John, the beloved disciple and faithful witness of Christ, was exiled to the Island of Patmos over his criminalized Christian testimony. Ironically, the testimony of Christians is being criminalized today as an intolerable violation of nonChristians’ civil rights. Under our country’s current hate crime laws, professing Christ or preaching His Gospel, which Christ commissioned His church to do, is prosecutable as hate speech and the incitement of hate crimes against nonChristians. While American Christians are not being exiled to a barren rock out in the middle of the Aegean Sea, as John was, we are, nonetheless, being exiled from a society that is becoming increasingly antichrist.
One Lord’s Day (Sunday) on Patmos, John, who was in the Spirit, received a revelation of the glorified Christ. Christ instructed John to take up his divinely inspired pen and to pen for posterity the things which he had seen, the things which were, and the things which shall be hereafter. What John had seen was the glorified Christ, which he records for us in Revelation chapter 1. The things which were, are the 7 letters to the 7 churches of Asia Minor, which John records for us in Revelation chapters 2 and 3. And finally, the things which shall be hereafter, are found in the unfolding of future events, which are recorded for us in the remainder of the book of Revelation, chapters 4-22.
In Revelation chapters 4 and 5, John is called up into Heaven, where a search is being conducted for one worthy to break the seals on the title deed to the earth, the breaking of which will unveil the earth’s future. Christ, the Lamb of God and the Lion of Judah, is alone found to be worthy to break the seals, since He alone is the Redeemer of the earth, the One who has bought it back for God with His own blood. Being found worthy, all of Heaven, as well as all of the universe, erupts in praise of Christ, presenting us with Scripture’s most awesome worship service, not to mention a foretaste of what awaits us all in Heaven when we finally gather to rejoice around the throne of Him who died for our redemption on Golgotha’s tree.
In Revelation chapter 6, the first 6 seals of the earth’s title deed are broken. The breaking of each seal serves to foretell future world events. These world events are divinely foreordained and cannot be foiled by angels in Heaven, devils in Hell. or men on earth. As we are forewarned in the very first verse of Revelation’s first chapter, these things “must shortly come to pass”; that is, they are inevitable and will be expeditiously executed once they begin to be fulfilled.
The first 4 of the 6 seals broken in chapter 6 reveal to us the famous 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse. These 4 Horsemen, representing false christs, war, famine, death and the grave, perfectly correspond with our Lord’s predicted “beginning of sorrows,” which mark the beginning of this fallen world’s unprecedented end-time woes (Matthew 24:3-8). Much to the chagrin and consternation of our world, as well as to most confessed Christians within it, these woes are now upon us and the hoofs of the 4 Horsemen can now be heard galloping throughout the earth.
David Beasley, the executive director of the United Nations' World Food Program, is seeing Christ’s predicted beginning of sorrows, as well as hearing the galloping hoofs of the Apocalypse’s 4 Horsemen. He recently warned the UN Security Council that large-scale famine “of biblical proportions”—Beasley’s words, not mine—was coming to the developing world, as a result of global pandemic. According to Beasley, even before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, 2020 was on track to be a year of unprecedented crisis, due to ongoing wars in places like Yemen, Syria and South Sudan, as well as multiplying natural disasters, like earthquakes and desert locust swarming across Africa.
Normally, I’d put very little stock in any prediction of a United Nation's prognosticator, but when UN predictions start lining up with our Lord's predicted beginning of sorrows—wars, famines, pestilences, and earthquakes—and the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I start paying attention. So should you. Jesus is coming!