gospel to Abraham beforehand, saying, ‘In you all the nations shall
be blessed’ ” (Galatians 3:8; see also Genesis 22:18). It was the same
gospel preached to ancient Israel amid their wilderness wanderings
(Hebrews 4:2). This same gospel, this same message, was what heaven
had preached to shepherds outside Bethlehem about the birth of Jesus:
“I bring you good tidings of great joy which will be to all people. For
there is born to you this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ
the Lord” (Luke 2:10, 11). It was the same gospel that Jesus preached:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent,
and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:15). It was the same gospel that
saved the thief on the cross, to whom Jesus had promised eternal life
(Luke 23:43). And it was the same gospel that Jesus told the disciples
to preach until the very end: “And this gospel of the kingdom will
be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then
the end will come” (Matthew 24:14). And it is the same gospel, the
“everlasting gospel,” that the first angel proclaims to the world.
And the message, this eternal, everlasting message, is that
salvation, the eternal life that we were originally supposed to have, is
found only by faith in Jesus. Only by claiming, by faith, the perfect
righteousness of Jesus, by leaning totally on His merits and not on
ourselves or our good works, can we regain the eternal life that was
supposed to have been ours from the start.
“Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord,
nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the
gospel according to the power of God; who hath saved us, and called
us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to
his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before
the world began” (2 Timothy 1:8, 9, KJV).
If ever a text proved salvation by grace, and not by works, this
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The Final Hope
must be it. If we were called to be saved before the world began, before
time itself began, then salvation can’t be based on our works, because
we were called in Him before we even existed in order to have any
works! Being promised something before you existed, before you could
possibly have done anything to deserve it—if that is not grace, what is?
Also, as we have seen, Jesus, the one who created all that had been
made (John 1:1-3), “shrinks down” and becomes a human baby who
grew into adulthood, who lived a sinless life, who then offered that life
as a sacrifice for us. God Himself, dying for us? As if that weren’t enough
to save us? We need our own works as well?
One Christian writer expressed it like this: “If you would gather
together everything that is good and holy and noble and lovely in man
and then present the subject to the angels of God as acting a part in
the salvation of the human soul or in merit, the proposition would
be rejected as treason. Standing in the presence of their Creator and
looking upon the unsurpassed glory which enshrouds His person, they
are looking upon the Lamb of God given from the foundation of the
world to a life of humiliation, to be rejected of sinful men, to be despised,
to be crucified. Who can measure the infinity of the sacrifice!” 1
This, the “everlasting gospel,” is the foundation of the three angels’
messages, because without it, without the promise of eternal life,
which is what the gospel is all about—what else matters? We’d be back
to nothing more—than what? Than floating around as spores in the
atmosphere or being lowered into a hole and becoming nothing but
ashes and dust? Surely, after all we go through, all the toils and troubles
and hassles of just getting by in life, to end like that, and forever, too,
hardly seems worth it. Hardly makes sense at all.
It doesn’t make sense, because it was never the way that it was
supposed to have been. Sin derailed everything; the gospel, the
“everlasting gospel,” is God’s way of restoring normalcy, sanity, and life
to a world suffused in the abnormality and insanity of death.
From Heaven to Earth
the everlasting gospel to preach to those who dwell on the earth—
1
Ellen G. White, Faith and Works (Nashville: Southern Pub. Assn., 1979), p. 24.
40
to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people—saying with a loud voice,
‘Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His judgment has
come; and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and
springs of water’ ” (Revelation 14:6, 7).
Notice the heaven-to-earth dynamic here: the first angel’s
message, though being physically delivered by humans, comes from
heaven. It’s of divine, not human, origin. It is revealed truth, truth that
is told to us, truth divulged to us, truth given to us by God through
His human messengers. These messengers, such as Moses, Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Matthew, John, Paul, and Peter, had writings in the Bible; or
they didn’t, such as Nathan the prophet (2 Samuel 7:1, 2) or John the
Baptist, of whom Jesus said that “among those born of women there is
not a greater prophet than John the Baptist” (Luke 7:28). Either way,
they were speaking for God.
Meanwhile, Scripture itself is “given by inspiration of God, and
is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction
in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). The Greek word for “inspiration
of God” is theopneustos, which means “God-breathed.” It has been
revealed by God Himself, “who cannot lie” (Titus 1:2). Humans lie,
but not God, and so we must listen to what He has said to us in this
angel’s message.
Because this message comes from heaven, that is, from high
above the earth, it is proclaimed to “those who dwell on the earth.”
The prophet Isaiah talks about high mountains (Isaiah 40:9; 52:7) as
the place from which the gospel is preached to those below. Before
sending His disciples to preach, Jesus said that what He had told them
in secret would be proclaimed from rooftops (Matthew 10:27), high
places from which their voices would be heard by the masses in the
streets beneath.
The angel also speaks in a “loud voice,” giving the idea of being
easily heard. In biblical times, long before anything even like a telegraph
wire transmitting Morse Code—much less FaceTime—ever entered
anyone’s imagination, messengers were trained from youth to have
strong voices. These trained men, standing from posts on strategic
mountains, would loudly shout to those on another mountain, and so
forth, until the message reached the intended destination.
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The Final Hope
In short, this first angel’s message will be proclaimed worldwide;
no one will be able to claim ignorance. (This book you’re reading right
now is part of that prophetic truth being fulfilled.) The universality of
this message is also found in whom it is being directed to: “to those
who dwell on the earth—to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people.”
The phrase “who dwell on the earth” is also used in Revelation to
depict people who have chosen not to follow and obey God (see
Revelation 13:8, 14). However, because the first angel’s message is a
call to faithfulness, this phrase in this context must be referring to a
time when people still have the opportunity to choose whom they
will worship and obey (see “A Bit of Context, Please [Part Two]”). In
fact, what follows right after, “every nation, tribe, tongue, and people,”
shows the universality of the message. It is for every human being.
Which makes sense. Humanity has been created, out the gate, to
live forever; in order to ensure us of that eternal life (if we would accept
it), God put in place “the everlasting gospel” long before anyone of us
took our first, or last, breath. “For to this end we both labor and suffer
reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Savior of all
men, especially of those who believe” (1 Timothy 4:10). Thousands
of years ago the Lord told Abram (later Abraham) that in him “all the
families of the earth will be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). The destroying
fires of hell were originally prepared only for the devil and his angels,
not for humans and their offspring (Matthew 25:41).
The plan of salvation is, ultimately, a restoration: re-creating
what has been ruined by sin and death. It’s no wonder, then, that the
first angel’s message, proclaiming “the everlasting gospel,” is for all
humanity. Christ died for all people, with no one left out. The tragedy
of the lost is that no one should be lost, not when such a steep price,
the crucifixion of the Creator, has been paid for them to be saved.
Finally, in a world racked by ethnic, racial, and gender conflicts
(when has it not, actually?), the universality of the gospel message
should say something about the essential equality of humanity: we’re
all wretches, all in need of God’s grace (go back to the idea, in “The
Sin Problem,” of you standing before a holy God who knows your
deepest, ugliest secrets). Death cares nothing about race, gender, social
standing, or wealth. It’s an equal-opportunity destroyer. “Every nation,
42
tribe, tongue, and people” are ultimately, and equally, impotent before
it, because, sooner or later, death pulls “every nation, tribe, tongue and
people” back into the dust and dirt from which they all arose. And that
is why the first angel’s message is directed to all of them, to all of us.
Mi-Yittan
Most languages come sprinkled with idioms, such as (in English)
“not know jack,” or “a lame duck,” or “to be on cloud nine,” whose
meanings are not literally, or even logically, deduced from the phrases
themselves. (To “not know jack” has nothing to do with a man named
Jack, but refers to having no knowledge at all of a specific situation.)
Biblical Hebrew itself has idioms; one is mi-yittan, which literally
means “Who will give?” However, it’s used idiomatically to express
something else. After their escape from Egypt, the children of Israel,
facing challenges in the wilderness, exclaimed, “If only we had died
by the Lord’s hand in Egypt!” (Exodus 16:3, NIV). The phrase “if
only” came from mi-yittan. In Psalm 14:7 David utters, “Oh that the
salvation of Israel were come out of Zion!” (KJV). The Hebrew doesn’t
say, “Oh”; it says, mi-yittan, “Who will give?” In Job 6:8, when Job
exclaims, “Oh, that I might have my request,” “Oh” is translated, rather
poorly, from mi-yittan.
In all these cases, mi-yittan expresses the idea of frailty and
weakness in the face of events that the people cannot control as
they would wish. Overcome by the sufferings that had so quickly
choked but not strangled him, Job wished, “Oh, that I might have my
request”—which is that God would have “cut me off ” (Job 6:9, KJV);
that is, let him die and be free from his trials. But God didn’t, and
his cry mi-yittan, “Who will give?” expresses the unfulfilled wish that
God would.
Another occurrence appears in Deuteronomy 5:29. Going over
the history of God’s providences, Moses reminds the children of
Israel about their request that he, Moses, talk to the Lord for them lest
they die. According to Moses, the Lord, pleased with their request,
then said: “Oh that there were such a heart in them, that they would
fear me, and keep all my commandments always” (KJV). The word
translated “Oh”? Mi-yittan.
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The Final Hope
Mi-yittan? Here is the Lord—the Creator God, the one who made
space, time, and matter and energy, the one who spoke our world into
existence, the one who breathed into Adam the breath of life—here
is the Sovereign God Himself uttering a phrase associated with the
weaknesses and limitations of humanity? Talk about the reality of free
will. Talk about the limits of what God can do in the midst of the great
controversy. This use of mi-yittan reveals that even God can’t trample
on free will (for the moment He did, it would no longer be free).
What’s fascinating, too, is the context. The Lord wishes, mi-yittan,
that His people would have such a heart as to fear Him. To fear God?
Can’t God easily make people fear Him, as in being scared of Him? At
Mount Sinai, for instance, with the giving of the Ten Commandments,
what happened? “When the people heard the thunder and the loud
blast of the ram’s horn, and when they saw the flashes of lightning
and the smoke billowing from the mountain, they stood at a distance,
trembling with fear. And they said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and
we will listen. But don’t let God speak directly to us, or we will die!’ ”
(Exodus 20:19, NLT). Trembling in fear before God? The God who
can open up and swallow people alive (Numbers 16:32) or bring
fire down from heaven that burns up not just animal sacrifices but
also “the wood and the stones and the dust” (1 Kings 18:38)? “And it
licked up the water that was in the trench” (verse 38). This is a God
who, if He chose to, could scare the daylights out of any of us (to use
an English idiom). God cannot force people to love Him without
destroying what love is, but God could easily force people to fear
Him without destroying what fear is. If not free, we could not love
God, but, free or not free, we could certainly cower in dreadful terror
before Him.
Yet that’s not the kind of fear that God wants from us. Look at the
following texts, all about fearing God; look, too, at the positive, uplifting
implications that come from fearing God. “Afterward the children of
Israel shall return and seek the Lord their God and David their king.
They shall fear the Lord and His goodness in the latter days” (Hosea
3:5). “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge” (Proverbs
1:7). “The eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him” (Psalm 33:18).
“There is no want to those who fear Him” (Psalm 34:9). “He will bless
44
those who fear the Lord” (Psalm 115:13). “He fulfills the desires of
those who fear Him” (Psalm 145:19, NIV). “Therefore, having these
promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the
flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God” (2 Corinthians
7:1). “Honor all people. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the
king” (1 Peter 2:17).
And then, too, there’s the first angel. After we’re told that this angel
is proclaiming the everlasting gospel to all the world, the angel begins
that proclamation with a loud voice, declaring, “Fear God and give
glory to Him, for the hour of His judgment has come; and worship
Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water”
(Revelation 14:7). The first words out of his mouth are to “fear God.”
If that does not mean to be scared of Him, as you might be scared of
a machine gun-toting, deranged psychotic rampaging through your
neighborhood, what does it mean? And why would the first words
spoken by an angel proclaiming the great news of Christ’s death for us,
the everlasting gospel—why would those first words be to “fear God”?
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Section Three
Fear God
W hy wouldn’t the first words of an angel proclaiming the

everlasting gospel be “Fear God”? Think, again, about what the
everlasting gospel is. The God who created and sustains the universe,
the estimated 50 billion-light-year-wide observable universe (who
knows how far beyond even that it goes?), and whose power is so vast
that our imaginations can’t grasp His creation (how do you imagine
something 50 billion light-years wide?)—this God so humbled
Himself, so lowered Himself, that He purposely, of His own choice
and out of love for us, allowed Himself to become one of us. “Let
this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the
form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but
made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and
coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a
man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death,
even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:5-8).
It would have been an infinite condescension just to have stepped
down from the glories of heaven to come to this fallen, disease- and
war- and crime-ridden planet as a human being. After all, what is the
earth in contrast to the vastness of the universe, with its estimated
2 trillion galaxies, each with billions of stars (and only God knows
how many exoplanets1 around those stars)? In the geography of the
cosmos, our whole solar system, sun included, would seem of no more
consequence or importance than a grain of sand digested in the belly
of a crab. That’s our solar system. What about our planet, earth, or each
of us, which in contrast even to the earth are but fleeting spasms of
cellular metabolism that will eventually all but evaporate into nothing
but scanty chemical remains?
1
Exoplanets are planets that orbit other stars.
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The Final Hope
And yet so great was His love for us that not only did He come to
live among us but He—the Creator of the 50 billion-light-year-wide
observable universe (who knows how far beyond even that it goes?)—
allowed Himself to be mocked, jeered, humiliated, tortured, and then
crucified for us so that we can all have the promise of eternal life.
No wonder we should fear Him, not as in being scared but as in
being awed and utterly reverent and utterly astonished that He would
care so much for us, even at such a cost to Himself. He is so powerful;
we are so weak, we are so filthy, we are so sinful before Him that He
could have justifiably wiped us out. But instead He humbled Himself
and, reaching across the cold, dead inhospitable void of space, became
one of us. And by His willful self-sacrifice, Jesus linked us to Himself
with ties that will never be broken.
Fear God? Fear that in the face of such love, such undeserved love
and such unrelenting grace, that we should sin against Him. Fear that
we should have to stand before Him without His robe of righteousness.
Fear that we should allow ourselves to forget His great love to us and
reject His offer of salvation. That’s a frightening thought: that despite
the cross, that despite the astonishing self-abnegation of God Himself,
that despite the infinite price paid for our souls, we should ignore
or forget or reject what has already been done for us. Again, “before
time began” (2 Timothy 1:9; Titus 1:2) each of us had been chosen in
Him to have the eternal life that was supposed to have been ours from
the start. And to secure this life for us, even before we existed, Christ
covenanted with the Father and the Holy Spirit to sacrifice Himself for
us as the only means of any of us having eternal life.
And yet, as too many will do—to reject the offer? To walk away
from such infinite price paid for us? To count it as a small thing or to
brush it aside for the fleeting pleasures of this world, which never gives
true happiness and is passing away anyway?
That is a frightening thought!
Human analogies fail, but imagine someone drinks himself silly
over long years until his liver is completely shot. A loved one, seeing
what is happening, offers their own liver, at the cost of their life. The
liver is removed, but the sick person then chooses not to take it, even
after the person died so that they could have it. That, roughly, is what
48
it means to reject, in the face of Calvary, what Christ has done for us.
In the past, people have looked up into the night sky filled with
stars and felt a sense of awe, of fear, at the vastness, the grandeur, the
beauty of what was up there above them while they were so small, so
little, so seemingly insignificant below all this. And today telescopes
that reveal a cosmos so vast that we throw out such numbers as 20
billion light-years2 for these distances give us the illusion that we can
grasp them when we can only shudder, in awe, in fear, at the infinitely
starry magnificence that surrounds us. But if humans can be in awe
of the creation itself, how much more so should we before the God
who created it and who sustains it? That thought alone should be
more than enough to get us to tremble before Him. But then, added
to this, to realize our own unworthiness before Him and yet to know
that despite this unworthiness—no, indeed, because of it—Christ
sacrificed Himself for us?
Before such big ideas, before such cosmic love focused directly
on us, how can we not cry out, Who is sufficient for these things? And
also, how could we not ask: How are we supposed to respond? What
response is worthy of what’s been given us? And how could anything
that we do be of consequence in contrast to what’s been done for us
in Jesus? The answer—and the first thing we’re told to do, after to fear
God—is to “give glory to Him” (Revelation 14:7).
Think of the Amoeba
In light of the astonishing truth that “so great was His [Christ’s]
love for us that not only did He come to live among us but He—the
Creator of the 50 billion-light-year-wide observable universe (who
knows how far beyond even that it goes?)—allowed Himself to be
mocked, jeered, humiliated, tortured, and then crucified for us so that
we can all have the promise of eternal life,” it seems rather strange that
we should be called to “give glory to Him.”
Give glory to God? How could that possibly be? How can we, sinful,
fallen beings on a tiny planet in a single galaxy out of 2 trillion galaxies,
give glory to God? Considering how piddling we are in contrast, not
2
That is, traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second (seven times around
the earth in one second), a person would take 20 billion years to reach that far away.
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The Final Hope
only to the universe but to the God who created it; considering how
sinful and fallen we are in contrast to a holy God; and considering how
dependent we are upon God for salvation—the idea of us glorifying
Him seems preposterous. It would be like a single-celled amoeba
singing praises to us and we, actually, caring that it does.
Yet the theme of humans bringing glory to God pervades the
Bible. Jesus Himself said, “Let your light so shine before men, that
they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven”
(Matthew 5:16). “I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole
heart, and I will glorify your name forever” (Psalm 86:12, ESV). “So,
whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of
God” (1 Corinthians 10:31, ESV). “For you were bought with a price.
So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:20, ESV). “Let them
give glory to the Lord and declare His praise in the coastlands” (Isaiah
42:12). “There is no one like You among the gods, O Lord, nor are there
any works like Yours. All nations whom You have made shall come
and worship before You, O Lord, and they shall glorify Your name”
(Psalm 86:8-10, NASB). “My Father is glorified by this, that you bear
much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples” (John 15:8, NASB).
This idea, that of fallen sinful humanity being able to glorify God
and to give God glory, however initially counterintuitive (think of that
amoeba), is biblical. What does it mean, especially in the context of the
three angels’ messages? Why, after being told about “the everlasting
gospel,” and being told to “fear God,” are we told to “give glory to Him”
as well? How do we do that—and why?
One of the most exciting moments in intellectual history came
in 1687 when Sir Isaac Newton published a massive work called, in
English, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Though the
story about Newton sitting under an apple tree and an apple falling on
his head and he, suddenly, discovering gravity, is silly (everyone knew
about gravity), what Newton did realize, and what he published in his
book, was that this gravity (whatever it was?) pervaded the universe.
The same force that caused an apple to fall to the ground was the same
force that kept the moon and the planets in orbit. In fact, everything in
the universe attracts each other with the force of gravity. Your reading
this book exerts a gravitational pull on the moon, on the sun, and on
50
the Crab Nebula. Though, yes, the attraction is weak, and the farther
away things are, the weaker it gets, yet it’s still real. In some strange
way, everything in the universe is intertwined.
Something similar applies in the spiritual realm. Heaven and
earth are more closely bound than we realize. What happens on earth
impacts heaven, and what happens in heaven impacts earth. “For this
reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,” wrote
the apostle Paul, “from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is
named” (Ephesians 3:14, 15). The whole family in heaven and earth?
Though exactly what Paul meant by the “whole family in heaven and
earth” is debated, he certainly, by the word “family,” gives the idea of
some kind of closeness between heaven and earth.
Just a few verses before, Paul wrote that “God’s purpose in all this
was to use the church to display his wisdom in its rich variety to all
the unseen rulers and authorities in the heavenly places” (Ephesians
3:10, NLT). The idea in this text (and as seen in the ones above about
glorifying God) is similar: that our actions here matter, and that we
can, indeed, bring glory to God. We can bring glory to God before men
(Matthew 5:16), and, it seems, before “unseen rulers and authorities in
the heavenly places” as well. Again, the universe is more tightly linked,
at least spiritually, than what appears to our immediate senses.
One of the earliest books of the Bible, the book of Job, presents
a powerful example of the close link between heaven and earth, and
shows that what we do here matters, even greatly, to God. Though
the story begins on earth, with a man named Job, it quickly shifts to
some cosmic realm (heaven, perhaps), where Satan and other angels
(sometimes referred to as the “sons of God”), are meeting. God
Himself points to the person of Job, saying, “Have you considered My
servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and
upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil?” (Job 1:8). Satan then
responds, basically saying, Sure, God, no wonder he serves You. Look
at how good his life is. Let Job’s life go bad and see what happens. See if
he really loves You after all! (see Job 1:9-2:7). God then allows Satan
to destroy Job’s property, family, and health, and yet, amid it all, Job
stayed faithful to God, proving Satan wrong. God used Job to refute
the charges of Satan. That is, the actions of a human being here on
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The Final Hope
earth had repercussions in heaven. That’s how tightly linked heaven
and earth are.
Though for thousands of years Bible students have pondered
the meaning of this book, the point for now—as astonishing as it
is (again, think of the amoeba)—is that God, the Creator, was in a
sense “glorified” by Job’s actions. Job proved that his love for God
and his trust in God’s goodness was so strong that despite all that
happened, Job remained faithful. This is a powerful example of the
principle behind Jesus’ words: “My Father is glorified by this, that you
bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples” (John 15:8, NASB).
Also, the story of Job unfolded in the context of the great controversy
between God and Satan. The battle is real, and our actions in it matter
both in heaven and on earth.
In short, we as human beings, by staying faithful to God, by
bearing much fruit, by “letting our lights shine,” glorify God, as we
have been told to do in the first angel’s message.
Give Glory to God
However common the idea of God being glorified in and by His
people, the actual phrase, to “give glory” to God, is not common in the
Bible. But its use is instructive.
A powerful example came from early Israelite history, when the
children of Israel, after wandering for 40 years in the desert, had finally
crossed over into the Promised Land, which was filled with dangerous
and corrupt pagans who, among other things, would sacrifice their
own children to their “gods,” such as Molech. Before the Hebrews
had entered the land, they had been specifically warned against this
horrific practice. “And you shall not let any of your descendants pass
through the fire to Molech, nor shall you profane the name of your
God: I am the Lord” (Leviticus 18:21). These Canaanites were bad folk
who, it seemed, had long spurned God’s overtures to them (Genesis
15:16). Notice, too, the idea: by doing this evil practice they would
“profane” the name of their God; this is the opposite of the idea that,
when doing well, when obeying the Lord, when letting their “lights
shine,” they would glorify that name instead.
The children of Israel had also been warned against the personal
52
pillaging of these pagan nations. “And you, by all means abstain from
the accursed things, lest you become accursed when you take of the
accursed things, and make the camp of Israel a curse, and trouble
it. But all the silver and gold, and vessels of bronze and iron, are
consecrated to the Lord; they shall come into the treasury of the Lord”
(Joshua 6:18, 19). These “accursed things,” herem (in Hebrew), carries
the idea of the utter destruction of something in order to protect the
people from spiritual contagion. Israel’s security in the land—as the
chosen people, who had been called out to reveal the true God to a
world suffused in idolatry, polytheism, and evil practices—depended
upon their spiritual purity, and nothing endangered that purity more
than being contaminated by their neighbors’ evil. A good portion
of the Old Testament reveals how much the Hebrew people allowed
themselves, unfortunately, to be overcome by the very things that God
had warned them against.
Early on, in fact, just after they had entered the Promised land,
calamity struck, and the Lord told Joshua why: “Get up! Why do you
lie thus on your face? Israel has sinned, and they have also transgressed
My covenant which I commanded them. For they have even taken
some of the accursed things, and have both stolen and deceived;
and they have also put it among their own stuff ” (Joshua 7:10, 11).
The idea of mixing pagan things with their own symbolized what
ultimately would lead to the nation’s demise (a practice that, as we will
see, has also plagued Christianity), and not long after they had entered
the land, this contamination was already happening.
Out of greed, out of covetousness, and in flagrant disobedience
to the commands of God, who did not want His people contaminated
by herem, someone in the camp had pillaged for himself things from
the recently destroyed pagan city of Jericho. Though having a chance
to come clean and confess, only when he was confronted by the
leader of the people at that time, Joshua (whom God showed who was
guilty), did Achan admit his evil deed, saying: “Indeed I have sinned
against the Lord God of Israel, and this is what I have done: When I
saw among the spoils a beautiful Babylonian garment, two hundred
shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold weighing fifty shekels, I coveted
them and took them. And there they are, hidden in the earth in the
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The Final Hope
midst of my tent, with the silver under it” (verses 20, 21).
When the situation was investigated and found true, Achan was
immediately punished with death. “Why hast thou troubled us?” said
Joshua. “The Lord shall trouble thee this day” (verse 25, KJV). Achan’s
sin had been committed in open defiance of direct and solemn
warnings, all accompanied by manifestations of God’s power—such as
when, at the shouts of the people and the blowing of the trumpets, “the
wall of Jericho fell down flat. Then the people went up into the city,
every man straight before him, and they took the city” (Joshua 6:20).
The fact that God’s power alone had given the victory to Israel, that
they had not taken Jericho by their own strength, gave solemn weight
to the divine prohibition of taking the spoils for themselves.
However, when Joshua first confronted Achan, he said, “My son,
I beg you, give glory to the Lord God of Israel, and make confession
to Him, and tell me now what you have done; do not hide it from
me”(Joshua 7:19). Give glory to God, just like the phrase in Revelation
14:7. In the context of judgment, of being called to admit his guilt,
Achan is told to give glory to God. What does that mean? It’s not to
give glory as singing praises to Him. Instead, it’s to admit that God is
just in not only pointing out Achan’s overt act of greed and selfishness
and defiance, but also in the penalty that will come. Achan deserved
the punishment that he is about to face, and he is expected to recognize
this fact. In short, to give glory to God is to admit, in the context of
judgment, that God’s judgment is just and fair.
Considering the great controversy, and God’s intention to deal
with sin and rebellion and evil in a manner harmonious with the
principles of love, and not force—how important not only that God’s
judgment be just but that others, including “the principalities and
powers in heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10), acknowledge that justice.
In fact, Revelation 19:1, 2 depicts some of these “principalities and
powers” in heavenly places shouting: “Alleluia! Salvation and glory and
honor and power belong to the Lord our God! For true and righteous
are His judgments.”
Which is why this specific phrase, to “give glory” to God,
appears in other settings of divine judgment as well (1 Samuel 6:5;
Jeremiah 13:15, 16; Malachi 2:2). But, no question, the most dramatic,
54
consequential, and powerful example occurs in the heart of the first
angel’s message itself: “Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of
His judgment has come.” Why “fear God”? Why “give glory to Him”?
Because the hour, the time, of His judgment, God’s judgment, has
come.
Judgment? God’s judgment? An all-knowing, all-seeing God who
knows your every thought, your every secret deed, your everything
including the things that you have long ago forgotten? That judgment?
What are your odds?
Stop Worrying?
Years ago British atheists started a campaign in which those
famous red double-decker London buses carried this sign: “THERE’S
PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY
YOUR LIFE.”
Probably no God? (Hedging their bets, huh?)
Why, though, worry if there were a God? Because perhaps this
God has a moral standard, such as the Ten Commandments, which
people would be obligated to follow, as opposed to their own personal
standards that often rise no higher than their own urges and lusts?
Stop worrying about having to answer to this God for the evil things
that they have done to others, or even to children, and that they have
gotten away with, at least so far. The mere idea of this God implies
a sense of moral obligation, of moral accountability—precisely what
those behind the bus campaign obviously worried about. And rightly
so, considering that the Bible itself depicts human depravity—“that
every mouth may be stopped, and all the world may become guilty
before God” (Romans 3:19)—in stark terms (see “The Sin Problem”).
The phraseology of this sign, with its appeal to “stop worrying,” reveals
their fear of a moral God whose existence they try to deny.
A young man who was an agnostic was, by the cultural and social
customs of his day, not so bad. Yet every now and then he would think:
Maybe there really is some God out there? But each time that thought
came, he’d push it out of his mind. Why? Because if there were a God
out there, he knew he was in deep trouble! Those who put up the
London bus signs had, obviously, similar fears.
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The Final Hope
And again, with good reason, too. To quote from “The Sin Problem”:
“But who would like to one day stand before God, a God who knows
your every wrong thought, your every hidden deed, every single thing
that you might have done in secret, things that you’d rather die than
have revealed? How well, then, would you, covered in your own filthy
garments, fare before a holy, sinless, perfect God? Sure, you might not be
Charles Manson, or even his prostitute mother. But you’re bad enough.”
Even worse: if these atheists are right about there being no God,
then think about what that would also mean as far as justice ever being
done in a world that, since the dawn of recorded history, has cried
out for justice. If “there’s probably no God,” then there’s probably no
hope of justice, no hope of answers, no hope of untold wrongs being
righted, of untold evil being accounted for and punished. Every
unpunished and unaccounted evil will forever remain unpunished
and unaccounted for—a depressing and hopeless thought.
Ever heard of the Pinto? It was the brainchild of the Ford Motor
Company in the 1970s, an attempt to compete with the Volkswagen
Beetle. Yet the company, including its iconic executive, Lee Iacocca, knew
that the Pinto was unsafe, and that if their car were rear-ended, even
at a relatively slow speed, the gas tank would explode. However, doing
a cost-benefit analysis, Ford decided to sell the car anyway, dangerous
flaws and all, figuring that it would be cheaper to pay the lawsuits for the
deaths and maiming than it would be to make the car right.
“What caught the public’s eye in the Pinto cases was the disclosure
that Ford found it cheaper to pay off the families of the victims of Pinto
fires than the $137 million it would cost to fix the Pinto immediately,
according to an internal Ford memo introduced during a civil trial.
That meant it was not cost-effective to do the repairs.”3
Hundreds of passengers were killed, scorched, maimed, including
a 13-year-old boy who was burned over 90 percent of his body,
because Lee Iacocca and others at Ford decided on profit over people.
Pintos blowing up and burning passengers, however, wasn’t good PR
for Ford, whose radio advertising spots included the line “Pinto leaves
you with that warm feeling.” The spots, along with the Pinto, were
3
https://www.autonews.com/article/20030616/SUB/306160770/lee-iacocca-s-pinto-a-
fiery-failure
56
eventually pulled, but not until after the unsafe vehicle had left a trail
of carnage and death.
Yet Lee Iacocca went on to fame and immense fortune and died at
the ripe old age of 94, a revered figure in American business.
Justice?
If “there’s probably no God,” then, as poet Czeslaw Milosz warned,
there is “nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that
for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to
be judged.”4 Of course, for some, that’s exactly what they want: no
judgment for their betrayals, greed, cowardice, and all the other evils
humans have been guilty of but have never had to answer for.
Only one problem: if the Bible teaches anything, anything, it
teaches, again and again—Old Testament, New Testament, from
Moses to Paul, from parables, to poetry, to flat-out in-your-face
warnings—that God is a God of justice and a God of judgment, and
that human beings will be made to answer for all their deeds here, all
the deeds and evil that they think that they have gotten away with.
Just a smattering of the Bible promises that awaits the evil so far
unpunished:
“Look, I am coming soon, bringing my reward with me to repay
all people according to their deeds” (Revelation 22:12, NLT).
“God will judge us for everything we do, including every secret
thing, whether good or bad” (Ecclesiastes 12:14, NLT).
“But the Lord reigns forever,
executing judgment from his throne.
He will judge the world with justice
and rule the nations with fairness” (Psalm 9:7, 8, NLT).
“And do you think this, O man, you who judge those practicing
such things, and doing the same, that you will escape the judgment
of God?” (Romans 2:3).
“But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by
the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and
perdition of ungodly men” (2 Peter 3:7).
“Fear God and give glory to Him, for the hour of His judgment
has come; and worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and
4
Czeslaw Milosz, Road-Side Dog (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1998), p. 22.
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The Final Hope
springs of water” (Revelation 14:7).
For the hour of His judgment has come. What does that mean?
And also, what hope can we, as sinners, as people who also have done
things that have gone unpunished—what hope can we have in this
judgment as well?
58
Section Four
The Hour of His Judgment
“For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God;

and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do
not obey the gospel of God?” (1 Peter 4:17, ESV).
“I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for
every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified,
and by your words you will be condemned” (Matthew 12:36, 37, ESV).
“Because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in
righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has
given assurance to all by raising him from the dead” (Acts 17:31, ESV).
We could go on and on: Bible text after Bible text about God as a God
of judgment, and the certainty from heaven above that the injustice and
evil on earth below will, one day, be accounted for, answered, and justly
punished. The concept of God’s judgments permeates the Scriptures.
There’s not one single overarching judgment that rights all wrongs,
that punishes all evil, and that rewards all goodness. Instead, God’s
judgments have been ongoing events depending upon the time and
place and circumstances, and from His judgments in the past we
can learn about the judgment now and to come.
From God bringing judgment to Adam and Eve after the
Fall (Genesis 3:14-19), to the worldwide flood (Genesis 7), to the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19), to the fall of
ancient Babylon (Daniel 5), to the declaration of judgment in the first
angel’s message today, to the final judgment at the very end of time
(Revelation 20)—the Bible reveals the reality of God’s judgments.
Such as one powerful and particularly relevant depiction of
judgment found in the Old Testament book of Daniel. In chapter 7
the prophet had a prophetic dream of four beasts arising out of the sea
(verse 3), each one symbolic of a world empire (verse 17) that would
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arise and then vanish into ancient history until a massive judgment in
heaven (verses 9, 10, 22, 26) leads to God’s eternal kingdom (verses
14, 22, 27). The main point of prophetic dream is to show that these
four earthly and transient kingdoms are followed, ultimately, by God’s
eternal one: “Those great beasts, which are four, are four kings which
arise out of the earth. But the saints of the Most High shall receive
the kingdom, and possess the kingdom forever, even forever and ever”
(verses 17, 18).
These four earthly kingdoms, or empires, have long been
identified as Babylon, Media-Persia, Greece, and then Rome, the final
empire, which remains until the end of this present world. Rome, the
Rome of the republic and then the Caesars, was the phase of Rome
that arose right after ancient Greece. However, Rome, this fourth
power, still exists today (just as the prophecy predicted, because it
remains until the end of the world), but now in the papal phase. In
fact, the fourth beast had been described with certain characteristics
that fit medieval Rome very well, which included, unfortunately, great
persecution (verses 21, 24, 25).
Different times in this chapter (verses 9, 10, 22, 26) an end-time
heavenly judgment is depicted as leading to God’s eternal kingdom,
what the Bible calls “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1;
see also Isaiah 65:17; 66:22; 2 Peter 3:13).
The first goes like this: “I beheld till the thrones were cast down,
and the Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow, and
the hair of his head like the pure wool: his throne was like the fiery
flame, and his wheels as burning fire. A fiery stream issued and came
forth from before him: thousand thousands ministered unto him, and
ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him: the judgment was
set, and the books were opened” (Daniel 7:9, 10, KJV).
The “Ancient of Days” (a name for God), thrones, books open,
judgment set. Clearly some kind of cosmic courtroom scene is
unfolding before all these other heavenly beings, which—given what
we have seen about the great controversy and the interest of “the
principalities and powers in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10)—
should not be surprising.
This same judgment is later shown like this:
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“I was watching in the night visions,
And behold, One like the Son of Man,
Coming with the clouds of heaven!
He came to the Ancient of Days,
And they brought Him near before Him.
Then to Him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom,
That all peoples, nations, and languages should serve Him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion,
Which shall not pass away,
And His kingdom the one
Which shall not be destroyed” (Daniel 7:13, 14).
The Ancient of Days, now with “the Son of Man”—a term used
over and over in the New Testament by Jesus to refer to Himself
(Matthew 17:22; 20:18; 24:30; Mark 2:10; 10:33; Luke 6:22; 11:30; 12:10;
17:22; John 6:53; 12:34; 13:31)—in some sort of heavenly event, another
depiction of the judgment that leads directly to God’s eternal kingdom.
Another picture of this same judgment, though first talking about
events on the earth here, reads: “until the Ancient of Days came, and
a judgment was made in favor of the saints of the Most High, and
the time came for the saints to possess the kingdom” (Daniel 7:22; see
also verses 26, 27). Notice: judgment made in favor of God’s people.
We tend to think of judgment as something bad, something that leads
to punishment, which in many cases is true. But in this case, at least
for the “saints” (a biblical term for God’s people that has nothing to
do with the Roman Catholic “sainthood”), judgment is made in
their behalf.
How could that be, though? Have we not all been deemed sinners?
Have we not already been told about how bad we are?
“ ‘There is none who understands;
There is none who seeks after God.
They have all turned aside;
They have together become unprofitable;
There is none who does good, no, not one.’
‘Their throat is an open tomb;
With their tongues they have practiced deceit’;
‘The poison of asps is under their lips’;
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‘Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.’
‘Their feet are swift to shed blood;
Destruction and misery are in their ways;
And the way of peace they have not known.’
‘There is no fear of God before their eyes’ ”(Romans 3:11-18).
How, then, would any of us, even the “saints” in judgment, with
the books opened, be able to stand before God, who, again, knows our
every wrong thought, our every hidden deed, every single thing that
we might have done in secret, things that we’d never want revealed (see
Ecclesiastes 12:14)?
The everlasting gospel. That’s how.
The Gospel and Judgment
It’s no coincidence that the gospel and judgment appear together.
However good the news of the gospel, it doesn’t get any better
than when linked with judgment. Why? Because our only hope in
judgment is the gospel, is Christ’s righteousness, which is accepted by
the Father as our own the moment that we claim it by faith—and also
in the judgment, when we need it the most. “There is therefore now
no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). No
condemnation now and certainly not in the judgment.
Is it because we are sinless? No, it’s because Jesus was, and His
record is credited to us as our own. That’s why the judgment in Daniel 7
“was made in favor of the saints” (Daniel 7:22). They, like the thief on
the cross, were covered by the righteousness of Christ. Or as Paul has
said: “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith apart from
the deeds of the law” (Romans 3:28).
Justified apart from the law? Of course. The law, however “holy
and just and good” (Romans 7:12)—a truth that becomes powerfully
apparent in the third angel’s message—points out sin but cannot atone
for it. The law is like a mirror: it will keep your blemishes before you,
but no matter how long and often you look into it, the mirror won’t
take those blemishes away. The law reveals sin; it offers no power to
overcome or to forgive it. That’s why we need the gospel.
One grand expression of the law and God’s judgment came from
the Old Testament sanctuary (and later the temple in Jerusalem), the
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center of worship for ancient Israel. This is the same temple that Jesus
famously purged of those who had defiled the sacred grounds with
their wanton and exploitative commerce (see Matthew 21:12, 13). It
was here that the children of Israel learned about the plan of salvation,
the “everlasting gospel.” Central to the sanctuary service were the
sacrifices of the animals, the lambs, bulls, goats—each one a symbol,
a type, a mini-prophecy of Jesus’ death on the cross, as well as His
work as our high priest in the heavenly sanctuary (see below). That’s
why, when first introducing Jesus, John the Baptist cried out, “Behold!
The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).
Instead of the sinner dying for his or her sin, the lamb, a symbol of
Jesus, died in the sinner’s place. Instead of us, ultimately, dying for our
sins, Jesus on the cross did it for us. And this great truth had been
proclaimed, in symbols and types, through the Hebrew temple.
The temple also had two apartments, and though every day the
atoning blood of the animal sacrifices had been brought into the first
apartment once a year (see Leviticus 16), the blood of animal sacrifices
was brought into the second apartment, the inner compartment, in
a ritual known as Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. This was the
day of judgment, good news for the children of Israel, because even
though they had sinned, their sin was forgiven, purged and cleansed
by the shed blood, and they stood righteous before God in this
judgment. This yearly ritual occurred “because of the uncleanness of
the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions, for all their
sins” (Leviticus 16:16). That is, they had sinned, and that was the day
of reckoning for those sins.
However, that day was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and
atonement is about forgiving sinners, not condemning them, and that
forgiveness comes only from the blood—not from the law. Though in
the second apartment of the sanctuary in the ark of the covenant (see
Numbers 10:33; Deuteronomy 10:3; 31:26) were the stone tablets, the
Ten Commandments, which showed Israel their sacred obligation to
keep the law, atonement came about, not because of the law, but despite
it. The law, which they had violated (“because of the uncleanness of
the children of Israel, and because of their transgressions, for all their
sins”), would have condemned them but for the blood. “He [the high
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priest] shall take some of the blood of the bull and sprinkle it with his
finger on the mercy seat on the east side; and before the mercy seat
he shall sprinkle some of the blood with his finger seven times. Then
he shall kill the goat of the sin offering, which is for the people, bring
its blood inside the veil, do with that blood as he did with the blood of
the bull, and sprinkle it on the mercy seat and before the mercy seat”
(Leviticus 16:14, 15). The mercy seat is the golden lid that covered the
ark of the covenant, which contained the Ten Commandments, and
the sprinkled blood on that mercy seat symbolized the blood of Jesus,
which atoned for their violation of the Ten Commandments.
“This shall be a statute forever for you: In the seventh month, on
the tenth day of the month, you shall afflict your souls, and do no work
at all, whether a native of your own country or a stranger who dwells
among you. For on that day the priest shall make atonement for you, to
cleanse you, that you may be clean from all your sins before the Lord”
(verse 29). This was a solemn day, the day of judgment, and the people
were “to afflict their souls.” That is, it was a day of repentance, of soul
searching, of realizing their shortcomings, and, while depending upon
the blood to forgive their sins, they needed the blood to cleanse them
from those sins as well.
From the death of the animal to the priest ministering the blood
in the sanctuary, everything prefigured “the everlasting gospel”
(Revelation 14:6), with Jesus, first as the sacrifice, then as the high
priest. An entire book of the New Testament, the book of Hebrews,
explicitly explained that the earthly sanctuary was a model, a symbol,
of the heavenly sanctuary, where Jesus, having shed His blood on
the cross (symbolized by the animal sacrifices), now ministers in the
heavenly sanctuary as our high priest.
“Now this is the main point of the things we are saying: We have
such a High Priest, who is seated at the right hand of the throne of the
Majesty in the heavens, a Minister of the sanctuary and of the true
tabernacle which the Lord erected, and not man” (Hebrews 8:1, 2).
And just as the earthly priest interceded for the sinners by bringing
the blood into the sanctuary, Jesus as our high priest in the heavenly
sanctuary intercedes for us as well. “Who is he who condemns? It is Christ
who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand
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of God, who also makes intercession for us” (Romans 8:34). “Therefore
He is also able to save to the uttermost those who come to God through
Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews
7:25). “My little children, these things I write to you, so that you may
not sin. And if anyone sins, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus
Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). “For Christ has not entered the holy
places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven
itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us” (Hebrews 9:24).
Notice the theme here: Christ is in heaven, in the heavenly
sanctuary, interceding for us. He is in the presence of God for us. He
is an advocate for us. Which is why, now, in the time of this judgment
(“for the hour of his judgment has come”), we have the assurance of
salvation because of what Christ has done for us on the cross, as our
sacrifice, and what He does for us now, in the heavenly sanctuary, as
our high priest. Again: “Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who
died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of
God, who also makes intercession for us” (Romans 8:34), and because
of that intercession for us, “there is therefore now no condemnation to
those who are in Christ Jesus” (verse 1)—no condemnation now and,
certainly, not in judgment.
In fact, the first angel’s message about judgment occurs in the
context of the Day of Atonement. Though the book of Revelation is
filled with images from the earthly sanctuary (Revelation 1:20; 5:5;
8:3-8; 11:19; 15:5-8; 21:1-8), not too long before the events depicted
in the three angels’ messages unfold, Revelation 11:19 declares:
“Then the temple of God was opened in heaven, and the ark of His
covenant was seen in His temple.” The temple is the sanctuary, and
the ark of the covenant, in the second apartment, contained the Ten
Commandments—and the only time the high priest entered the
second apartment was on the Day of Atonement, the day of judgment.
Thus, what the first angel’s message tells us is that, yes, “the hour
of His judgment has come,” which is why, though His people need to
“fear God and give glory to Him,” they do so with the assurance of
“eternal life” in Jesus, promised them by the “everlasting gospel”—the
promise that is theirs by faith.
How else?
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Which Came First, the Grapefruit Seed,

the Grapefruit, or the Grapefruit Tree?
It’s a big universe out there. Two trillion galaxies with 100 billion
stars each, and some of those stars have planets orbiting them, just as
our sun does. Suppose on one of those planets the inhabitants got their
nutrition, not from food, but from merely staring at their sun. A swami
here on earth claims that we can do the same: get all our nutrition
from the sun alone (though we advise not to try this at home).
Suppose that the beings on this planet were told about another
planet, called Earth, where the inhabitants put pellets, little white
pellets, in dirt, and that was it: They just left these little white pellets
in dirt, and with only water and sunshine, out of these pellets grew
trunks of wood, called trees, with dozens of branches. And on each of
these branches sprouted green leaves from which coated packages of
food—tasty, beautiful, nutritious food called “grapefruit”—would be
created in abundance. And this is how the people on Earth got, at least
partially, what they needed to survive. Suppose those people from this
other planet were told, too, that inside those grapefruits many more
white pellets would grow, and each single pellet could be taken out
of the grapefruit and put into the dirt, and yes, more grapefruit trees
would grow out of that one pellet in the dirt, creating more grapefruits
that contain more pellets, and on and on infinitely.
Why would they believe it? Why should they believe it?
Why would anyone believe it? Nothing is logical, nothing is
commonsensical, and nothing is rational about a little white pellet
containing even one grapefruit tree, much less potentially an
infinite number of grapefruit trees, in itself. Just add dirt, water, and
sunshine—and voilà, a grapefruit tree!
Please! If we had never seen anything like a seed in dirt turn into
a tree filled with fruit bearing more seeds, why would we believe it?
“They talked,” wrote G. K. Chesterton of intellectuals, “as if the fact
that a tree bears fruit were just as necessary as the fact that two and one
trees make three. But it is not.”*
No, it’s not necessary at all. It is, instead, a miracle. But the only
reason that we don’t think so is that we see it happen all the time. But
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if only once in our entire lives we saw someone put a white pellet in
dirt and out of that pellet came a grapefruit tree, we would deem it a
miracle filled with awe and mystery.
And that’s just the grapefruit. What about peaches, plums, apples,
avocados, broccoli, lemons, tomatoes, coconuts, wheat, barley, rice,
kiwi, cucumbers, apricots, bananas, blueberries, breadfruit, cherries,
asparagus, cauliflower, celery, corn, eggplant, kale, onions, garlic,
mustard, red pepper, radishes, blackberries, cantaloupes, watermelons,
clementines, figs, olives, guava, mangoes, nectarines, passion fruit,
spinach, strawberries, basil, mustard, okra, cranberries, and on and
on and on? Each one of these arising from a pellet in the dirt? It’s not
logical, it’s not rational, it’s not sensible. It’s, instead, a miracle. If only
one time in our whole lives we can see any one of these alone (and this
just what we can eat) arise out of the dirt, it would astonish us. But all
of them? And every season, too? We’re just so used to it that we don’t
see the miracle that it is.
Meanwhile, one might humbly ask: How did the grapefruit tree
evolve? That is, how did it arise, unintentionally, with no thought
at all going into it, as the theory of evolution speculates? (Evolution
allows for no forethought, no intentions, no purposes, for any life
forms on earth.) How does something that’s only partially a grapefruit
(or a cherry or a banana) seed, or partially a grapefruit (or a cherry
or a banana) tree, or partially a grapefruit (or a cherry or a banana)
evolve into a whole seed, a whole tree, or a whole grapefruit (or a
whole cherry or a whole banana)? Or, instead, did one of them evolve
first? If so, what came first: the grapefruit seed, the grapefruit tree, or
the grapefruit? (It’s a vegan version of the chicken-and-egg paradox:
which came first, the chicken or the egg?)
However, the problem isn’t really a problem, because the question
itself—“What came first: the grapefruit seed, the grapefruit tree, or
the grapefruit?”—is a false question. It assumes what it sets out to
answer, which is that one of them, the tree, the seed, the fruit, had
to come first.
But that’s not what the Bible teaches. “Then God said, ‘Let the
land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land
that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.’ And it
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was so” (Genesis 1:11, NIV).
No one could answer which came first, because none did.
According to the Bible, they were created at the same time, the only
logical option to the dilemma. God created the grapefruit “with seed
in it.” And the same with peaches, plums, apples, avocados, broccoli,
lemons, tomatoes, coconuts, wheat, barley, rice, kiwi, cucumbers,
apricots, bananas, blueberries, breadfruit, cherries, asparagus,
cauliflower, celery, corn, eggplant, kale, onions, garlic, mustard, red
pepper, radishes, blackberries, cantaloupes, watermelons, clementines,
figs, olives, guava, mangoes, nectarines, passion fruit, spinach,
strawberries, basil, mustard, okra, cranberries, and on and on. Any
one of these food sources, much more all of them together—beautiful,
tasty, healthy, growing, literally, out of the dirt, should scream to us
about our Creator God, a God who loves us.
Which leads, indeed, to what might be deemed the climax of the
first angel’s message. Yes, the first angel proclaims to us “the everlasting
gospel.” Yes, the first angel tells us to “fear God and give glory to Him,
for the hour of His judgment has come.” And finally, the first angel
tells us to do one last thing: “Worship Him who made heaven and
earth, the sea and springs of water” (Revelation 14:7).
What does this mean, to worship the Creator, the one who put the
grapefruit tree in the seed, and the seed in the grapefruit tree—and
why is it such an important message for us now?
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Section Five
“For in Six Days . . .”
Read the first sentence of Scripture. It does not say, “For God so
loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John
3:16, KJV). It does not say, “But God commendeth his love toward
us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans
5:8, KJV). It does not say, “Here is the patience of the saints: here are
they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Jesus”
(Revelation 14:12, KJV). The Bible does not open with the second
coming of Jesus (Matthew 24:30). It does not open with human
sinfulness (Romans 3:10), or with “the everlasting gospel” (Revelation
14:6), or with a warning about judgment (Ecclesiastes 12:14).
Instead, it opens with these words: “In the beginning God created
the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). And that’s because all these
other teachings, the death of Jesus, the great controversy, human
sinfulness, the fall of humanity, judgment—all these teachings make
sense only if, yes, God created our world.
Otherwise, what? In a godless universe the death of Jesus on the
cross would be just another murdered Jew. In a godless universe, what
does the idea of final judgment mean? Who would do the judging? Or
the rewarding? Or the punishing? In a godless universe, what could
the “good news” possibly be other than that we live, we struggle, we
suffer, we die—and then we are gone forever along with every memory
of us. Some “good news,” huh?
That’s why the Bible begins with the truth upon which all other
biblical truth—i.e., “the everlasting gospel,” judgment, the great
controversy, the Fall, everything that the Bible teaches—rests. And
that is God as our Creator. Contrary to the modern idea that life here
on earth arose by chance alone, with no forethought, no intention,
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no purpose, the Bible begins with what should be an obvious truth
(again, think of the grapefruit): that life in all its beauty and stunning
complexity was created by God.
And though the three angels’ messages are specifically for the last
days, the days that we are living in now, they point back to the first
days, to the first six days, to the creation of life on earth itself. The
language that John used in the first angel’s message comes (as does
much of Revelation) from the Old Testament. In this specific case
the very wording of the angel’s message—“worship Him who made
heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water” (Revelation 14:7)—is
derived from the fourth commandment, that is, the fourth of the 10,
as in the Ten Commandments.
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall
labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the
Lord your God. In it you shall do no work: you, nor your son, nor your
daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your
cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates. For in six days the
Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them,
and rested the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day
and hallowed it” (Exodus 20:8-11).
Exodus 20:11 reads: “For in six days the Lord made the heavens and
the earth, the sea”; the first angel’s message reads: “Worship Him who
made heaven and earth, the sea.” Revelation 14:7 is a direct reference
to the fourth commandment, which is itself a direct reference to the
creation. The final words of the fourth commandment—“For in six
days the Lord made heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in
them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the
Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:11, NIV)—come directly
from the Genesis creation: “So God blessed the seventh day and made
it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in
creation” (Genesis 2:3, ESV).
The first angel (Revelation 14:6) takes us back to the fourth
commandment (Exodus 20:8-11), which takes us back to the six days
of Creation (Genesis 1-2). And embedded in the six days of Creation
is the specific emphasis on the seventh day. “Thus the heavens and
the earth, and all the host of them, were finished. And on the seventh
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day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the
seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed
the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His
work which God had created and made” (Genesis 2:1-3).
A point worth remembering, too: When God blessed the seventh
day, when He made it holy, and when He rested on it—only Adam and
Eve existed. There were no Jews! The Jews didn’t come into being until
thousands of years later, after Abraham (see Genesis 29:35). The word
“Jew” (or “Jews”) first appears in 2 Kings 16:6 (KJV) and 25:25, in the
context of invasions of the Hebrews in the eighth and sixth centuries
B.C.—a long time after the Genesis creation account.
In other words, the idea, the common idea, that resting on the
seventh-day Sabbath and keeping it holy is exclusively for the Jews
is not biblical. Practicing Jews have been keeping the seventh-day
Sabbath longer than anyone else, yes, and so they are commonly
associated with it. But the seventh-day Sabbath didn’t originate with,
or from, the Jews any more than an apple, the ubiquitous logo for a
computer company of that same name, began with Steve Jobs. The
apple itself, like the seventh-day Sabbath, began in Eden, before the
Jews and before Steve Jobs, no matter how much the seventh-day
Sabbath is linked with the Jews, and the apple with Steve Jobs.
All through the Bible, Old Testament and New, the doctrine of
creation appears. It’s foundational to everything else because, again,
everything else the Bible teaches means nothing apart from God as
our Creator. That’s why the theme appears again and again:
“By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word
of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things
which are visible” (Hebrews 11:3).
“For thus says the Lord,
Who created the heavens,
Who is God,
Who formed the earth and made it,
Who has established it,
Who did not create it in vain,
Who formed it to be inhabited:
‘I am the Lord, and there is no other’ ” (Isaiah 45:18).
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“You are worthy, O Lord,
To receive glory and honor and power;
For You created all things,
And by Your will they exist and were created” (Revelation 4:11).
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things
were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that
was made” (John 1:1-3).
“By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
And all the host of them by the breath of His mouth” (Psalm 33:6).
“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens,
and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you. Who among all these does not
know that the hand of the Lord has done this?” (Job 12:7-9, ESV).
“For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the
heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the
water” (2 Peter 3:5).
“Thus says God the Lord,
Who created the heavens and stretched them out,
Who spread forth the earth and that which comes from it,
Who gives breath to the people on it,
And spirit to those who walk on it” (Isaiah 42:5).
“You alone are the Lord;
You have made heaven,
The heaven of heavens, with all their host,
The earth and everything on it,
The seas and all that is in them,
And You preserve them all.
The host of heaven worships You” (Nehemiah 9:6).
“For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that
are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or
principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and
for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist”
(Colossians 1:16, 17).
And there are many more texts that show just how important that
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doctrine of creation is. In fact, so important is the doctrine of creation,
of God as the Creator, that we are commanded to spend one seventh of
our lives, every week, without exception, to remember it—something
that we are not commanded to do for any other doctrine. Why?
Because, again, no other doctrine makes sense apart from God as our
Creator. Right up there with “Thou shalt not kill” and “Thou shalt
not commit adultery” and “Thou shalt not steal” is the commandment
to “remember the Sabbath day.” Why? Because “in six days the Lord
made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them.” One seventh
of our lives, every week, we are to remember, not the “deities” whom
the pagans in antiquity worshipped, nor blind chance and natural
selection, the deities of the modern secular world, but that God, and
God alone, is the Creator.
How fascinating, too, that the first thing in the Bible declared
holy is not a shrine, not a mountain, but a block of time—the seventh
day. “Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because
in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made”
(Genesis 2:3). The word “sanctified” here is translated from a Hebrew
word often meaning “holiness,” and being “set apart for holy use.”
Though Creation dealt with the heavens, the earth, the birds, the
beasts, and humans, things in space—it was time, not space, that
God first pronounced blessed and holy. And that’s because time is the
dimension in which the things of space, i.e., the heavens, the earth, the
birds, the beasts, humans, exist.
Finally, so important is this memorial to Creation that, instead of
us going to it, the Sabbath comes to us. Once a week, at a thousand
miles per hour (the approximate speed at which the earth rotates on its
axis), the Sabbath circles the globe. “Arriving on one sundown, leaving
on the next, the seventh day washes over the planet each week like a
huge cleansing wave. We never have to seek it. The day always finds
us.” 1
Here, then, in this warning message about the end of the world,
the Word of God brings us back to the beginning of the world and,
specifically, to the One who created it. And that is why we are told, not
only to “fear” Him, and not only to “give glory” to Him, but also (and,
1
Clifford Goldstein, A Pause for Peace (Nampa, Idaho: Pacific Press, 1992), p. 46.
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perhaps, most important) to “worship” Him.
Worshipping the Image

A dramatic episode unfolds in Scripture. The choice is stark, clear,
unambiguous. Obey the law of the land—or die. And die by being
thrown alive into a burning furnace. No middle ground, no appeal, no
pardon. Obey or burn.
But the issue is deeper: worship. Whom do we worship? Because,
in the end, we all worship something. “In the day-to-day trenches of
adult life,” wrote American author David Foster Wallace, “there is no
such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice
we get is what to worship.” 2 Self, fame, money, celebrities, sex, power—
whatever. Worship isn’t just about religious reverence or adoration or
singing hymns of praise to the glory of the Lord. We worship whatever
takes the place of God in our lives; whatever takes the place of God in
our lives we worship. Atheists worship too.
The dramatic account is revealed in the Old Testament book of
Daniel, a book that helps form a template, a background, to Revelation,
where the three angels’ messages are found. The episode unfolds in the
ancient empire of Babylon, a name that, as we will see, plays a big role
in the three angels’ messages. Though the date isn’t given, 594 B.C.
or thereabouts is believed to be in the ballpark. The date isn’t crucial;
what happened is.
The empire of Babylon, under King Nebuchadnezzar, had
conquered the nation of Judah, pillaging the land, destroying
Jerusalem and its sacred temple, and carrying away captives. Among
the captives were four young Jews whose Hebrew names were changed
to Babylonian ones: Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego.
Instead of laboring as slaves in some wretched mine or the like, these
boys, of patrician Hebrew blood, were brought to the king’s palace,
where they, excelling in “all matters of wisdom and understanding
about which the king examined them” (Daniel 1:20), served the king.
About this time, 594 B.C., King Nebuchadnezzar had a gold statue,
a giant image, erected in his own honor, and then ordered everyone
to worship the image. “To you it is commanded, O peoples, nations,
2
https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf
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and languages, that at the time you hear the sound of the horn, flute,
harp, lyre, and psaltery, in symphony with all kinds of music, you shall
fall down and worship the gold image that King Nebuchadnezzar
has set up; and whoever does not fall down and worship shall be cast
immediately into the midst of a burning fiery furnace” (Daniel 3:4-6).
To obey this decree, however, would mean violating one of the Ten
Commandments, the law of God. Old Testament, New Testament—
the law of God is the standard of righteousness that God’s people are
called to obey. In the Old Testament, Moses tells God’s people to “keep
His commandments” (Deuteronomy 30:10); in the New, James writes:
“For whoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point,
he is guilty of all. For He who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also
said, ‘Do not murder.’ Now if you do not commit adultery, but you do
murder, you have become a transgressor of the law” (James 2:10, 11).
Or, as expressed in Revelation: “Here is the patience of the saints; here
are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus”
(Revelation 14:12).
And because one of the Ten Commandments says, “You shall not
make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in
heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water
under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them”
(Exodus 20:4, 5), these three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-
Nego (Daniel—or Belteshazzar in Babylonian—was not in this story),
refused to worship the image. They worshipped only the Creator,
nothing or no one else. It was as simple as that.
Because of their refusal, they were hauled before the king, who
asked: “Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego, that you do not
serve my gods or worship the gold image which I have set up?” (Daniel
3:14). Without much equivocation or double-talk, they replied, “O
Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If
that is the case, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from
the burning fiery furnace, and He will deliver us from your hand, O
king. But if not, let it be known to you, O king, that we do not serve
your gods, nor will we worship the gold image which you have set up”
(verses 16-18).
Whatever historians know about ancient Near Eastern monarchs
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such as Nebuchadnezzar, they know that these men are not used to
being talked to like that. Their response was not proper court etiquette.
And, true to his word, he had the three of them thrown alive into a
burning furnace. (Read Daniel 3 to find out how the story ended.)
The point here is—worship. Whom do we worship, for we all
worship something. It is either the Lord—the one who “in six days
. . . made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them”
(Exodus 20:11), and then “blessed the seventh day and sanctified it,
because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and
made” (Genesis 2:3)—or something else.
And to worship something else—anything else—other than the
God who created us, who sustains us, the one in whom “we live and
move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) and who ultimately redeemed
us (the “everlasting gospel”), is idolatry. Whether worshipping the
golden image, or science, or self, or money, or sex, or whatever we
make into gods, it is still idolatry, because only the Lord has created us,
only the Lord sustains us, only the Lord gives us life, and so only He,
and He alone, deserves our worship. It’s as simple as that.
One of the most famous works of art is the marble statue of King
David, sculpted by Renaissance artist Michelangelo sometime between
1501 and 1504. Imagine standing before this block of marble, in the
Accademia Gallery in Florence, Italy, and thanking it for being there,
for being so exquisitely and finely detailed and crafted, even down to
the veins in his hands, or for even existing, as if the statue had not
only created itself but made itself into the stunningly beautiful work
of art that it is. Instead of you praising and thanking Michelangelo, its
creator, all your praise and honor is directed to the creation itself, as if
it had created itself. Kind of nonsensical, is it not?
Though only analogous, this point about Michelangelo’s David is
what all idolatry, all false worship, is about: worshipping the creation,
or some aspect of the creation (from self to statues to celebrities
to science), as opposed to the Creator. As Paul expressed it: they
“worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is
forever praised” (Romans 1:25, NIV). All through the Old Testament,
God had warned against worshipping anything other than Himself.
Whether the sun, moon, and stars (Deuteronomy 4:19), or the “gods”
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of the nations around them (Judges 10:6; Deuteronomy 8:19; 1 Kings
11:33; Psalm 81:9; Jeremiah 1:16), their idolatrous worship was futile
and meaningless. Isaiah showed how futile it was:
“He cuts down cedars for himself,
And takes the cypress and the oak;
He secures it for himself among the trees of the forest.
He plants a pine, and the rain nourishes it.
Then it shall be for a man to burn,
For he will take some of it and warm himself;
Yes, he kindles it and bakes bread;
Indeed he makes a god and worships it;
He makes it a carved image, and falls down to it.
He burns half of it in the fire;
With this half he eats meat;
He roasts a roast, and is satisfied.
He even warms himself and says,
‘Ah! I am warm,
I have seen the fire.’
And the rest of it he makes into a god,
His carved image.
He falls down before it and worships it,
Prays to it and says,
‘Deliver me, for you are my god!’ ” (Isaiah 44:14-17).
In some cultures people are too sophisticated to do exactly what
Isaiah warned about here. But the principle is the same: whatever takes
the place of God in someone’s life is false worship, and whatever it is, it
can no more save them than Steve Jobs’ computers or fame or money
or power saved him. Sooner or later gravity is going to put us all back
in the dirt from which we first arose, and our only hope, our only
salvation, is found in the Lord, in His “everlasting gospel.” God alone
deserves to be worshipped. Fame, sex, power, science, technology,
self—none of these potential idols can save us any more than the
carved image in Isaiah saved the one who carved it.
The episode of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego and their
refusal to worship the image is directly linked to the three angels’
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messages. In Daniel 3 the phrase “worship the gold image” appears
six times (in verses 5, 7, 10, 12, 14, 18). The book of Revelation, in the
chapter that leads up to three angels’ messages, warns about a coming
time of persecution. Under the threat of death, people will be forced to
“worship the image” (Revelation 13:15). As in Daniel 3, the question
of worship, and whom we worship, will become especially pertinent.
The third angel’s message itself, in fact, uses language from Daniel 3
when it too warns against worshipping this false “image” (Revelation
14:9, 11), which first appears in Revelation 13.
In summary, the first angel’s message opens with the “everlasting
gospel,” the amazingly good news of Jesus, our Creator and our
Redeemer, whose righteousness alone gives us hope in “the hour of
His judgment.” Besides calling us to “fear God and give glory to Him,”
the first angel’s message climaxes, and ends, with a call to “worship
Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water”—and
who also established, in Eden, the seventh day as the memorial to that
creation. This call to worship the Creator becomes, as we will see,
more pointed when contrasted with the fierce warning in the third
angel’s message about worshipping “the image,” at a time when the
issue of worship will engulf the world.
We all worship. And, ultimately, we all worship one of two things:
the creation or the Creator. One, the creation, this fallen creation, is
what we need to be saved from; the other, the Creator, is the only one
who can save us from it. Creation or Creator?
Whom do we worship?
One-Tongue World
It’s a fascinating episode, one shrouded in the mysteries created
by nothing but time because it unfolded deep in the past and our sole
record, in Scripture, depicts it in only nine verses (Genesis 11:1-9). And
yet its implications, its results, have reverberated through the millennia,
to the very moment that you exist in now. The fact that you are reading
these words in whatever language you are reading them—French,
Spanish, Mandarin, Swahili, Hindi, Russian, whatever—is only because
of what happened in this story. That’s how basic, and consequential,
the event was. Just as the seed in the grapefruit originated from Eden,
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different languages originated from the Tower of Babel.
The account opens with this line: “Now the whole earth had one
language and one speech” (Genesis 11:1). Because all we have known,
and for all recorded history too, is the reality of different languages
(it’s estimated that today about 7,000 different ones are spoken), the
concept sounds strange, but, given that it was still relatively early in
the history of the world, the idea of “one language and one speech”
makes sense. “This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. In the
day that God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. He
created them male and female, and blessed them and called them
Mankind in the day they were created” (Genesis 5:1, 2). One God,
one race, one language.
Though the exact date of this account, the Tower of Babel, is
unknown, the Genesis flood, the worldwide flood, had already
happened. Noah died (Genesis 9:29), and his children and
grandchildren and great-grandchildren multiplied and dispersed.
(Genesis 10). Some dwelt in “a plain in the land of Shinar” (Genesis
11:2), the southern part of Mesopotamia, today’s south Iraq. It was here
that the people said long ago, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and
a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves,
lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth” (verse
4). One could imagine, having heard about the Flood, these people
seeking to protect themselves from another one, even though every
rainbow painted across the sky was God’s way of reminding them that
“never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood; never
again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth” (Genesis 9:11). Thus,
the building of a high tower whose “top is in the heavens” symbolizes
defiance against God and His promises.
“Let us make a name for ourselves” depicts human arrogance and
hubris as well. The word “name” there (in Hebrew, shem) appeared
earlier in biblical history, when, before the Flood, in the context of how
evil humanity was becoming, the Bible said: “Those were the mighty
men who were of old, men of renown” (Genesis 6:4). “Renown” is a
translation of shem, literally “men of the name.” The next verse reads:
“Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the
earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil
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continually” (verse 5). Not long before the flood, and not long after,
the idea of having a “name” (shem) depicts something negative.
The Tower of Babel narrative reinforces that unfortunate truth:
“And the Lord said, ‘Indeed the people are one and they all have
one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that
they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let Us go down
and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one
another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the
face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city” (Genesis 11:6-8).
Though details remain unknown, they were openly defying
God, which is why He came down and confused their language.
Imagine the bewilderment, the chaos, the confusion: hundreds,
maybe thousands, of people, suddenly speaking to each other in
languages that others didn’t understand? They must have been
astonished, fearful, angry, and frustrated all at once by something
that they had never experienced before. It worked, too: they ceased;
the city and the tower remained unfinished; and these confused
people dispersed over the earth. Surely those who spoke a common
tongue united with each other as they all spread out from Babel.
We have here, then, the origins of different human languages.
The account ends with this verse: “Therefore its name is called
Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth;
and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the
earth” (verse 9). Babel, symbol of open rebellion and defiance against
God, is the same word later used all through the Bible for “Babylon”
(babel in Hebrew). The name “Babylon” appears hundreds of times
in the Bible, from the days of the Judean monarchy, more than a half
millennium before Christ, to the book of Revelation, where its first
use is here: “And another angel followed, saying, ‘Babylon is fallen,
is fallen, that great city, because she has made all nations drink of the
wine of the wrath of her fornication’ ” (Revelation 14:8).
Where is that? It’s in the second angel’s message. In fact, that is the
second angel’s message in entirety.
What is this message, and what does it say to us today?
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Section Six
Babylon Is Fallen
T he first angel’s message is a proclamation about God: about His

“everlasting gospel,” about “His judgment,” and about Him as
Creator, the one “who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of
water.” It’s also about what our response to these great truths should
be: fear, give glory to, and worship Him.
The second angel’s message, in contrast, is not about God, not
directly, but about an enemy of God (remember the great controversy).
The message says: “And another angel followed, saying, ‘Babylon is
fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she has made all nations drink
of the wine of the wrath of her fornication’ ” (Revelation 14:8). While
we’re at it—there’s more in Revelation about Babylon, too. “ ‘Babylon
the great is fallen, is fallen, and has become a dwelling place of
demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean
and hated bird! For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath
of her fornication, the kings of the earth have committed fornication
with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through
the abundance of her luxury.’ And I heard another voice from heaven
saying, ‘Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest
you receive of her plagues. For her sins have reached to heaven, and
God has remembered her iniquities’ ” (Revelation 18:2-5).
Ouch! Even before going to the Old Testament to learn what
some of these images mean, the images themselves—i.e., “the dwelling
place of demons,” “the wine of her fornication,” “a prison for every
foul spirit,” and “a cage for every unclean and hateful bird”—depict a
spiritually unpleasant place for sure. However, there’s also these other
words, crucial words, from heaven: “Come out of her, my people.” God
has people, “my people,” still there, though He tells them to get out
before it’s too late.
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Babylon, Babel, even before the tower of that same name, symbolized
opposition to God. In one biblical depiction of Satan—“O Lucifer, son of
the morning! . . . For you have said in your heart: ‘I will ascend into heaven,
I will be like the Most High’ ” (Isaiah 14:12-14)—he is first referred to as
“the king of Babylon” (verse 4), representing Babel itself.
In the Old Testament, Babylon had been a massive ancient empire.
An enemy of God’s people, Israel, Babylon had invaded and destroyed
the nation. Many of the images in Revelation for this end-time Babylon
have been taken directly from this same Old Testament Babylon:
Ancient Babylon End-Time Babylon
1. This Great Babylon 1. Mystery, Babylon the Great

(Dan. 4:30) (Rev. 17:5)
2. Babylon’s harlotry 2. The great harlot
(Eze. 23:17, 18) (Rev. 17:1)
3. Wild beasts in Babylon 3. Habitation of devils
(Isa. 13:21) (Rev. 18:2)
4. Luxurious city 4. Luxuriously adorned
(Isa. 13:19; Jer. 51:13) (Rev. 18:7)
5. Ruled the nations 5. Will reign over earth
(Isa. 14:6) (Rev. 17:18)
6. Attacked Israel 6. Attacked God’s people
(Jer. 51:49) (Rev. 17:6; 18:24)
7. Nations drank of her wine 7. Nations drink of her wine
(Jer. 51:7) (Rev. 14:8)
8. Use of sorcery and spells 8. Works miracles
(Isa. 47:9, 12) (Rev. 16:14; 13:13, 14)
9. God’s judgment against her 9. God’s judgment against her
(Jer. 25:28-30) (Rev. 18:8)
10. Nations against her 10. Nations against her
(Jer. 51:27, 29) (Rev. 17:16)
11. Fall of Babylon 11. Babylon is fallen
(Isa. 21:9) (Rev. 14:8)
12. Come out of her 12. Come out of her
(Jer. 51:6, 45) (Rev. 18:4)
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Long after the old empire of Babylon had been destroyed, the
apostle Peter wrote: “She who is in Babylon, elect together with you,
greets you; and so does Mark my son” (1 Peter 5:13). How could
someone be in Babylon, which had vanished centuries earlier?
Scholarship is certain that he’s using this name as a symbol for the
empire that had, by his time, replaced ancient Babylon as an opponent
to God, which was Rome. This is the power that had crucified Christ
(Mark 10:33; Matthew 20:19), that had persecuted the early church
(see book of Acts), and that, unfortunately, continued that persecution
in the papal phase, up to the early modern era (see Daniel 7:19-21, 24,
25; 8:10-12, 23-25).
The book of Daniel, in three prophetic chapters (Daniel 2; 7; 8),
depicted a series of world empires. Two of these chapters, Daniel 2
and 7, started with Babylon (Daniel 2:36-38; 7:4), but then all three
predicted the empires that followed—Media-Persia (Daniel 2:39;
7:5; 8:20), Greece (Daniel 2:32; 7:6; 8:21), and finally, Rome, which
remains until the end of the world (see Daniel 2:33, 40-43; 7:7, 8, 19-
27; 8:10-12, 23-25) and has a role to play in last-day events.
And, just as ancient Babylon, a vast religious and political power,
opposed God and persecuted His people, modern Babylon is and does
the same, only it will get worse as we near the end.
One of the images in the second angel’s message is about
Babylon’s “fornication,” an Old Testament image of unfaithfulness
to God and His truth. The prophets used the idea of a pure woman,
sometimes a bride, as a symbol of ancient Israel when it was faithful
to God (Jeremiah 6:2). However, when it was unfaithful, when
it went into apostasy, another image was used: harlotry. Ezekiel
accused Jerusalem of playing the harlot “with the Egyptians,” “with
the Assyrians,” “as far as . . . Chaldea” (see Ezekiel 16:26-29). “Have
you seen what backsliding Israel has done? She has gone up on every
high mountain and under every green tree, and there played the
harlot” (Jeremiah 3:6). Thus, the image there of “fornication” gives
the same idea: false doctrine, along with unfaithfulness to God and
His truth that false doctrine inevitably brings.
Thus, the cry “Babylon is fallen” is another way of letting people
know that the corrupt systems of this world will not win, will not
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dominate, regardless of how things seem now. Ancient Babylon, with
its false teaching, errors, and persecutions, once seemed invincible.
Modern Babylon might now too. But thanks to Jesus and His victory
on the cross, sin, evil, Satan, the great controversy, and end-time
Babylon, along with its false doctrines and teachings, will be forever
gone, and this shout will be heard across the cosmos: “Alleluia! For the
Lord God Omnipotent reigns! Let us be glad and rejoice and give Him
glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and His wife has made
herself ready” (Revelation 19:6, 7).
The Third Angel
The third angel’s message is a warning: “Then a third angel
followed them, saying with a loud voice, ‘If anyone worships the beast
and his image, and receives his mark on his forehead or on his hand,
he himself shall also drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is
poured out full strength into the cup of His indignation. He shall be
tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels
and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment
ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night, who
worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his
name. Here is the patience of the saints; here are those who keep the
commandments of God and the faith of Jesus” (Revelation 14:9-12).
Notice the imagery: straight from the book of Daniel, in which
(see “Worshipping the Image”) people were forced to “worship the . . .
image” (Daniel 3:5, 7, 10, 14, 15, 18) on the pain of death. The warning
in the third angel’s message in Revelation 14 echoes Revelation 13 as
well, in which people must, as in Daniel 3, worship an image or face
death: “as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed”
(Revelation 13:15).
Also, don’t miss this point: the third angel’s message comes right
after—what? The proclamation of the second angel about Babylon
being fallen (Revelation 14:8). What empire in the Old Testament
forced the worship of an image? Babylon (Daniel 3:1).
Ancient Babylon, modern Babylon—the issue is worship.
The first angel’s message calls people to worship the Creator, “who
made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water” (Revelation
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14:7). This language comes directly from the Ten Commandments,
specifically the fourth. “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,
the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore
the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:11, ESV),
which comes directly from the Genesis creation: “So God blessed the
seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work
that he had done in creation” (Genesis 2:3, ESV).
The three angels’ messages, then, present the great issue facing the
world in the end-days: do we worship the Creator, or do we worship
“the beast and his image” (Revelation 14:9)? The answer should be
obvious: we worship God because He is the Creator, and there’s no
more foundational and basic symbol of Him as Creator than the
seventh-day Sabbath, blessed and made holy in the first week, the
Creation, and deemed by God important enough to be embedded in
the Ten Commandments themselves!
This deep biblical truth, however, leads to an important question:
Why, in most of the Christian world, is Sunday, the first day of the
week, kept, as opposed to the seventh-day Sabbath, the biblical sign of
God as Creator?
The following quotes explain why.
The 1977 edition of The Convert’s Catechism of Catholic Doctrine
reads:
“Q. Which is the Sabbath day?”
“A. Saturday is the Sabbath day.”
“Q: Why do we observe Sunday instead of Saturday?”
“A. We observe Sunday instead of Saturday because the Catholic
Church transferred the solemnity from Saturday to Sunday.”—Peter
Geiermann, The Convert’s Catechism of Catholic Doctrine (Rockford,
Illinois: Tan Books and Publishers, 1977), p. 50.
Rome admits to changing the foundational sign of God as our
Creator to another day, Sunday? Here’s another one:
“Q. How prove you that the church hath power to command
feasts and holy days?”
“A. By the very act of changing the Sabbath into Sunday, which
Protestants allow of; and therefore they fondly contradict themselves,
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by keeping Sunday strictly, and breaking most other feasts commanded
by the same church.”
“Q. How prove you that?”
“A. Because by keeping Sunday, they acknowledge the church’s power
to ordain feasts, and to command them under sin; and by not keeping the
rest [of the feasts] by her commanded, they again deny, in fact, the same
power.”—Rev. Henry Tuberville, D.D. (R.C.) (1833), p. 58.
A human institution claiming to have changed God’s law?
“Q. Has the [Catholic] church power to make any alterations in
the commandments of God?”
“A. Instead of the seventh day, and other festivals appointed by
the old law, the church has prescribed the Sundays and holy days
to be set apart for God’s worship; and these we are now obliged to
keep in consequence of God’s commandment, instead of the ancient
Sabbath.”—The Catholic Christian Instructed in the Sacraments,
Sacrifices, Ceremonies, and Observances of the Church by Way of
Question and Answer, RT Rev. Dr. Challoner, p. 204.
Here is one by a Roman Catholic luminary about the fact that the
Bible never teaches that Sunday is the day of rest:
“Is not every Christian obliged to sanctify Sunday and to abstain
on that day from unnecessary servile work? Is not the observance of
this law among the most prominent of our sacred duties? But you
may read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and you will not find
a single line authorizing the sanctification of Sunday. The Scriptures
enforce the religious observance of Saturday, a day which we never
sanctify.”—James Cardinal Gibbons, The Faith of Our Fathers (1917
edition), pp. 72, 73 (16th Edition, p. 111; 88th Edition, p. 89).
Google “Roman Catholic quotes about the change of the Sabbath,”
and you will find many more statements like these above in which
Rome admits that Sundaykeeping is its, not God’s, creation.
Some Protestants reluctantly admit that there’s no biblical
evidence for Sunday as opposed to the Sabbath. The leader of a
Christian group in the United States dedicated to the observance of
Sunday admitted just that. “There is,” wrote James Westberry, “no
record of a statement on the part of Jesus authorizing such a change,
nor is there recorded a such a statement on the part of the apostles”
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(James P. Westberry, “Are We Compromising Ourselves?” Sunday,
April-June 1976, p. 5). Remember, these are the words from a man
dedicated to keeping Sunday!
In The Lord’s Day, a book dedicated to Sunday observance, Samuel
Cartledge wrote: “We must admit that we can point to no direct
command that we cease observing the seventh day and begin using
the first day” (in James P. Westberry, ed., The Lord’s Day [Nashville:
Broadman Press, 1986], p. 100). They can point to no direct command
because there is no command, direct or indirect, in the Bible to change
the seventh-day Sabbath, instituted at Creation, to Sunday—a day that
the Bible never treats as holy.
Are these Protestants saying, without coming right out and
admitting it, that they have accepted Rome’s change of the Sabbath,
this foundational symbol, reaching back to Eden itself, of God as
our Creator?
Seems so. Only it gets worse.
“Think to Change Times and Laws”
About 600 years before Christ, in the context of ancient Babylon,
Daniel 2 (a prophecy parallel to Daniel 7) presented an amazing
prediction that covered the history of the world from ancient Babylon
down through our day, until God establishes His eternal kingdom. In
the prophecy itself, after coming to the breakup of pagan Rome into
the nations known today as modern Europe (depicted as kings), the
text says: “And in the days of these kings the God of heaven will set up
a kingdom which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not
be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these
kingdoms, and it shall stand forever” (Daniel 2:44).
Sometime, in the days of modern Europe, God will establish His
kingdom. And this kingdom, which ends all earthly ones, will exist
forever. And the great promise of the “everlasting gospel” is that by
faith in Jesus, we all can have our place in it. “In My Father’s house
are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to
prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I
will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there
you may be also” (John 14:2, 3). All that can keep us out is our own
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wrong choices.
The prophecy of Daniel 2, in summary, goes like this:
Babylon
Media-Persia
Greece
Rome
God’s eternal kingdom (where Jesus has prepared a “place” for us)
As shown already (see “The Hour of His Judgment”), in Daniel 7
this same sequence of empires was also prophesized:
Babylon
Media-Persia
Greece
Rome
God’s eternal kingdom (where Jesus has prepared a “place” for us)
In both prophecies the final earthly kingdom, the one that arises
after ancient Greece and remains until God establishes His “kingdom
which shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44)—is Rome. Though
pagan Rome vanished 1,500 years ago, papal Rome remains—and will
continue to until God’s kingdom at the end of this world.
Daniel 7, using different images, gave more details about these
kingdoms than did Daniel 2, particularly regarding the last one, Rome,
and particularly its papal phase, which included some unfortunate
history, such as—it “shall persecute the saints of the Most High”
(Daniel 7:25). Then, in the same verse about papal Rome’s persecution
of God’s people, the prophecy also predicted that Rome would “think
to change times and laws” (Daniel 7:25, KJV). Considering the quotes
just looked at (see “The Third Angel”), in which Rome claimed to have
established Sundaykeeping—a day that both Protestants and Catholics
admitted has no scriptural backing—this verse is significant.
Notice: this verse says that it will “think to change times and laws.”
God’s law, including the fourth commandment, was written in stone
by the finger of God Himself. “Then the Lord delivered to me two
tablets of stone written with the finger of God, and on them were all
the words which the Lord had spoken to you on the mountain from
the midst of the fire in the day of the assembly” (Deuteronomy 9:10;
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see also Exodus 31:18). No earthly power can change that! The New
International Version reads that Rome will “try to change” times and
the law. Trying is not the same as doing it!
Jesus’ death on the cross, for sin, which is defined as “the
transgression of the law” (1 John 3:4, KJV), proves the immutability of
God’s law. Would not it have been better to have changed the law—or,
to use an English expression, “to change the goalposts in the middle
of the game”—in order to meet us in our sins so that Jesus would not
have had to die for them (see 1 Corinthians 15:3)? Of course. Merely
because someone claims to have changed the Sabbath day, and merely
because most people follow the “changed” day, no more makes the
Sabbath Sunday than someone’s claim to have changed the law of
gravity means that things will, now, fall slower to the ground, even if
most people are under the delusion that they do.
This attempted change becomes of momentous importance when
all the world will worship the beast—“as many as would not worship
the image of the beast to be killed” (Revelation 13:15)—a worship that
the third angel’s message specifically warns against (Revelation 14:9-
11). Or they will “worship Him who made heaven and earth, the sea
and springs of water” (verse 7), an act memorialized in Eden in the
seventh day—“God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because
on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done” (Genesis
2:3, NIV)—and then immortalized in the fourth commandment: “For
in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all
that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord
blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy” (Exodus 20:11, NIV).
Worship the image? Worship the Creator? One or the other. That
will be the choice before the whole world.
The Mark of the Beast
Revelation 13 repeats a great deal of imagery directly from Daniel 7,
including Rome’s past persecution of God’s people—it “shall persecute
the saints” (Daniel 7:25); it will “make war with the saints” (Revelation
13:7). The same verse that depicts this persecution, Daniel 7:25, also
tells of Rome’s attempt to change the law (it shall “think to change times
and laws” [KJV]). Then, in the context of Rome (remember, in Daniel
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2 and Daniel 7, Rome is the final earthly power remaining until God
establishes His eternal kingdom), which is identified in Revelation
13:1-9 as a beast, the issue of worshipping the image in the last days
first appears in Revelation 13:8, 12-15. This, in contrast to the three
angels’ messages, which warn against worshipping “the beast and his
image” (Revelation 14:9, 10), but not before calling people to “worship
Him who made heaven and earth, the sea and springs of water” (verse
7)—language taken from the fourth commandment, which the beast
power had attempted to change!
To repeat: “A. We observe Sunday instead of Saturday because the
Catholic Church transferred the solemnity from Saturday to Sunday”
(Peter Geiermann, The Convert’s Catechism of Catholic Doctrine
[Rockford, Ill.: Tan Books and Publishers, 1977], p. 50).
The issue becomes clearer because, right after warning about this
false worship, the third angel’s message portrays God’s people like
this: “Here is the patience of the saints; here are those who keep the
commandments of God and the faith of Jesus” (Revelation 14:12). In
direct contrast to those who worship the beast and its image, God’s
people are depicted, besides having “the faith of Jesus,” as keeping the
commandments of God, which includes the one commandment that
points to Him as the Creator, as the one “who made heaven and earth,
the sea and springs of water” (verse 7)—again, the commandment that
Rome had attempted to change!
Worship the Creator? Or worship the beast and its image? Can the
issue of worshipping the beast and its image, or worshipping the Creator,
Jesus (see John 1:1-3; Hebrews 1:1, 2; 1 Corinthians 8:6; Colossians 1:15-
17), really be outwardly manifested over Sabbath versus Sunday?
How else? We worship God because, as the Creator (and also
our Redeemer), He alone is worthy of worship (Revelation 5:9), and
no more foundational symbol of Him as our Creator exists than the
seventh-day Sabbath—blessed and made holy in Creation itself. For an
earthly power, then, to seek to change, to usurp, the most basic sign, the
seventh-day Sabbath, of the most basic doctrine, creation, is to attempt
to usurp the Lord’s authority at the most basic level possible: Him as
Creator. The only level more basic is God Himself. No power, in heaven
or on earth, can get to Him, so instead they get as close as possible: to the
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foundational sign of Him as Creator.
How fundamental is worship of the Creator to Christianity?
It’s a truth so fundamental that God commands one seventh of our
lives, every week, to remember it. That’s why it’s hard to see how the
controversy about worship—either worship of the beast (the very
power that attempted to change the Sabbath) and its image, or worship
of the Creator—could be centered on anything else but the day God
established as a memorial to Him as Creator. This in contrast to the
day that the beast power has established instead.
But killing people over the seventh-day Sabbath? Can that really
happen? It already has! The Gospels themselves give us a precursor
to it: those promoting human tradition wanting to kill because of the
seventh-day Sabbath.
In John 9 Jesus had healed on the Sabbath a man blind from birth,
perhaps the greatest miracle ever yet seen. “Since the world began it
has been unheard of that anyone opened the eyes of one who was born
blind” (John 9:32). How did the religious authorities respond? They
accused Jesus of having violated the seventh-day Sabbath, saying,
“This Man is not from God, because He does not keep the Sabbath”
(verse 16). A conflict between human tradition (nothing in the Bible
forbade healing on the Sabbath, just as nothing in the Bible has Sunday
as a holy day) and God’s law—specifically the seventh-day Sabbath of
the fourth commandment—was brewing.
“Now when He had departed from there, He went into their
synagogue. And behold, there was a man who had a withered hand.
And they asked Him, saying, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?’—
that they might accuse Him. Then He said to them, ‘What man is there
among you who has one sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath,
will not lay hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value then is
a man than a sheep? Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.’
Then He said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ And he stretched
it out, and it was restored as whole as the other” (Matthew 12:9-13).
How did the religious leaders respond to this astonishing
expression of God’s power? “But the Pharisees went out and plotted
how they might kill Jesus” (verse 14, NIV).
Kill Jesus? Death because of the seventh-day Sabbath?
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The Final Hope
In John 5:1-16, after another miraculous healing on the seventh-
day Sabbath, the religious leaders “persecuted Jesus, and sought to kill
him, because He had done this on the Sabbath.”
Wanting to kill because of the seventh-day Sabbath? Death because
of human tradition versus the seventh-day Sabbath? Exactly! Though
the specific issue here isn’t the same as what the world will face in the
final days, it’s close enough: human law versus God’s, and in these cases
the part of God’s law under contention is the Sabbath commandment,
the one commandment that gets to the foundation of why we should
worship only God, the Creator, and nothing or no one else.
In the life of Jesus, then, we can find precursors, hints, to what
those “who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus”
(Revelation 14:12) will face: human tradition in conflict with God’s law.
How does this idea, that of the mark of the beast centering on
the biblical Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, versus human
tradition, the first day, fit with the warning about the end-time power
that “causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to
receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no
one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the
beast, or the number of his name” (Revelation 13:16, 17)?
During the centuries, speculation has arisen over what the “mark on
the right hand or their foreheads” means. But that’s only what it has been,
speculation. More remains to be revealed. But, going on the principle
that the Old Testament holds the key to interpreting Revelation, we can
find indications of what Revelation is talking about here.
Before the children of Israel were about to enter the Promised
Land, Moses, having warned them many times about false worship,
reminded them to keep God’s commandments, that is, His law. He
then said: “Therefore you shall lay up these words of mine in your
heart and in your soul, and bind them as a sign on your hand, and they
shall be as frontlets between your eyes” (Deuteronomy 11:18).
Exactly how they were supposed to bind his words to their hands
and between their eyes, we don’t know (the practice today of religious
Jews “wrapping tefillin” is one interpretation). Yet they were to keep
these words, God’s law, “in your heart and in your soul,” and this
faithful adherence to God’s law was to be manifested by the words
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being put on their hand, symbolic of deeds, actions, and on their
heads, symbolic of their knowledge of God’s law. Though one can’t be
too dogmatic about exactly how this was done in ancient Israel, or how
in the last days this “mark on their right hand or on their foreheads”
will be manifested either, there will be, it seems, some outward sign
that will distinguish those who worship the beast and his image from
those who, instead, “keep the commandments of God and the faith of
Jesus” (Revelation 14:12).
(Also, for the record: only when the issues unfold in the last days
does the mark come into effect. So, no—people who now keep Sunday
do not now have “the mark of the beast.”)
Finally, a question: How could something like this happen? An
answer: We don’t know. Though Revelation tells us what will happen,
it does not tell us how. If, however, the COVID-19 pandemic has
taught us anything, it’s that our world, the entire world, can change—
dramatically, quickly, dangerously. If in early 2019 people would have
been told what we all would be doing in 2020 (lockdowns, quarantines,
face masks, a pandemic with millions infected), most would not have
believed it. After COVID-19 we should be aware that anything, even
the unexpected (or, maybe, especially the unexpected), can happen,
including, as the third angel warns, “the mark of the beast.”
The Patience of the Saints
The first angel’s message begins with the “everlasting gospel”
(Revelation 14:6); the third angel’s ends with it: “Here is the patience
of the saints; here are those who keep the commandments of God and
the faith of Jesus” (verse 12). Faith (“the faith of Jesus”) and obedience
(“keep the commandments of God”)—if that’s not the gospel, the
“everlasting gospel,” what is?
Debate exists on the precise meaning of “the faith of Jesus.” Is it
the faith of Jesus, in that it reflects the faith that Jesus had manifested
when here; or is it the faith that believers have placed in Jesus? Either
way, as the Bible says: “But that no one is justified by the law in the
sight of God is evident, for ‘the just shall live by faith’ ” (Galatians 3:11).
How else but by faith?
Considering that the power who created space, time, matter, and
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energy, that is, who created the universe itself, had “shrunk down,”
becoming one of us, and then offered Himself as a sacrifice for our
sins—we are going to add to that? As if the death of the Creator were,
somehow, not enough to pay for our sins? No matter how bad you
might have been, the sacrifice of Him who “is before all things, and
in Him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17) certainly was more than
enough to cover you. And by faith, “the faith of Jesus” (however we
understand it), you can claim His death in your behalf, right now, and
stand perfect before your Creator as if you had never sinned.
And “the commandments of God”? Which commandments? At
last count, there were 10. The book of Revelation, besides Revelation
14:12, makes references to them. Just before the vision that includes
the three angels’ messages, Revelation 11:19 reads: “Then the temple
of God was opened in heaven, and the ark of His covenant was seen
in His temple.” The “ark of His covenant” is the place where the Ten
Commandments were stored in the earthly sanctuary.
Specific commandments also appear in Revelation. The first
angel’s message, to worship God (Revelation 14:7), directly refers to
the first commandment (Exodus 20:1-3), and (as we have seen) this
same message uses language directly from the fourth. The third angel
warns against worshipping the image (the image of the beast), which
points to the second commandment, against idolatry (Exodus 20:4-6).
Meanwhile murder, theft, and adultery are all covered in Revelation
9:20, 21 alone. Revelation 12:17, the final verse before Revelation
13, where the mark of the beast is introduced, depicts God’s people:
“And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make
war with the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of
God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.” Twice (Revelation 12:17;
14:12), then, in the context of last days, God’s faithful people are
depicted as keeping His commandments.
And why not?
A man went to his 30-year high school reunion. After he left,
thinking about how messed up so many of his old friends were,
one thought entered his mind: If only people had kept the Ten
Commandments—how much better their lives would have been!
Imagine our world if everyone kept even just some. If no one violated
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the sixth commandment (murder), the seventh (adultery), the eighth
(thievery), and the ninth (lying), our existence would be paradise
compared to what it is now.
A thought experiment: what country would you rather live in
and raise a family? A country in which everyone obeyed the Ten
Commandments, or in which no one did? The answer alone reveals
how beneficial “the commandments of God” are for us.
And the good news of the “everlasting gospel” is that the same
faith, “the faith of Jesus,” that takes hold of Christ’s righteousness,
which covers our sin, is the same faith that takes hold of Christ’s
righteousness, which also cleanses our sins and transforms us. “If
anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away;
behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).
We are promised, over and over, the power to obey, to overcome,
and to keep God’s commandments.
“No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to
man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond
what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of
escape, that you may be able to bear it” (1 Corinthians 10:13).
“For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the
world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our
faith” (1 John 5:4, ESV).
“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”
(Philippians 4:13).
“We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that
the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no
longer be enslaved to sin” (Romans 6:6, ESV).
“Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to
present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding
joy” (Jude 24, KJV).
Yes, we can, by God’s grace, keep His commandments, even
perfectly. We just can’t keep them perfectly enough to be saved by them.
That’s why salvation is by faith, and not by the law. We are “justified
by faith without the deeds of the law” (Romans 3:28, KJV) because the
deeds of the law cannot justify us. If they could, why didn’t Jesus skip
the cross? Why didn’t He just come to the earth, show us how to obey,
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and then return to heaven? It was because, as much as we needed an
example, we needed a substitute as well, which is why He died on the
cross, suffering in Himself the penalty for our having already broken
God’s law. “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that
while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The cross
alone shows the futility of human works for salvation.
And we need to be saved, don’t we? Please! As bad as this world
has been, it’s going to get worse. Daniel warns of “a time of trouble, such
as never was since there was a nation, even to that time” (Daniel 12:1).
However, even though at first things will get worse, they will get better—
better beyond anything that we could imagine. “For behold, I create
new heavens and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered
or come to mind” (Isaiah 65:17). “Nevertheless we, according to His
promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness
dwells” (2 Peter 3:13). “Now I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for
the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Revelation 21:1).
“And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no
more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the
former things have passed away” (verse 4).
No more death? No more sorrow? No more pain? It’s an existence
that we, who have known only death, only sorrow, only pain, cannot
envision. These “former things,” which never should have been here
to begin with, will pass away, and a new existence will be ours forever.
That’s what the “everlasting gospel,” formulated “before time began”
(2 Timothy 1:9), promises. This new existence is what the three angels’
messages are, ultimately, pointing to. It’s what the prophets dreamed
about, had visions about, preached and wrote about. And it’s what,
ultimately, Jesus died for. “He shall see the labor of His soul, and be
satisfied” (Isaiah 53:11). And living in the times that we do, we can
be the people of the prophet’s dreams, we who, by faith, the “faith of
Jesus,” will one day proclaim:
“Behold, this is our God;
We have waited for Him, and He will save us.
This is the Lord;
We have waited for Him;
We will be glad and rejoice in His salvation” (Isaiah 25:9).
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Copyright © 2021 by General Conference Corporation of Seventh-day Adventists®

Published by Review and Herald® Publishing Association, Hagerstown, MD 21740

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This book was

ISBN 978-0-8280-2890-5 (print)

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