Sermon Tone Analysis

February 17, 2012

By John Barnett

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As we open Revelation 1:1, stop for a moment and remember how God starts this final book.

We read that:

God Wants His Servants to

Understand The Future

God opens the Book of Revelation by telling us that He wrote this book “to show His servants” (Rev.

1:1) things that we need to know about the future.

Only followers of God and servants of Christ have the incredible insight for living that comes from knowing for sure, what will happen in the days, months, and years ahead.

If you stop and consider what God just said, it is amazing.

God Himself wants us to know the future.

He has written down and sent us these 22 chapters filled with everything we need: to understand the rest of history, both for the Church and for this world.

We are in the midst of the study of the letters to the seven churches, and as we pause we notice that:

*The Seven Churches Portray Seven Stages*

For just a moment, let me give you a perspective.

Revelation 2-3 contain seven specific letters to historic churches.

But these letters also portray patterns, problems, and directions that also portray a prophetic perspective on the future of the church: from Christ’s ascension in Century One, to His coming back to Rapture His Church .

Let me show you what many Bible teachers have taught over the years.

The seven historic stages of Christ’s Church:

1.

There was the Ephesian period (30-60 AD): this was a period of warmth and love and labor for Christ, dating directly from the apostles, in which defection began just as Christ warned—by the gradual cooling of the love of some, the false professions of others and the incoming of undue exaltations of the clergy and church offices.

2. Then came the Smyrna period (60-300 AD): this was the era of martyrdom, and of the sweet savor unto God of faithfulness unto death, but marked with further developments of the departure from the true simplicities of the Gospel.

3. Then followed the Pergamite period (300-500 AD): this was when true faith began to fade, and spirituality gradually formed itself into a system, and the church united with the world, and finally the mystery rites of Babylon began to permeate Christ's Church.

4. Then came the Thyatiran period (500-1500 AD): this became the age of purple and glory for the corrupt priesthood, and of the darkness of truth; the age of effeminacy and clerical domination, when the church usurped the place of Christ, and the witnesses of Jesus were give to the dungeons, stakes and inquisitions; the age of the enthronement of false prophetess, reaching up to the days of Luther and the Reformation.

5. Then came the Sardian period (1500-1800 AD): this was seen as the age of separation and return of the rule of Christ; an age of many worthy names, but marked with the deadness of institutionalizing Christ through the denominations; it was an age covering the spiritual lethargy of the Protestant centuries before the coming of the great evangelical movements of the last two hundred years.

6.

Next was the Philadelphian period (1800-1950 AD): this was a return to the zeal for missions of the early church, a time of great evangelistic outreach and devotional godliness.

In this time nearly every corner of the world was penetrated with the Gospel like no time since Pentecost.

7. Which brings us to the Laodicean period (1950 AD–present): the Church of the West has become so self-sufficient, comfortable, and untested that lukewarmness, materialism, empty profession, and false peace have become accepted.

Jesus warned of this day in which He finds an unthinking multitude, who suppose they are Christians, and are not.

*Christ's Call is to Hear His Voice And Follow Him*

God wants those who are His servants to understand what is going on around them.

He wants us to have insider knowledge about the timing, severity, and events that will surround the coming global economic and religious collapse, just before Christ's Second Coming.

As we turn back now to Revelation 17-18, we can see God describing the coming global financial and religious collapse coming upon this world at the end.

Note the frequency of one word in both chapters: Babylon .

Have you ever noticed how much the word Babylon shows up in the prophecies from God about the end of the world?

Just here in Revelation we find the word Babylon five times (14:8; 16:19; 17:5; 18:2, 10, 21).

Outside the book of Revelation Babylon is frequently cited in the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel, in ways that transcend just the physical city and kingdom of human rulers.

Babylon in God’s sight is often a picture of Satan’s rebellion.

That is what we need to keep in mind:

*Satan is Leading a Global Rebellion Against God*

The only key to correctly understanding history comes from God's Word.

God's Word explains to us the struggle going on behind the pages of history is that: Satan is a rebel.

First, as Lucifer, the greatest and most powerful creature God ever made, Satan rebelled against God and lost his position as the anointed cherub (Isaiah 14, Ezekiel 28) and became Satan, the adversary of God.

Next, Satan led a third of the angels of God in rebellion against God (Rev.

12:4), and they become Satan’s demon warriors, following with him in his ongoing rebellion against God.

Then, Satan goes on to enlist humanity in his rebellion against God by tempting Eve (Genesis 3), and leading Adam into sin.

Finally, at the Tower of Babel, Satan devises a global spread of his rebellion through false religion and materialism.

God had made a way for mankind to be redeemed, by a substitutionary, sacrificial, blood-sprinkled, way.

But Satan wanted at all costs, to obscure and confuse God’s Way.

To do so Satan devised snares to catch humans up in his rebellion.

When God describes the world’s end at the close of the Tribulation, He devotes two entire chapters of Revelation to detail the end of Satan’s twin pathways of rebellion.

*Revelation 17 & 18: God Judges the Rebellion of Religion & Materialism*

Since the temptation and fall of humanity in Genesis 3, Satan has most often ensnared the world into his rebellion through one or the other of these two systems.

First in Revelation 17:5, God describes the false system of Satan’s religion, by which he deceived humanity and led them away from God. Note: Mystery, Babylon the Great.

Revelation 17:5 (NKJV) And on her forehead a name was written: MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.

Then in Revelation 18:2, God explains the end of the other way Satan has enslaved humanity through the false worship of materialism.

Note: Babylon the Great.

Revelation 18:2 (NKJV) /"And he cried mightily with a loud voice, saying, “Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and has become a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird!"/

The Harlot of Revelation 17 represents the spiritual adultery, drawing people away from God and to false gods, of Babylon’s Mystery Religions.

Our study of the church at Pergamum, and the connection that Pergamum has to Satan’s Seat through pagan religions, is where we are today.

Religion is mankind seeking the wrong gods, neglecting the True Creator, and offering any kind of worship, other than what God’s Word has commanded.

Religion is the self-styled offering of a humanly designed worship, rather than the Spirit-prompted offering of strict obedience to God’s Word.

Now, turn back with me to:

*Genesis 11: Babel’s Idolatrous Tower, Babylon’s Mysteries & Organized Religion*

Remember that Satan’s plans of false worship began to be exported globally at the tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9 which was the advent of what we would call Organized Religion.

This was over 24 centuries before Christ, and nearly 4,500 years ago.

The Tower was the first idol and it became the object of men's worship, the point of their pride.

It spawned a complex of weird, strange, mysterious religions that are still going on in our world today.

Genesis 11:1-4, 9 (NKJV) /"Now the whole earth had one language and one speech.

2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.

4 And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.”

9 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth."/

Satan desires to counterfeit, confuse, and mess up God’s plan.

So the one-world plans Satan had at Babel, God confounds; but the scattered humans took with them Babel’s false worship, mystery religions, and idolatry to the ends of the earth.

The rebellion of Satan promotes human-invented religion, and it has spread to every corner of the Earth.

From the Tower of Babel’s worship ziggurat, the Babylonian Mystery Religions fill the pages of ancient history.

They're all over everywhere and they're still with us today all in different forms.

In Genesis 11, on the plains of Shinar, probably not far from the original Garden of Eden, Satan’s rebellion grows as Nimrod organized humans into Creator-rejection and false worship.

From history we can see that:

*Idolatrous Religions Originate from Babylon*

There is no record of any pre-flood idolatry among humans, they were just totally corrupted.

Even the unsaved historians chronicle the spread of Babel’s religion.

Listen to the conclusions of the late Joseph J. Campbell (1904-1987), a New Age guru and media personality, who wrote in his classic treatment of mythology called The Masks of God :

"the dead and resurrected god Tammuz (Sumerian Dumuzi), prototype of the Classical Adonis, who was the consort as well as son by virgin birth, of the goddess-mother of many names: Inanna, Ninhursag, Ishtar, Astarte, Artemis, Demeter, Aphrodite, Venus".

Unlike the unbelieving mythologist Campbell just quoted, the godly Alexander Hislop , a great 19th century Scottish theologian and historian, traced the concept of false religions under the idea that Babel’s idolatry spread as Babylon’s mystery religions.

Both Campbell and Hislop saw the same pattern.

After God destroyed the tower, He scattered mankind into multiplied language groups.

According to the cult of Ishtar, Tammuz was conceived by a sunbeam, a counterfeit version of Jesus’ virgin birth.

Semiramis & Tammuz of Babel were worshiped as a divine mother and son under many different names.

They became:

• Ishtar & Tammuz of Assyria

• Ashtaroth & Baal of Phoenicia

• Isis & Horus of Egypt

• Aphrodite & Eros of Greece

• Venus & Cupid of Rome

In every case, the worship of those gods and goddesses was associated with sexual immorality.

History shows that Babel, became the fountainhead of all false religion.

That's why when false religion reaches its climax in the end times, God's Word calls Satan’s rebellion by the name of Babylon again, in Revelation 17-18.

The mystery religions of Babylon also propagated the idea of baptismal regeneration, (being born again merely through the rite of water baptism), and the practice of mutilation and flagellation to atone for sins or gain spiritual favor.

Nimrod’s wife Semiramis, along with her son Tammuz, formed the basis for the many counterfeit mother-child cults of antiquity.