Rev No.20 Jesus, The Lord

We're getting on the homeward strait of the studies that we've been having from this difficult and yet challenging book, so difficult that Martin Luther wouldn't even attempt to commentary on it. So challenging that I think it has spoken to many of our hearts through what it has to say in terms of encouragement and also in terms of correction, as we see aspects of the character of God that maybe we don't like to home in on, but nonetheless they remain very much part of who God is. So from the 19th chapter of Revelation, we drop down to the 11th verse and pick up the reading where we left off last week and dip also into the 20th chapter for a few verses.

Revelation 19, 11, I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing fire and on his head are many crowns.

He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean.

Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule them with an iron scepter. He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty.

On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And I saw an angel standing in the sun who cried in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair, come gather together for the great supper of God so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals and mighty men, of horses and their riders and the flesh of all people, free and slave, small and great. Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse and his army.

But the beast was captured and with him the false prophet who had performed the miraculous signs on his behalf. With these signs he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshipped his image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur.

The rest of them were killed with a sword that came out of the mouth of the rider on the horse. And all the birds gorged themselves on their flesh. Verse seven of the next chapter.

When the thousand years are over, Satan will be released from his prison and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle. In number they are like the sand of the seashore. They marched across the breadth of the earth and surrounded the camp of God's people, the city he loves.

But fire came down from heaven and devoured them, and the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night forever and ever. Well, last week was a very special occasion.

We looked into some of the most glorious verses in the whole of scripture. And if you were not enthusiastic, I certainly was almost ecstatic at the thought of the wedding supper of the Lamb, verse nine of Revelation nine. The invitation that's given to all of God's children, Jew and Gentile down all generations, to have fellowship with him eternally.

If you were not present last Sunday, let me suggest that you get hold of the tape in order to get the context of the passage that we're going to be looking at now. Those of you who are present will remember that I said that in one sense you can summarize the whole of the gospel in terms of the invitation for the likes of you and me, issued by God Almighty, to sit down and have fellowship with him throughout eternity. We will know that.

And when the Bible describes heaven, it describes it in terms of a celebration, in terms of a party, in terms of a great festive occasion. And the most important thing that you listen to and make response to right now, if you do not give attention to anything else is, when the eternal day dawns, will you be ready? Will you have responded to that blessed clarion call that comes from the lips of the Savior himself to have repented of your sins and to have assured yourself a place in God's never-ending tomorrow? The man, the woman who is wise attends to such things. There are far greater consequences than anything else—your health, your job, your marriage, anything else.

The supreme thing—I adjure you from Scripture, in the name of God, to listen to this. The supreme thing is for you to have ensured that your peace has been made with God through the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. And then, if that is the case, this ninth verse of Revelation will become as glorious to you as it is to me.

Blessed are those who are invited to the wedding supper of the Lamb. Now there's a sense in which, when we got to the tenth verse, we wished that some angel could have perhaps, in one sense, mimicking the film industry, have cried, Cut, and that would have been it. And we could have gone away with this glorious conception of the marvels of heaven and the new heavens and the new earth and God's blessed tomorrow.

But no angel says, Cut, and the man who is worth his integrity as a preacher will go on into the next part of the chapter. He'll do so with temerity, both in his own inability—at the forefront of his mind is inability to expound the things of God accurately, and the realization of the weight of the somberness of this particular passage. Here we're going to look, if you like, at the underbelly of heaven.

We're going to have a look at the darker, the gloomier side of that which is yet to be. Martin Lloyd-Jones, in a very brilliant address he gave years ago, at almost the beginning of his ministry in London, he preached it during the war. It's not readily accessible, I just happen to have a copy.

Preaching actually from the book of Revelation, though not this passage, says that God controls history and he does so in two ways. There is the history that God permits, and there is the history that God decrees. You see, God has allowed the human race to evolve to the point that it has.

And within the story of humanity, there is the history of unrighteousness and wickedness. God has permitted this. But God has also decreed certain things in history that he has brought about.

That's the reason why biblical history, you see, is not the history of the classical historian. It will home in on specific passages, specific points of history, and then it will let centuries go by with no comment at all, and then once again the spotlight will fall. God will decree that a man comes from Ur of the Chaldees and is given a land, a promised land, and so you get the large portion of the book of Genesis given over to this.

God decrees that he will enter into a covenant with a man called Moses on behalf of the Israelites, and you get volumes in the Old Testament that are given up to this. God decrees that the son of his love, the Lord Jesus, shall come into the world, and though there have been hundreds of years that have passed since the closing of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, then at the beginning of the New, a great deal of scripture, a great many pages are given to the work of the Lord Jesus. And God has decreed that at the end of time, he in the person of his son will step into history once more, and he will bring it to its consummation, as to the responsibility of man or as to his ultimate destiny.

And that's the reason why you need to read the book of Revelation, because this will tell you about why man, man made in the image of God, destined to live for his glory, but declaring UDI, and as a result, finding himself in great difficulty. He will tell you, will John, in his book of Revelation, of with a man, the ultimate destiny of man, he will tell you that God has decreed to bring the saga of man to its final consummation. Well, let's look at this passage.

There are three aspects to it. They each run into the other, so there's no way homiletically that I can help you with some three rhyming words. You'll discover that John tells us about seeing in the 11th verse words which are a reflection of what he says earlier, though now he has an even greater understanding, I saw heaven standing open.

And he'll tell you of the portrait that he espies of the Lord Jesus. And then he will tell you of the last battle that there will be in the world, from the 17th verse to the end of the chapter. And then he will tell you of the elimination of evil from the world, the 7th verse through to the 10th verse of the next chapter.

First of all, the portrait of our Lord Jesus. The Duke of Edinburgh, God bless him, got to his 70th year during the last few days. He didn't want a picture.

The tabloids say that he didn't want the picture painted because the tabloids can be cruel, because the Duke is beginning to show signs of his age. I think he's incredible, actually, for 70. But there is a sense in which when the years go by, we're not quite what we think we might look like.

I mean, I still feel that I'm around the same age as when I came here 20-odd years ago. I don't feel any difference. It's just when I look in a mirror that I begin to realize that I have not been able to defeat what so many others have failed to do, the passing of the years.

The first prayer that I ever learned when I was a kid went something like this, Gentle Jesus, meek and mild, look upon a little child, pity my simplicity, help me, Lord, to come to thee. And along with that prayer, I have three pictures in my mind, etched upon my mind indelibly of the way I considered the Lord Jesus. One was of a very European-looking savior with a handful of boys and girls who by their national costume indicated that they came from around the world.

And I have the picture of Jesus as a friend of little children. Another one was of a venerable gentleman knocking against a door and he had a lamp in his hand and I got the impression that Jesus wanted to come into my heart. And then I remember the picture of a shepherd with a sheep around the nape of his neck and the dandling feet of the sheep were safely within the grasp of the shepherd, who in his other hand had got his staff and he was setting off towards the flock.

And there is a sense in which each of those three portraits of our Lord are valid from Scripture. He is the friend of little children. Our Lord Jesus does want to enter into the hearts of men and women and become their savior and Lord.

Our Savior is the one who looks for, who seeks after the erring sheep and wants to bring him into the safety of pasture land and away from the rocky precipice. But that's not the total picture. In one sense I wish it was, but it is not.

The media in its wisdom decided last year to do a series on the book of Revelation. Perhaps you never saw it. You didn't miss much if you didn't see it.

And they couldn't brook the portraiture of the Lord Jesus as is here represented. And so somebody did a little research and they remembered that John was once called, along with his brother, the sons of thunder. So they thought that John got a little senile in his dotage.

And he went back to the more vicious streak that was there before his conversion. The media didn't put it like this, but this is really what it all boiled down to in summary fashion. He's no longer the apostle of love, he's the apostle of vindictiveness.

You see, the point was that the media could not cope with the portrait of the Lord Jesus that you do find in Revelation 19 and also in Revelation 1, which was so wonderfully described for us by Tim in one of the early addresses from this book. But you know, before we criticize the media and the liberal theologian, we have to ask ourselves, what picture of the Lord Jesus do we have? Is it an emasculated picture? Is it a scissors and paste picture? The Jesus the good shepherd, yes, that will buy. Jesus the friend of little children, yes, that we will go after.

Jesus the good shepherd who looks after the sheep and will even give his life for the sheep. Oh yes, that really does impress us. But what about Jesus the judge? How did you relate to Psalm chapter 2? You kiss the son lest he be angry with you.

How do you relate to the fact that as you get towards the end of that psalm, it speaks to you of the wrath of the Son of God? Let me actually read the words to you. Kiss the son lest he be angry and you be destroyed in your way, for his wrath can flare up in a moment. How do you cope with the language of our Lord Jesus? When in Matthew's Gospel and towards its conclusion, we have there a depiction of the end of the age and there are people who are addressing the Lord and they're saying, Lord, didn't we do this for you? Didn't we do the other for you? And our Savior says, no, depart from me, I never knew you.

And he tells them to depart into everlasting darkness and into torment. You see, the Apostle John in representing or representing to us the vision that he has of this, of this being on this, on this, on this white horse is not just dependent on, though that would have been sufficient in itself. He's not just dependent on the vision.

He has evidences in the Old Testament and in the sterner language, not so popular of our Lord Jesus in his public ministry, that our Savior is the judge. Our Savior is the one who comes to represent the law of God, who has a scepter that is inflexible. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who was killed by the Nazis, once said, just before his death, actually, I believe, the problem with most Christians is that they only read scripture for themselves, never against themselves.

Well, here we get this picture of our Lord Jesus at the end time, and there he is on a white horse. I remember when I was a kid, I used to listen to, Monday by Monday, God bless my mother for her patience, The Lone Ranger. Okay, so some of you also listen to it.

And I can see by your faces and listen to your response, The Lone Ranger and he had a horse, Silver. And always at the beginning of a cowboy film, you would see The Lone Ranger on Silver. One American preacher I know believes that the film writer actually got his inspiration from this picture of the Savior on a white horse.

Of course, it's symbolism. You ask yourself, who is it? It is the same person, as was years before, taken with his mother, who was astride a donkey into Egypt. It's the same person who was born as a babe incognito, unknown in Bethlehem.

But now, he's known. Now we are at the end time. And now we have language that speaks of the Lord Jesus in his second advent coming to this world.

And we are told that he's called faithful and true. And that was the Savior. I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Faithful and true in all that he did, in all that he said. Faithful in terms of the judgment that he suggested would come upon people who did not acknowledge him. You see, in one sense, at the end of the world, the credibility of our Lord Jesus will be in the balance.

Not that there's any doubt as to where it will go, but he will have to act according to his justice, as well as according to his love. This is where, why one weeps for the vast majority of people who are clergy within the Methodist church, which has linked itself with a universalism, in terms of, well, everyone ultimately will become a Christian. I don't say that's critically of the Methodists, I say it with great sorrow.

It wasn't John Wesley's position, but it's the position of the Methodist conference. And it does sound very nice, but unfortunately it does not run in accord with the word of God. Faithful and true.

Faithful, yes, in as much as what he said he will bring about. With justice he judges and makes war. Listen to the Apostle Paul, as he stands before a pagan congregation, and he makes reference to one of the decrees of God.

You remember what I said, that God permits and God decrees? Well, here is the Apostle Paul in the 17th chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. We read of this, and addressing this unbelieving audience, he says, Therefore, since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone, an image made by man's design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now He commands all people everywhere to repent.

And this is where it becomes really important, Acts 17, 31. For He has set a day when He will judge the world with justice by the man He has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.

Our Lord Jesus comes with the flaming eyes of one who can see every secret. Verse 12, His eyes are like blazing fire. I meant to read to you a quotation.

I've read it before, so perhaps some of you with memory will recall it. I've failed to bring the book into the pulpit. Of a man in the war who wrote poems for the soldiers, the First World War, and he depicts the British Tommy coming into the presence of God.

The man thinks he's going to die, and he has this sort of vision, and he stands in front of the Lord Jesus, and he says, I'd rather rush into a dying hell than look into His eyes and hear His voice say, Well, you cannot be comfortable in the presence of Jesus, the risen Son of God, in the tomorrow that is yet to come, if your sins have not been forgiven. Because His flaming eyes uncover all the hidden secrets, all the hidden sins, I mean, that have not yet been absolved, forgiven through His shed blood. Our Lord Jesus comes to execute judgment.

He has a name written on Him that no one knows. There's more about this Lord Jesus than has even been revealed in Scripture, His relationship with His Father, the destiny of our Lord in the eternal purposes of God. We know so much, says Martin Luther, but there's the hiddenness of God that we don't know.

He's given us sufficient for our understanding of salvation, but there is far, far more to learn of God, and we have eternity in front of us to make those lessons plain and to comprehend them. He's dressed in a robe, dipped in blood, and His name is the Word of God. If you went to Isaiah in the 61st chapter, the 63rd chapter, references made to this Scripture in terms of Isaiah's prophecy.

He speaks of one who comes from Edom. Who is this coming from Edom, from Bozrah, with his garments stained crimson? Who is this robed in splendor, striding forward in the greatness of his strength? It is I speaking in righteousness, mighty to save. Why are your garments red like those of one treading the winepress? I have trodden the winepress alone from the nations, no one was with me.

I trampled them in my anger and trod them down in my wrath. Their blood spattered my garments and I stained all my clothing. For the day of vengeance was in my heart and the year of my redemption was come.

You see the point? Here is the depiction of our Lord Jesus, the end of time. Here is the bloody conflict, the last rebellion against the forces of God. And our Lord comes to quell the rebellion.

And in all the bloodshed, He makes reference to His own garments being splattered with blood. And there is a sense in which either the blood that Jesus shed on the cross of Calvary is applied to you for your eternal salvation, or the blood that you spill at the judgment of God will be the blood that will carry you into the eternal separation from Him. On His robe and on His thigh He has His name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

This man who is astride the white horse, this Lord Jesus is someone to be admired and feared, worshipped and adored. He can be your Savior. And if He is not your Savior, He will be your judge.

In the portraiture that you have in your mind of Him, I beg you not to have a fragmentary one. Not to be deluded by an emasculated one. Our Lord Jesus represents the holiness and the righteousness of the Father.

He comes as your Savior. Or He comes as the one to whom ultimately you will render your account for having lived against the law that He reckons precious and eternal. So we move from that picture of our Lord Jesus Christ to the picture of the last battle.

But before that, let me just pick out the fact that in the 15th verse it says of our Lord Jesus that He comes with a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. And you know that the sword in Scripture in the New Testament often represents the word of God. And there is a sense in which the word of grace, which men reject, become the word of judgment by which they are condemned.

And so we move on to the depiction of the last battle in the 17th verse. Here is one who witnesses the end of time when the great judgment shall come upon the world. The language is not novel to John.

You find it actually also in the book of Ezekiel. If you go to the 39th chapter of Ezekiel, there you will find reference made to Gog and Magog, these anti-God forces in the Old Testament times who came against the ethnic Jew. And now you read of a terrible calamity.

Verse 17 of Ezekiel 39. Son of man, this is what the Sovereign Lord says. Call out to every kind of bird and all the wild animals.

Assemble and come together from all around to the sacrifice I am preparing for you, the great sacrifice on the mountains of Israel. There you will eat flesh and drink blood. You will eat the flesh of mighty men and drink the blood of the princes of the earth as if they were rams and lambs, goats and bulls and so forth.

You see, the language is almost the same, isn't it? As you find in the 18th verse of Revelations 19. All right, so it's symbolic. And yet when you've done with your symbolism, when you have come to terms, however, with what these scriptures are saying, you appreciate this, that there is a most distasteful, horrific experience in view for all those who have not trusted this man who rides a straddle across the white horse, who have not trusted him as Lord and Saviour.

And it's given in this language of doom and destruction. And you say, well, can this be anything that accords with the language spoken from our gracious Lord Jesus? And the answer is yes. But the problem is we don't read the Gospels sufficiently or with accuracy.

Our Lord Jesus in the 17th chapter of Luke's Gospel is warning people about the ultimate judgment that's coming into the world. He says in the 32nd verse of Luke 17, remember Lot's wife. And then he goes on to speak about the surprise that it will be when he comes to judge the world.

I tell you, verse 34, on the night two people will be in one bed, one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding grain together. One will be taken and the other left.

Where, Lord, they asked. He replied, where there is a dead body, where the vultures will gather. You say you didn't follow that? Then he makes it even more plain.

Go to what he has to say in the Gospel of Matthew, will you, and then the 24th chapter. And let's see him in the 28th verse. See what he's saying.

Listen to what he has to say. He's talking again about the southernness of the coming, the southernness of the end, verse 27 of Matthew 24. For as lightning that comes from the east is visible, even in the west, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.

Wherever there is a carcass, there the vultures will be gathered. And so forth. You see the point? This is our Lord Jesus.

And he's speaking about the end time. He's speaking about that last great assault that there is made on the purposes of God for this world by those who head up evil forces. And so we are reintroduced, verse 20, to the beast and also the false prophet who performed the miraculous signs on behalf of the beast.

And you'll remember from what we had to share from Revelation chapter 13 that there has been a confederacy down all the years and especially since the ministry of our Lord Jesus, there has been an anti-Christian political setup. And there has been an anti-Christian religion which has grown parallel. The beast and the false prophet.

And our Lord is depicting that at the end of time these twin systems working one with the other will endeavor to silence the people of God, the representatives of God. The Bible does not tell us that at the end time there will be great rejoicing throughout the world. It tells us at the end time Satan will have his final fling and endeavor to stop the purposes of God's decree from coming to pass.

And so our Lord reveals to John in this second part of the vision in Revelation 19 not just the picture of who he is but he gives us some impression of the final battle. And he tells us that the confederacy that has been against him and his purposes will be cast into the lake of burning sulfur. And verse 21, the rest of them, those who have not believed on our Lord Jesus Christ, were killed with the sword that came out of the mouth of the rider on the horse.

Our Lord Jesus told us that when he speaks, he speaks with a two-edged sword. It can minister salvation or it can minister damnation. It depends upon your response.

Listen to him in the Gospel of John and the 12th chapter and the 47th verse. As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him for I did not come to judge the world but to save it. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words.

That very word which I spoke will condemn him on the last day. Jesus in his first advent did not come to judge the world. He comes to save the world.

But the very word of salvation which is distributed, which is publicized, are you listening? If that word is not accepted, it becomes the word of judgment and damnation. And that is what our Lord Jesus Christ is saying here as you read through this last passage in Revelation 19. And now we're taken to the final picture with a description of the total elimination of evil from this world.

Look at the 7th verse, will you, of the 20th chapter. And remember this, that when you read the book of Revelation, you're not going chronologically through the events of the future. Rather, you will find that from time to time, John will take you to the beginning and then he will take you to the end, to the beginning, and to the end, and so forth.

He does not always deal chronologically with events. And at the beginning of the 20th chapter, he takes you once more to the commencement of the gospel era. And then in the 7th verse, he takes you to the end time when the devil is released from prison and is allowed to go out once again to deceive the nations from the four corners of the earth.

And there is awaiting the devil the same destruction that came to the beast and to the prophet, the false prophet. You say, when was the devil ever bound prior to the end of the world? Well, there is a sense when our Lord Jesus Christ came that he bound the devil. You remember on one occasion, he says, I saw Lucifer fall as a star from heaven to earth.

You remember the Apostle John's, the Apostle Paul says of our Lord Jesus that he destroyed principalities and powers on the cross. And you recall how the Gentile nations, a people that were in great darkness, were reached with the glorious gospel of the Lord Jesus so that in the first century towards its end, it was said of the Christian ambassadors, these are the men who have turned the world upside down. Prior to that, there'd be no witness amongst the Gentiles.

They were the nation in darkness. But our Lord trimmed the sails of the evil one to some degree, and he has done to some extent throughout the whole of this era. Gospel proclamation does go, by and large, freely around the world.

But here is our Saviour saying that at the end of time, in that very short period before his second coming, Satan will be released from his prison, and he will go out to deceive. And the deception will be international. The nations in the four corners of the earth.

And once more, reference is made to Gog and Magog, those anti-Jewish forces which created such consternation historically for the Jewish people. It will be a rerun of this, but it will have international implications. People will be gathered to battle in great numbers.

They will march against the breadth of the earth and surround the camp of God, the city he loves, Jerusalem that is spiritual as well as Jerusalem that is physical. But fire came down from heaven and devoured them, and the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night forever and ever.

You see the point? This Lord Jesus who felled the soldiers when they tried to arrest him in the garden of Gethsemane, when he said that he was indeed the I Am, those soldiers fell back in amazement. We are told in the book of Thessalonians when Paul writes of the second coming that our Lord Jesus will come in great splendor, in great glory. There will be the irradiation that will be felt throughout the whole of the world of his mighty presence.

To put it in the language of moderns, he has the ability to zap all men who hold the truth of God in unrighteousness. This will be the final battle. It will not be a long battle.

It will not be a prolonged battle. It will not be fought with the weapons of modern military warfare. It will be fought by the holiness of the Lord Jesus.

Did you not notice that when reference is made to those who come with him, verse 14 of the 19th chapter, it is said the armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Whenever did you see an army dressed like that? It doesn't make sense, not physically, but it makes sense spiritually because there are far greater forces in the universe than the forces of nuclear bombs, than all the aggregate armaments of men and women. When this Lord Jesus Christ comes in the power that is his, in the holiness that is his, he will release into this world the power of destruction and also the power that will cause the world to be remade and reformed.

And from this universe shall be eliminated every vestige of sin and evil, rottenness, obscenity, injustice. It will all go. It has to go.

Why? Well, you see, God made the world in the first instance good. He made it for his honor. He made it for his glory.

That's how he made man in his image. Man is a unique person. Is the devil going to have the last laugh over God? Not a bit.

He will have the nations in derision. He will have the last laugh. Kiss the son, therefore, lest he be angry with thee.

For this Lord Jesus shall return to this world in order that the paradise that was lost shall be reformed. A great man in early church history said that what it took God to create, it takes God to recreate. And that's the reason, don't you see? It's the reason for the first coming and the second coming.

As in Adam, all die. That was the hopeless condition to which our Lord Jesus Christ came into this world. It was a world with no future.

It was a world sodden with every aspect of sin. But he releases the power of the gospel, and the power affects the Jews, and it affects the whole of the world. And then ultimately, having given opportunity for men and women to respond to this gospel, this Lord Jesus comes again.

He is not smuggled off into Egypt as a refugee, sat astride his mother, sat astride a donkey. He comes with all the splendor of his being, like a mighty man saddled upon a great white horse. And he rids the world of all that fouls it and causes God to be scorned in the bowels of hell.

And he does away with the beast, and the prophet, and even Satan himself. This is according to the decree of God. There is that which he permits.

There is that which he decrees. And as sure as night shall follow day, and day shall follow night, as certain as the world itself are the promises of God. The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof.

And Jesus shall reign where'er the sun doth its successive journeys run. The nations will bow before him. All the politicians will acknowledge who he is.

The kingdoms of this world shall become the kingdoms of his Christ. And he shall reign forever and ever. There's a banquet in store.

The invitation is given. But there is the underbelly, there is the unpleasant aspect of all this. The gospel is not some emotional story to tell to the kids.

The gospel affects your destiny, are you hearing me? Throughout the whole of eternity. I go back to where I started. Are you ready for heaven? Have your sins been forgiven? Have you been washed in the blood, spilt by the rider of the white horse when he first came on this earth and dwelt and lived as a man? Lord, we come before your throne.

The truths we look at are somber. If through the inexactness of preaching anything was wrongly conveyed, then expunge that from our attention, from our memory. But if the substance of what was proclaimed is the essence of your truth, then may it never be lifted from our minds and help us to respond to our Lord Jesus as Savior, friend of sinners, the one who knocks at the door, the one who bleeds on the cross.

Help us to prepare for his soon return. In his name. Amen.