The Glorious Appearing
The Second Great Supper
Revelation 19:14-21
We studied a couple of weeks back about the Marriage Supper of the Lamb which takes place sometime after the Judgment Seat of Christ and before the return to the earth. It is a time of purification and readying for the MIllenial Reign as the Bride fo Christ.
But the Marriage Supper of the Lamb is not the only “supper” mentioned in the last days of earth.
Tonight we come to a different kind of supper. This is not a supper of celebration but of condemnation.
Revelation 19:14-21
The scene is rather gruesome in this passage. The great battle at Armageddon is over and the area is literally littered with human remains upon which the birds will feast.
And John is seeing this great sight. Here is a battle going on, all the armies of the world led by the antichrist in the Valley of Armageddon in modern day Israel and they are fighting against the nation of Israel. It is the final holocaust, the final effort to destroy the Jew. And suddenly, when Christ appears in heaven and all the armies of heaven come back with Him, the antichrist, recognizing who it is, turns from fighting the army of Israel to fighting the army of heaven. I guess he thinks he can win. I told someone the other day that I never ran from a fight. I got whipped a lot of times, but I didn’t run!
And the anti-Christ is so filled with pride that he thinks that he can defeat Christ and His army.
Let me give you a little commentary material on this scene, and then we’ll look at the outline.
The beast (verse 19) is the anti-Christ. He is the leader of the world. He is the head of the political, military, and economic. He has also declared that he is to be worshipped.
But now he is captured by Christ, along with the false prophet. The false prophet was his religious representative. Remember, Satan never does anything original. He is an imitator. And just as God is a trinity, he tries to copy that. He is Satan the Father, the anti-Christ is the fleshing out of Satan in an imitation of the incarnation of Jesus, and the false prophet is mimicking the Holy Spirit.
This false prophet has come saying I am another like Christ. I have his power. Notice the reference to “signs”. The Holy Spirit filled and indwelled the church with the power of Christ. Everything is an imitation of the real thing. By the way, Jesus said it was a foolish generation that was always seeking a sign.
But because of the signs, the world believed the lie. They believed the anti-Christ was good. The Jews were bad. They were the ones who must be destroyed. But it was all a deception designed by Satan himself to ultimately and finally send people to hell. And now it’s over. Everything that had been promised is gone. The world is gutted and disseminated.
And the beast and the false prophet have been captured and cast into the “lake of fire burning with brimstone”.
What is this fiery lake of burning sulfur? It is the way that John sees hell. This is the final, eternal stage of the lost, the fiery lake. The King James Version simply says they were cast into the lake of fire. When you translate the word from the Greek it is talking about a burning, sulfur kind of fire.
And left scattered all over Israel are the armies of the antichrist. They are all killed. From this slaughter develops the river of blood that we read about in Revelation 14:20. It is 200 miles long and as the horse’s bridles. And we are told that the birds gorged themselves on their flesh.
Many will read this and say I thought God was a God of love. He is a God of love but he is also a God of holiness and justice. He is a God of omniscience. He is a God of all power. There are many facets and attributes to the character of God and one of them is that God is holy. And a holy God must judge sin.
And God is getting ready to create a new world. It’s not the first time He’s done that. And back in the days of Noah, when He got ready to create a new world, He destroyed the old one. Specifically, He dealt in judgment with those that messed it up.
And that’s what we see happening here. He is getting ready to create a new heaven and a new earth where His people will dwell in righteousness. Before He does that, He has to do business with the ones who messed up the world in the first place.
And what we have here is this apocalyptic, dynamic picture of the coming of Christ in His glorious appearing and the outcome of the Battle of Armageddon. This is what must happen for the tribulation to come to an end, and for the false prophet and the antichrist to be destroyed.
Now with that in mind, let me highlight three specifics from this text. First, notice
1. The Armies of Christ
v. 14
Think about the composition of this army.
Who makes up this army?
- the angelic hosts are there. That just makes sense. They have always fought battles on behalf of God on the earth all through the Bible.
In fact, 2 Thessalonians 1:7 tells us the Lord will be revealed from heaven “in blazing fire with his powerful angels." So obviously, the angels are in that army.
- Number two, the saints of God are a part fo the army. Whether they are Old Testament or New Testament saints, they’ll be there. Paul said to the Colossians in 3:4, "When Christ, who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory."
So you and I as believers are in the army of heaven.
That truth has been a part of the theology of the people of God since the very beginning.
Jude 1:14 says, "And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his saints".
He is using a literary device to mean uncounted thousands. When the writer gets the vision of this army, he can't count the number of them, he just looks at this vast crowd and he says there are tens of thousands of people out there.
So that’s the composition of heaven. Angels and Saints. Or we could just say, the inhabitants of heaven. That’s the composition.
Then notice the clothing of this army.
Verse 14
They are dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Having been cleansed, having been judged at the judgment seat of Christ, we are wearing the robe of righteousness which represents the righteousness of Christ.
Quickly, think about the conquest of this army.
It says, "the armies of heaven were following HIM." The General is out front. We are following Him on a mighty conquest to once and for all put down evil and destroy sin and Satan and all of his effects.
So that’s a little about the Army of Christ.
Then notice
2. The Authority of Christ
Verse 15
Out of His mouth goes a sharp sword. That’s telling us about the Word of His Warfare.
When Jesus was on earth and He taught, "the people marveled for He spoke as one having authority and not as the scribes." The scribes copied the Bible meticulously, so meticulously that the oldest manuscripts of Isaiah that date back before the time of Christ are exactly the same wording as the Book of Isaiah in your Bible.
But these scribes could only quote the Bible. Jesus spoke the Bible. Whenever Jesus spoke, it was Scripture being spoken. So when they wrote down what Jesus said, it was Scripture being written.
And now He comes as captain of Heaven’s army and out of His mouth goes a sharp sword that with it He should strike the nations.
Why does He want to strike the nations? Because these are the nations that have joined the antichrist in his destruction of the Jews. These are the nations who have accepted the antichrist as their leader. These are the nations who accepted the mark of the beast.
So He comes to bring judgment against these nations and He does it with the power of His Word.
He doesn't need atomic weapons. He doesn't need stealth bombers. He doesn't need computerized weaponry. All He needs is the Word of His mouth.
Then notice the weapon of his warfare.
"He will rule them with a rod of iron". Understand he is not coming back on this occasion to redeem. He is coming to rule. He is not coming back on a mission of salvation. He is coming on a mission of condemnation.
Now, the rod of iron indicates that His enemies will be forced to submit to Him. Isaiah saw this hundreds of years before Christ. He said in Isaiah 11:4, "but with righteousness He will judge the needy, with justice He will give decisions for the poor of the earth. He will strike the earth with the rod of His mouth..."
Look at the wrath of His warfare.
What does it mean that he treads the winepress of the fury, the wrath, of almighty God? This is an Old Testament picture of how the wrath of God works. There are two words in Scripture to describe the wrath of God. One of these words means a sudden wrath. You know, when you suddenly get angry. It means when God sees something that grieves His Spirit and He suddenly gets angry and He sends a judgment.
But the other word for wrath means a wrath that slowly builds. God sees things that grieve His heart but He doesn't immediately send judgment, He just puts it to man's account. He just adds it on to man's tab. As in the days before the flood, God saw the wickedness of man was great that even the imaginations of his heart were evil continually. But what did God do? God didn't immediately send the flood. God waited to see if man would repent.
But His wrath was constantly building. God is allowing the grapes to ripen. The more man sins, the more the grape grows, the more the grape develops, the more the grape ripens, the juicier the grape becomes, and the greater the carnage when the grape is brought in to the winepress.
The winepress was a place where the grapes were submitted to pressure so that the juice would come out to make wine. And they did this with their feet. They would get into a vat or a big container and they would stomp the grapes with their feet. The juice would flow from the ripened grapes and the juice would come out from the bottom of that great vat or container into the jars prepared for it.
You’ve probably seen Lucy doing that when she and Ricky visited Italy or Rome or wherever it was.
Here he says that Jesus is in the winepress. The grapes are now ripe. God has had it. God has said it is enough. And He is stomping away.
Romans 2:5 gives goo dcommentary on that.
"But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God's wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed."
Man thinks he’s getting away with it when he sins. But he’s not. Paul is saying just because God didn't send a lightning bolt down and strike you dead when you were committing that sin, doesn't mean you are not going to pay for it. He said all you are doing is building up your account. All you are doing is making your judgment worse.
And what we have in Revelation 19 is the world's pay day. Righteous judgment will now be revealed.
Finally, notice
3. The Angel of Christ
Verses 17-18
Notice this angel, it is a Conspicuous Angel. He is standing in the sun. What does that mean? He is standing in the proximity of the sun, like an eclipse, allowing the sun to reveal nothing to the earth except the outline and form of the mighty angel.
It gets mighty quite on the earth as the earth grows dark and they look at the sun and all they see is this mighty angel of judgment.
This is a Crying Angel. He cries with a loud voice. Angels have been used to carry God's message for centuries. In fact, that’s what an angel is and what the word means. They are messengers.
In Revelation 2, pastors are called angels. Each letter is addressed to the church and its angel. It means the messenger or pastor of the church.
Go ahead on and call me and angel! It’s scriptural!
But this angel is not a pastor. He is a literal angel. And he comes pronouncing a message not for men but for the birds. I believe with all my heart this is a literal event that is going to take place.
Jesus said, in Mattthew 24:28, “wherever the corpse is the vultures will gather.”
And that is true. Wherever there is an old dead, rotting corpse, whether it is a horse or a cow or sheep or a man, the old vultures will gather. By the way, that is not all bad. That is part of God's plan for nature. That is how God keeps the ecology in balance. Something has to be done with that rotting flesh and God has birds to take care of that. And in so doing, the birds are provided for.
But these birds are invited by the angel to assemble for this second great supper of decaying human flesh.
Now, remember, while the saints of God feast on all of God's wonderful bounty at His table of the marriage supper of the Lamb, a little later these birds are going to feast in the Valley of Armageddon on human flesh.
The birds of Israel are an interesting study because the birds of Western Europe migrant through Israel. Millions upon millions of birds migrate through Israel every year. This migration through that tiny stripe of land that is Israel is due to the fact that birds need food. On one side of their migration route of Israel is the sea. On the other side is the desert. So they must migrate right through the land of Israel to find food.
Now each type of bird flies the same type of pattern every year at precisely the same time. Lots of scientific research has been done on the birds of Israel. The time of the migration is usually in the late spring.
There was a time when many Israeli pilots lost their lives because of birds being sucked up into the jet engine. So they did a study of the birds and, because the migration is so predictable, pilots now adjust the altitude of their jets to account for the migration route of the birds.
I say that to say this: When this time comes, the birds will know their path well. And they will come to the supper of the great God.
This is also a commanding angel.
verse 17
One final thing
4. The Annihilation by Christ
Just as surely as the birds are called and commanded, the enemies of God are drawn as well to Armageddon.
verse 19
They are drawn by their blind loyalty to the antichrist. They have been deceived.
They are drawn by their hatred of the Jews which has been historically universal.
They are drawn by demonic forces.
Revelation 16:13-14
Notice also,
They are not only drawn to Armageddon, but they are doomed at Armageddon.
They are doomed because Christ fights them with the sword of His mouth and they are immediately subdued.
The beast and the false prophet are thrown in the lake of fire alive.
Some people say when you die you go to the grave and that death is nothing but going to the grave and being there asleep for all of eternity. The Jehovah Witness’s call that hell. I asked one once if he was going to be buried when he died. When he said “Yes” I told him he was going to hell!
Notice, these two guys are alive and they are put into a lake of fire. And that ain't no grave! They are alive when they go in there and soon we’ll see them 1,000 years later and their still there and still alive.
God preserves people alive so that they may be judged eternally. Then we see Satan's forces are destroyed at Armageddon.
And it came to pass because of Christ's weapon, by Christ's wrath, and by Christ's warfare.
