Stay Prayerful and Stay Faithful In a World Gone Crazy

Intro:

With each passing week of 2020 the title for this sermon series proves more and more appropriate. The world has gone crazy.

And it has been another crazy week in our country. Elections make us nervous as they are filled with speculation and uncertainty about the future.

We may have some opinions, emotions, and reactions about what the next 4 years will look like, but the good news is that the Holy Spirit has given us a revelation from God that makes the future crystal clear.

And Revelation 8 and Revelation 9 makes an astounding statement about where things are headed. He lets us know where a lot of things you and I think are so important, that we trust in, that we get so emotional over are doomed to fail.

No matter who was elected President, Revelation 8 and Revelation 9 remained unchanged in the Word of God.

Revelation 8 and Revelation 9 sends the message to us that in a world gone crazy, that we need to stay prayerful and faithful to a Kingdom that prevails rather than trusting in one that fails.

Today we are going to look at Revelation 8 and 9 and a reason:

Why we should stay prayerful.

Why we need to stay faithful.

Stay prayerful (Rev. 8:1-5)

Revelation 8 begins with a pause and a prayer.

As we come out of Revelation 7 we hear the sound of a multitude of joyous worshipers before the throne of God. They are gathered from every nation, tribe, and tongue. Together, with a loud voice they cry out, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb (Rev. 7:10)!”

But as we turn the page there is silence. It is an ominous pause. Something significant is about to happen.

At the end of the pause, seven angels stand before God and he gives them each a trumpet. But then another angel, an eighth comes before the throne of God. He is not given a trumpet. He is given incense. And unlike the others who presumably come empty-handed, this angel brings something before God. The Bible says that it is a golden censer.

In short, the censer is like a small firepan a priest would use to carry hot coals. In the time of the Tabernacle, the priests would use the censer to transport hot coals from the bronze altar, into the holy place, and put them in the altar of incense. This would create an aromatic smoke and it represented the prayers of God’s people before the Lord.

The Bible tells us that what took place in the Tabernacle was only a copy of realities in Heaven (Hebrews 8:5). Here in Revelation 8 we are not seeing a copy, we are seeing the reality. So God gives the angel incense to mix with the prayers of the saints that are laid before the altar of God.

Once it is all mixed together and begins to burn, the angel takes the censer and throws it to the earth. This action signifies that what comes next is an answer to the prayers of God’s people.

This sequence reminds us of why we need to pray in a world gone crazy.

God has commanded His people to pray and His people have obeyed His command. We see in this text that they have prayed. If we do not become more prayerful we are out of step with God’s commands and with His plan.

God hears and answers prayer. The presence of our prayers in this passage ought to encourage us that God has not ignored us. He is attentive to us.

God answers our prayers according to His purpose and in His time so we should keep praying. God’s delay should not discourage our prayer life but encourage it. In Luke 11 Jesus taught us to pray with persistence. There are probably a lot of things you have prayed about and it seemed as if evil continued to prevail. You probably prayed for healing and a person was not healed. You probably prayed about something that was very wrong and wanted desperately to see it made right. We could not possibly plumb the depths of how God takes all of the prayers we have prayed and turns them into an Almighty YES in this moment.

God helps us as we pray. Notice that the passage says that the incense mixed with the prayers was given to the angel. In Romans 8:26 - 27 we are given the revelation that the Holy Spirit prays for us because in our sinful weakness and limitation we don’t quite know what to pray. I see this mixing as a beautiful picture of how our prayers are always mixed with the Holy Spirit’s help.

Romans 8:26–27 ESV

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

Let’s be encouraged by the truth of this revelation in chapter 8. In a world gone crazy, God’s people are to be prayerful. Our God hears, helps, and answers prayer.

So let’s take this passage and allow it to give us perspective. Some of us are very upset about last week and there are some who are ecstatic and hopeful about the outcome. We voted and we reacted. But on Tuesday our Hwy 76 campus was open for 12 hours, from 7am to 7pm for prayer and only about 8 people took time out of their day to come by and pray.

Now look at Revelation 8. What makes the most difference in the end, our votes or our prayers? Now before you dismiss what I’m saying, hear me out. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have voted. I voted. I thought it was very important for me to vote and for my family to vote. We should all vote and I am thankful for the freedom to vote. But look at the text. Did the Lord mix our votes with incense? Did the angel throw down our votes and ignite the final act of redemption in the world?

I’m not telling you that we shouldn’t have voted. But I am telling you that we failed to do what matters most in the end.

Remember the context of Revelation 8. John, the author is exiled as a means to contain him and stop him from spreading the gospel. The rest of the apostles are dead. They have all been martyred. The first readers of this letter are living under the tyranical rule of a corrupted, vile, Christ-hating Roman emporers. They are being fed to lions for entertainment. Nero dipped Christians in tar and lit them on fire to light his garden parties.

And I cannot imagine the pain they were going through as friends and family members were suffering gruesome deaths. And they didn’t have a vote. But I bet they prayed. And I bet they wondered if their prayers mattered. And Revelation 8 gives clarity, God heard them. God was helping them. God is answering them.

Your vote was important. But if you really want to have a say in the future, pray.

Stay faithful (Rev. 8:6 - 9:21)

The pause is like a reversal of the moment between Gen. 1:2 and Gen. 1:3. There we are shown the formless chaos before God begins to speak and bring about creation. This pause comes as God begins to turn creation back into chaos. What God has created, this world ruined by sin, the Almighty is about to tear apart.

Time does not allow us to expound on each and every judgment we see here, so let’s simply survey them and see the damage.

The first four trumpets bring about natural disasters that are very reminiscent of the plagues God brought down upon Egypt in Exodus. We see water turned to blood. There is hail and fire and blood. There is darkness.

These judgments send a very clear message to us in the same way that Egyptian plagues sent a very clear message to the Egyptians and to the Israelites. The Egyptians had an elaborate system of gods they trusted in. The Nile was a god. The Almighty God turned it to blood. They had a god with the head of a frog. God overran them with frogs. From fertility gods to the son of Pharoah himself the Almighty God sent a very clear message that you cannot trust these gods. They are not all powerful. They are not lasting. You have made a grave mistake if you trust your lives to them.

And so the message is very clear to us. It is a mistake to trust in this world. It will not last. It is not all-powerful.

I also think it is important to note that Revelation 8 and 9 did not change based on who was elected President. Your guy may or may not have won, but either way, they won’t save the world. It’s still headed for this.

So let’s lay this Scripture against your reaction to the election and ask if it’s going to be OK? Your version of OK all depends on where your investments are and where your trust lies.

If you thought those first four trumpets were disturbing turn your attention to trumpets 5 and 6. Trumpets 5 and 6 come with another sort of pause. What comes next is introduced as a “woe” (Rev. 8:13). The New Living Translation renders this word as “terror.” What’s about to unfold are some of the most awful moments of human existence.

With the fifth trumpet people are tormented for five months by these stinging creatures. Notice that the creatures wear battle armor. They have faces like people. They also have an evil commander and they come from the pit. I think these are demonic attacks. Whatever it is notice that it is so bad that people want to die, but can’t.

When the sixth trumpet is blown angels rise up along with an ominous army of millions. With the first four trumpets 1/3 of humans were killed. Here, another 1/3 are slaughtered.

So the world’s supplies are failing and people are dying. You can’t trust the world. And then people are tortured, attacked, and slaughtered by what seems to be an awful evil.

But Revelation 9:20 tells us that somehow, after all of this, there are survivors.

Before you read the next few sentences, let me ask you to write the scene of the survivor’s reaction to the world failing and to the evil the demons have brought upon them.

If I were writing it I think the next scene would be one of revival. People are in great need. The world has failed them and evil has attacked them. Surely now they turn to God. That is not at all what happens. Let’s read on:

Revelation 9:20–21 ESV

The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.

They don’t repent. They insist on sin.

With that tragic end described let’s apply the message of this. You and I need to stay faithful to Jesus because:

The world will fail and only Christ’s kingdom will prevail. The world we have just voted on is doomed. Trump or Biden don’t change this end. If you have all of your investments tied up in it, all of your happiness resting on it, and all of your trust in the future of it - that’s not OK.

Sin is serious. Not only is sin wrong, but it is sickening. It is addictive. It is deceptive. Sin is so bad that even when people have nothing else, they had rather continue in sin than turn to Christ. And we have all witnessed this tragedy to some extent. We all know people whose lives, families, marriages, health, communities have been ruined by sin but they just won’t stop. I think it’s interesting that mixed into this concoction of idolatry, theft, and sex is sorcery. The word sorcery doesn’t refer as much to magic potions as it does to illicit drugs. This is the word we get the word pharmaceuticals from. And how important is it, in the end, for us to be a drug-induced society so that deception can occur? The last ten years we have all watched as our society slowly gave in to the legalization of marijuana. Did you know on election day that in Oregon they not only voted for President but they voted to decriminalize drugs? Turn away from sin. It enslaves. Be faithful to Christ.

The world has gone crazy and it is going to be destroyed. If you are asking if everything is going to be OK and you mean will everything just be fine, like it is and we can carry on as we are - NO. It is not going to be OK. It is all going to be destroyed.

As the people of God we have been given absolute clarity about this through God’s revelation to us. If you want to be OK, be prayerful and be faithful.

Closing:

Prayerful for ourselves to turn away from sin.

Prayerful and involved in the mission of Liberty to rescue people, show them what we do.

Prayerful for others to turn away from sin and to turn to Christ.