Hopefully, our time in Revelation 11 last Sunday made things a little clearer to you. It’s a long chapter, but a great story of faithfulness and resurrection and victory. But to see it that way, we must interpret the book within itself and with the Scriptures. So let’s finish our interpretive keys started last week.

The fifth key is: Revelation is about the “tribulation times” and immediately afterwards, the last 3-3.5 years of the generation that Jesus mentions in Matthew 24, that runs from 30 to 70 AD (40 years).

Revelation picks up where Acts leaves off, and begins when the disciples see the “Abomination of Desolation” standing where he shouldn’t be (Matthew 24:15).

The sixth key is: The whole book is a worship service, a Lord’s Day, that gives you a front row seat on how worship is done in heaven. John tells you in 1:10 that he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day, worshipping Jesus,

This service starts on earth, chapters 1-3.

It then goes into heaven, chapters 4-22:6

Then it is back on earth in 22:7ff, where people can wash their robes and enter the city that is the church and eat of the tree of life for healing. That’s our worship service! It starts on earth, goes into heaven, and then ends up on earth!

The seventh key is: Angels, who are Old Covenant mediators, are all over the book of Revelation and replaced as rulers by the saints in chapter 20:4ff. This tells you the book is about the transition from the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. See Matthew 13 parables and Galatians 3:19.

Since you got a little dose of Revelation last Sunday, and more today, I’m sure you’ll all revved up to read the book again and again until you’re comfortable in it! To get there, let’s review seven key interpretive “must do’s” as you read the book.

The first key is: Believe the text when it says, in chapters 1 and 22, that these “things must soon take place” and that the “time is near” and that it is a “blessing to the one who receives the book and reads and heeds it” back then. Believe Jesus when he says, “I am coming soon.”

The second key is: John sees himself in “the Tribulation” when he receives the revelation. (see 1:9) It is the same “the Tribulation” that Jesus spoke of when talking about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in the land of Israel in Matthew 24. John was there and listening at Jesus’ feet!

The third key is: When you see the word “earth” in the book change it to “land” in your mind or when you read it aloud. (try it on 7:1-3)

The fourth key is: Understand that the terms “Sodom” and “Egypt” and particularly “Babylon the Great” or “the great city” refer to and apply to Jerusalem and the people of Israel symbolically, and not those places geographically. Why? Because the Israel and Jerusalem of John’s day resemble those places because of their false worship and their spiritual adultery. An enlightening example is in 11:7-8, where John measures the Temple where the two witnesses prophesy. But they are killed, and their bodies lie in the street of the “great city” called Sodom and Egypt. What city? Jerusalem, “where their Lord was crucified.” (to be continued)

With Iran and Israel in the news lately, there’s been a lot of hoorah on how the U.S. must support Israel, especially amongst us evangelicals. The claim is that Israel, and the Jews specifically, are God’s people, Abraham’s sons, and whoever blesses them will be blessed, etc. So you hear phrases such as “Support Israel” or “pray for the peace of Jerusalem” (not that anybody is against praying for peace).

So the questions are: Who are God’s people today? And is it the Jews of today?

Let’s start with the last question. Jesus Christ was the last true Jew; all genealogies in the New Testament stop with him. Additionally, “for all the promises of God find their Yes in him” (2 Cor 1); Jesus is the fulfillment of all of God’s promises in the Scriptures (see Luke 24 and Hebrews 1:1-4). Also, the Apostle Paul says that beginning in his day, “there is neither Jew nor Greek…for you all are one in Jesus Christ” (Gal. 3:28). How is that? Because the mystery of God was fulfilled in Christ, that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body (Eph. 3). Of what body? Of the Christian body, Jew and Gentile united as “one new man in the place of the two…”(Eph 2). So there is no future for the Jews in God’s word, with regards to them being his people, after the coming of Jesus.

So who are God’s people today? Well, Peter says the church is, using language that used to describe Israel in the Old Testament as now applying only to the church: “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession…once you were not God’s people, but now you are God’s people” (1 Peter 2:9-12). Paul does the same in 2 Cor. 6:14-7.1, applying old covenant promises of God to the church (7:1)!