GYC SE 2012: Ultimate Purpose

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GYC Southeast

GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Prophecy

Alistair Huong

144,000: Servants of the Living God

Gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you for your Word and for the truth that can set us free.

This afternoon, as we spend some time studying prophecy together, may it not simply be an intellectual exercise, but may we see how it fits in our lives?

May we see the Redeemer Jesus through the prophecies, through the revelation of Jesus Christ, and most importantly of all may it impact our lives that we might become shaped into his image.

May your spirit be our teacher and our guide this afternoon, we ask in Jesus' name.

Disclaimers, if you will, before we get into the study today.

We have 3 sessions, 3 hours each or a little less or a little more depending on how the spirit leads.

But I'm going to be assuming that We're familiar with the basics, the basics of prophecy.

The Bible talks about the milk of the word.

When you first come to Jesus, and you need to gradually build up your repertoire of knowledge, just like you don't jump into calculus right away.

You've got to learn your arithmetic and algebra and pre-calculus, geometry and all the rest.

I'm taking an assumption here that most of us are familiar with the basics of the prophecy seminar materials.

You know, the Revelation 13, the Beast, the Mark of the Beast, the Seal of God, the Sabbath, the end time scenario, last day events, Matthew 24 and the prophecies and those kind of things.

So, I'm assuming that we have that foundation.

And because, And as a result of that, I'm going to be doing a couple things.

First, I'm going to be skimming the surface on a lot of the topics.

I like to go deep, but unfortunately, once you study the Bible, the first thing you realize is, you can never exhaust it.

You keep digging, and there's more and more and more.

And if you just spend time studying 1 verse or 1 concept, we can drill 3 hours and not exhaust the text.

And so to give you the broad sweep, to give you sort of the theme of the concepts of the 104 for 1, 000, I'm going to be sort of skipping along.

And you just got to understand that as we skip along, I'm not saying that this is all there is to it.

You know, I am not exhausting the subject in any way, but I'm assuming that since you have some of the basics, you know many of the basic Bible principles and stories and prophecies, that you're able to fill in the blanks in your own personal study, in your own review, and etc.

So is that a fair assumption of you guys?

You know, we don't want to, you know, clamp down on the spirit in any way, but I just have to get that out front so people don't feel like, hey, how come you're just racing past that while I'm letting you fill in the blanks.

The next thing is I'm actually gonna be using quite a bit of spirit of prophecy quotations, the writings of Ellen White, and I make no apologies for utilizing her writings as an inspired source of instruction.

White, I believe, was given the gift of prophecy, and she wasn't given, per se, to all the heathen, but she's a gift given to the Seventh-day Adventist movement and so we should utilize her.

And I'm also going to utilize her writings in a way that unfortunately hastens our study along.

There are a lot of things that we can dive in and prove from the Bible, and I think we need to be able to do that.

But for the sake of time, I'm just going to pull from her commentary of the scripture to elucidate and just Make the point and move on.

So in no way does Ellen White replace the Bible.

We're just utilizing her as the commentary to just help us get through some of these concepts.

And so related to that also is this idea of the progression of truth.

These 3 parts are going to be linked together.

They're 3 distinct topics, as you'll see from the Bible, about the 104th of a thousand.

So I'm not trying to guilt you into staying here all 3 hours, because if you decide at a break you want to go check someone else out, you're still going to be my friend, and I'll still appreciate you guys.

But I'm just telling you, you're going to miss out on some of the connecting linkages.

So you might leave and like, oh, you know, I didn't fully understand that.

Well, we're going to be building and I'll try to make mention of some of those things like, hey, we're going to come back to this.

And we've, we're, we're going to be going through this study, sort of hopefully in a blended manner, where there's going to be some, there's some level of academic study, okay?

I want there to be some solid Bible study, but at the same time I want this to be a spiritual study, a spiritually enriching time of understanding the scriptures.

Prophecy is not just facts about history.

It's not just knowing that this event happens, and then that event, and then this happens after that.

And it's not just intellectual exercises.

Prophecy is given to us with a spiritual purpose.

There is a Christ in the middle of the prophecies, the apocalyptic prophecies.

And so as we study the hundred and 4000 together 1 of my goals is to be able to reveal Christ reveal Christ in the prophecy and also as someone that we can associate with through our own personal Christian experience.

So The first hour we're going to be talking about the 144, 000, the servants of the living God.

Second hour we're going to be talking about the seal of God.

The 144, 000 are the ones who receive the seal of God in their foreheads.

And then the last hour we're going to talk about the first fruits, this concept of the first fruits.

And all we're doing, we're just taking 3 qualities, attributes of the 144, 000, and we're just going to study those 3.

So we're not studying all of the 144, 000, just 3 concepts.

Let me give you some context about the Book of Revelation.

The Book of Revelation is divided, essentially can be divided in 2.

There are 22 chapters in the Book of Revelation.

And it's not exactly divided in half but if you take the first 14 chapters, Revelation 1 through 14 or 13 actually, you can make that as the first half and then from 15 to the end, 22, that's like a second half.

And if you look before Revelation 14, you see a very interesting picture of the church.

We see the 7 churches, the 7 seals, 7 trumpets, a great controversy I hope you guys there can see, the great controversy summary from Revelation 12 through 14.

And what we see here is a picture of a struggling church.

If we're going to take the perspective of looking at God's people in this period of church history or the book of Revelation, prophecy, we see that the church is in a state of unrest, of indecisiveness.

The church is struggling because the 7 churches, you remember the church starts off as you know the wonderful apostolic church and then it goes down into apostasy and compromise and then finally the church ends with Laodicea.

And Laodicea is not a good picture of the church.

You think you have everything but you don't know that you lack what's most important.

So the 7 churches show a church sort of up and down like this and then you take a look at the 7 seals and the first 4 seals happen to be the 4 horsemen of prophecy.

The white horse, the red horse, the black horse, the pale horse, and just those 4 seals we see the church, he's on the white horse, he's going forth conquering and to conquer, and then the red horse, they're persecuted as blood, bloodshed, and then black is compromise and pale is death.

7 trumpets, we don't talk about that as much, but similar story, great controversy, summary, war in heaven, we talked about that this morning with Pastor Doug.

Revelation 13, we see the beast, the image of the beast, the mark of the beast, 666.

We see all these things in Revelation chapter 13, and it concludes with the statement, who is like unto the beast, and who is able to make war with him?

But let's skip Revelation 14, and let's go to Revelation 15, the second half of the book of Revelation.

From 15 onward, I'll just make this statement, the church is victorious.

Okay, Revelation 15 and 16, the 7 last plagues, and guess what?

God's people are not affected by the 7 last plagues.

And then the judgment on Babylon, that harlot drunken with the blood of the martyrs who made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, all this stuff.

144,000: The Sealed of God

Father in heaven, we are thankful for your Word once again, and may we strive to be a part of this special number, the 144, 000, and may you encourage us as we study your Word with how you are at hand to inspire and to bless.

Alright, so this hour specifically we're talking about the seal of God, but let's do a little bit of review.

Revelation chapter 7, we'll begin reading in verse 1.

Revelation chapter 7 beginning in verse 1, And after these things I saw 4 angels standing on the 4 corners of the earth, holding the 4 winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree.

And I saw another angel ascending from the east, having the seal of the living God, and he cried with a loud voice to the 4 angels to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, saying, Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads.

And last hour we talked about this description, the servants of our God, servants of God, And we looked in Matthew 24, Matthew 25, Daniel chapter 3, Daniel chapter 6, and also Philippians chapter 2, at all these various examples of servants of God.

He gave His life fully to give glory to His Master.

He lived and died in obedience to His will.

There was Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the den of lions and the fiery furnace, servants of God.

They went through the final crisis or a similar experience as the final crisis will be, went through the time of trouble, there was the wise and faithful servant, there was the servants and the talents, and the development of talents, the development of the character, This idea of perfection of character.

We also discussed a little bit about the complete and entire commitment to God, to giving God our all.

Okay, so this hour we're gonna move on to talk about the seal of God, but we just read in the first 4 verses of Revelation chapter 7 that there are 4 winds.

Well these 4 winds are the 4 winds of strife.

I don't have time to develop this, but Testimonies to Minister, page 444, John sees the elements of nature.

Earthquake, tempest, and political strife represented as being held by 4 angels.

These winds are under control until God gives the word to let them go." So the 4 winds are being held back.

Destruction and persecution and political issues being held back.

They are held back until something important happens and that's called the sealing.

The sealing process must be complete before the 4 winds are let go.

And this symbolizes, this means that this is something important.

The sealing process is very important if it means that the rest of the last day events aren't gonna occur until that process is done.

Once the 4 winds are let go, they don't get lassoed back.

So let's talk a little bit about the purpose of a seal.

As we talk about, get into this a little bit more.

These are just some of the ones I've come up with.

There might be more, and some of these are, they overlap.

But a seal is used as a proof of identity or ownership.

So if a king or a world leader has a seal on something, it signifies that this letter came from his desk.

Authenticity meaning this is genuine, it's not some Chinese knockoff, right?

It's a mark of approval or mark of guarantee.

So if you have a seal on something, maybe it's a seal of warranty.

I guarantee this product is free from workman defects for 90 days or lifetime warranty.

And also sealing, taking a slight different approach, is a sign of completion.

So if a letter was written and the envelope was closed, and back in the day, before there were self-licking or self-adhesive envelopes, they dripped the wax on there and they put the imprint of the king or whoever, the lord, his seal.

So it's to close, to bind, to prevent tampering.

You know, you go to the store and you have those little jars, right?

If the little pop, the thing on the top is sticking up and you can press it down, it says, don't, it's been tampered with, or the plastic seal around the canister.

It's sealed to prevent tampering because a process of pasteurization or something like that has been completed and it's done.

It's finished and we've got to bind this thing up and put a seal on it so that nobody messes with it Okay, and also you remember when Christ was laid in the tomb.

It was the seal right is so that people don't tamper Don't mess with this So I'm gonna I mentioned earlier that I'm assuming that we are familiar with the basics, the Bible prophecy basics of prophecy.

And so when we go to a prophecy seminar and we talk about the seal of God, what do we say that it is?

A seal, you know, we say that a seal contains the name, right?

It must contain the name, the title, and the jurisdiction or the territory of the governing authority.

And the Sabbath commandment is the only 1 that contains all those things.

And we can go through Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 and so forth to look at it, but great controversy.

I'm just moving forward here to save time.

Ellen White writes on page 552 of Great Controversy, The seal of God's law is found where?

This only of all the 10 brings to view both the name and the title of the lawgiver.

It declares him to be the creator of the heavens and the earth and thus shows his claim to reverence and worship above all others.

Aside from this precept, there is nothing in the Decalogue to show by whose authority the law is given.

The fourth commandment is the only 1 of all the 10 in which are found both the name and the title of the law giver.

It is the only 1 that shows by whose authority the law is given.

Thus it contains the seal of God, affixed to His law as evidence of its authenticity and binding force." So the fourth commandment, if you remove it from the 10 Commandments, it could be anyone's commandments.

The devil could say, thou shall have no other gods before me.

And if there's no fourth commandment, you won't know who's speaking, right?

I could say, You are not allowed to make a graven image unto me and bow unto them.

But the point is, the law does not have an identifiable mark of the owner without the fourth commandment.

We usually say that Sabbath keepers are the ones who have the seal.

The seal of the living God is placed upon those who conscientiously keep the Sabbath of the Lord.

The next 1, those who would have the seal of God in their foreheads must keep the Sabbath of the fourth commandment.

Okay, so we're, it's, it's, things are fitting together, right?

144,000: First Fruits Unto God

Gracious Heavenly Father, we thank you for the time we've been able to spend in study of your Word so far.

I pray that you will continue to enlighten our minds as we conclude our time together, as we conclude this portion of our study of the 144, 000.

We recognize that there's yet so much more that we have not even begun to Develop and to understand and so may you guide our personal study that we will be faithful to identifying more precious and present truths to apply to our lives.

Bless us now as we continue the study of your word and may your Holy Spirit continue to lead and teach us, we pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

We're talking about the first fruits, but let's begin in Revelation 14.

Revelation chapter 14, we haven't dealt with it really at all yet, and that's where we want to conclude our study today.

Looks like my notes got a little mixed up here.

Okay, so Revelation chapter 14, we'll just read the first few verses together.

Revelation 14, beginning in verse 1, And I looked, and lo, a lamb stood on the mount Zion, and with him a hundred and forty-four thousand, having his father's name written in their foreheads.

And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder.

And I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps, and they sung as it were a new song before the throne and before the 4 beasts and the elders.

And no man could learn that song but a hundred and forty-four thousand which were redeemed from the earth.

These are they which were not defiled with women, for they are virgins.

These are they which follow the Lamb wither so ever he goeth.

These were redeemed from among men, being the firstfruits unto God and to the Lamb.

And in their mouth was found no guile, For they are without fault before the throne of God.

I just want to take a look at a few of the characteristics of the 144, 000 in these verses, and then we'll move on specifically on talking about the first fruits.

But I feel it's important just to give you a brief overview.

First of all, they're standing on the Mount Zion with the Lamb and they have the Father's name written in their foreheads.

We just talked about the seal in the forehead and the forehead representing the mind or the heart, the seat of the intelligence, the father's name.

Bang, stealing my thunder, is the character, right?

To the Jewish mind in particular, name connotes character.

You know, God will provide Jesus for he will save them from their sins.

Somehow, like even Jacob, he had a pretty bad name.

What parents in their right mind would name their children the supplanter?

He was grabbing his brother's heel and he ended up to match his name.

But of course he wrestled with God and he became Israel, right?

And so, the father's name, they have the father's character, all right?

But more than that, when you own a product, if you have, say, a flashlight or a toy if you're a child, what do you write on it?

God writes his name on those who are his.

To me, that's a simple thought, but it's a terribly powerful thought.

God writes his name on me because I am his and he is mine.

Continuing, they sing a new song that no 1 else can sing and we read in Revelation 15 it's the song of Moses and of the Lamb.

It's a song of deliverance, we're told, elsewhere.

It's a song that no 1 can sing because it's a song, or they have an experience that no 1 else has had.

And of course, that's worthy of much more study.

And women in the Book of Revelation symbolize churches.

We have the white woman, the woman clothed in white in Revelation 12, the pure church, the remnant church.

And then we have the woman clothed in scarlet, Babylon, the harlot.

And so 144, 000, they're not defiled with the fallen churches The apostate religions of the world if you will and they're also called virgins So that goes hand in hand, you know virgins are not defiled sexually, but you remember we talked about the parable of the talents and then we talked about the parable of the wise and and faithful servant along the wicked servant.

Do you know that sandwiched right between those 2 in the first part of Matthew 25 is the parable of the 10 virgins.

And the 10 virgins actually have everything to do with the present truth.

The judgment, the wedding, Being ready to go in, being shut out.

All those things the virgins, particularly if you read that in light of the Millerite movement, in light of the 1844, the end of the 2300 days, the virgins, the parable, really has direct application.

They enter into the wedding, enter into the wedding of the lamb.

Jesus is described as the Lamb several times in these 5 verses.

And of course the simple surface reading we say, well these people are followers of Jesus.

They're Christians and and they they do what he says and they follow his example, right?

Jesus has many names in the Bible, doesn't he?

Many titles that are ascribed to him, describing various facets of his ministry.

In 1 place, he is the light of the world, he is the bread of life, he is the resurrection and the life, He is the Alpha and the Omega.

He's all of these things, and they're just shining a light on different facets of Christ's ministry.

And the title of the Lamb of God also is a description of 1 facet of Christ's work.

So the lamb is slain on the altar, but is that the end of the role of the lamb?

I mean the lamb is dead, but the life is in the what?

So the blood is caught in the bowl and the priest takes the blood into the sanctuary and is sprinkled right on the veil and once a year there's the cleansing of the sanctuary and there's more blood.

Specifically it's a goat this time but you understand the point And the cleansing of the sanctuary takes place on the Day of Atonement.

And then we understand that to be the antitypical Day of Atonement, investigated judgment, 2300 days, the hour of judgment has come, all those things, we should be familiar with that.

So, what does it mean that the 144, 000 follow the Lamb whither so ever he goes?

They follow the Lamb into the Holy Place.

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GYC SE 2012 Seminar: Prophecy

144,000: The Sealed of God

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144,000: Servants of the Living God

1h

144,000: The Sealed of God

49m

144,000: First Fruits Unto God

47m

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