SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR
7/7/2015 9:13 AM
My Worship Time Focus: Characteristic
of Power PT-1
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference: Revelation
14:1
Message of the
verse: “1 Then I looked, and behold,
the Lamb was standing on Mount Zion, and with Him one hundred and forty-four
thousand, having His name and the name of His Father written on their
foreheads.”
A reminder to what we are looking at in these first five
verses of Revelation 14 is seen from this quote from John MacArthur “In addition
to the prophetic significances, this passage yields important practical
principles for triumphant Christian living.
Seven such features will characterize the 144,000: power, purity,
partisanship, purpose, precision, and perfection.” We look at the power in our SD for today.
John writes the phrase “I looked, and behold,” or
something similar many times in the book of Revelation and this speaks of the
surprise that John has when he sees something in the vision that God is showing
him, and in this case it is the 144,000 who were standing on Mount Zion with
the Lamb, the Lord Jesus Christ. As we
study the book of Revelation we will see that the Lamb is depicted as being
slain in 5:6; and 13:8, He is seen as glorified in 5:8, 12-13; exalted in
7:9-10, as the Redeemer in 7:14, and also as a Shepherd in 7:17, the Shepherd
of His people, and also the Lord of Lords and King of Kings in 17:14.
John MacArthur writes “The appearance of the Lamb on
Mount Zion is a monumental moment in redemptive history. The psalmist wrote of this moment in Psalm
2:6-9 ‘6 “But as for Me, I
have installed My King Upon Zion, My holy mountain." 7 "I will
surely tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to Me, ’You are My Son, Today I
have begotten You. 8 ’Ask of Me, and I will surely give the nations as Your
inheritance, And the very ends of the earth as Your possession. 9 ’You shall
break them with a rod of iron, You shall shatter them like earthenware.’"’”
Another Psalm, Psalm 48:2 also describes Mount Zion as
“Beautiful in elevation, the joy of the whole earth Is Mount Zion in the far
north, The city of the great King.”
Isaiah states in 24:23b “For the LORD of hosts will reign on Mount Zion
and in Jerusalem, And His glory will be before His elders.” Now as we look at verse one of Rev. 14 we can
see that these prediction are now fulfilled.
I mentioned in an earlier SD on chapter fourteen that
some equate Mt. Zion in this passage with the one written about in Hebrews
12:22-24 which states “22 But you have
come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,
and to myriads of angels, 23 to the
general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to
God, the Judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect,
24 and to Jesus, the mediator of a new
covenant, and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of
Abel.” The reason that it is believed
that this passage from Rev. 14:1 speaks of the earthly Mt. Zion is that if it
were the heavenly one then the whole point would be lost as to how the Lord
kept these 144,000 men alive throughout the Tribulation Period, for if they had
died then the scene would be in heaven, but since they were alive the scene
must be on earth in order to fulfill the prophecies we wrote about from Psalms
and Isaiah.
Another mistake that some commentators make is who these
144,000 are. We have read in chapter
seven that they came from the twelve tribes of Israel, 12,000 from each tribe,
and now people have trouble in believing that this is where they came
from. The Jehovah Witnesses use to
believe that there would only be 144,000 of them but since there are now more
they changed their tune and state that only the best of them will be included
in this number. I go back to the statement
that I have made many times in my Spiritual Diaries, and that is “When the
plain sense of Scripture makes sense, seek no other sense.”
John MacArthur quotes again John Phillips who writes
about the uniqueness of this group: “No
other age has produced a company like this, a veritable army of militant
believers marching unscathed through every form of danger. It has been theirs to defy the dragon, to
bait the Beast, and to give the lie to the false prophet. Their calling has been to preach the gospel
from the housetops when even to name the name of Christ called for the most
dreadful penalties. They have been
surrounded, these later-day Jobs, with impenetrable hedges, also to laugh to
scorn all the grand inquisitors of hell.
They have walked the streets in broad daylight, careless of the
teeth-gnashing rage of their would-be tortures and assassins, true witnesses of
Jehovah in the most terrible era of the history of mankind. The devil knows about this coming band of
conquerors, and writhes already in an agony of anticipation.”
We will continue this section in our next SD. 7/7/2015 9:54 AM 7/7/2015 11:28 AM
Spiritual Meaning
for my life Today: The more that I
think about the 144,000 Jewish Evangelists of the upcoming Tribulation Period the
more respect and awe I have for them and desire to be like then in my world
each day. I pray that God will give me
the power to do what He has planned for me to do each day that will bring glory
to His Name.
My Steps of Faith for Today:
To trust the Lord to provide to me the
power to do the things that He has planned for me to do in eternity past as
seen in the following verse: “For we are
His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand
so that we would walk in them (Eph. 2:10).”
Answer to yesterday’s Bible
question: “By making his father Isaac
think he was Esau” (Gen. 27:29).
Today’s Bible
question: “Who in a prayer thanked God
that he was not like the other men?”
Answer in our next SD.
7/7/2015 11:40 AM
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