Light on the Hill

Guest (Female): We come to the end of the Book of Revelation, and God ends the book with a warning. Light on the Hill is next.

Guest (Male): Have you ever heard the phrase, "Be careful, you don't ever want to be on the wrong side of history"? This is especially true when it comes to eternity. As we read the last words in the Bible today on Light on the Hill, we'll scratch the surface of how serious it really is. We should all want to be on God's side. It is the winning side. Here's Pastor James Kaddis in Revelation Chapter 22.

James Kaddis: Revelation Chapter 22. Now, I want to say this because it's important, and I know every single week I say lots of things are important because they are. Because we're dealing with the word of God, and the word of God has everything to do with the sustenance of our lives and, of course, our eternity. But I want to make this clear: as we study through the Book of Revelation, it is critical—let me say this again—it is critical, it is important that you know the Old Testament.

If you do not know the Old Testament, you are going to struggle with the Book of Revelation. Let me say that one more time. If you struggle with the Old Testament, if you don't know it, if you're not aware of it, then you are going to struggle with the Book of Revelation. If you know the Old Testament, the Book of Revelation is going to be very easy for you. By the way, have I said that before? I think I've said that just a few times. Okay, just want to make sure because it's important.

And actually, this is the reason why it's taken so long for us to get through Revelation. As a matter of fact, I think as we go through Revelation, we're at like 60 studies. And there's a reason why we've done that. We've done that because we need you guys to understand all of the relevant portions—actually, all of the Old Testament is relevant—but relevant portions to the subject matter of what we're going through in the Book of Revelation. And if I don't take the time to explain that to you, then you are going to meet this with extreme difficulty.

And of course, as we get into today's passage, today's passage is a perfect example of that. If you do not know the Old Testament, you are absolutely going to struggle with the content that I am going to read to you. And these next four verses are going to be extraordinarily confusing because you're going to come to all kinds of cockamamie conclusions if you don't understand the foundation for why God says what He says in these last four verses.

Now, I should say something, and it is very important: when you look at these verses, you are looking at, in essence, the epilogue, for lack of a better term. It's, in essence, the ending of the book, and God chooses to end the Book of Revelation by warning us. There's a warning. And by the way, the warning that's being issued in the next few verses are warnings that are being given to non-believers rather than believers. And we know that they're being given to non-believers because when you read verse 17, verse 17 in its context is a call out to those who don't know God.

Let me read verse 17 to you. It says this: "And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. And whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely." Guess what? We've already taken the water of life freely, haven't we? Those of us that have received the Lord, we have come to Him. We have reached out to Him because He first reached out to us. He loved us. He gave Himself for us, and we received that free gift. And so the call out that we read in verse 17 is one that is custom-tailored to people who have not received the free gift that only God can give.

That is important, folks. Super important, because this is what happens when people read verse 18 and verse 19. I'm going to read this to you right now. It's a very scary thing for them, and I can understand why it's scary, because the subject matter of verse 18 and 19 is extraordinarily scary on many levels, especially if you're somebody who chooses to do what it warns you not to do, right?

Let me read this to you, verse 18. It says, "For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in the book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book."

That's kind of a heavy statement, right? By the way, a couple of nuances that I should note right away that most people won't pick up on when they teach through this often times because they don't see the necessity to spend time really digging through it, but there are certain things that you can gather that provide evidence for the state that things are in currently and in the current time. Like, for example, this new city that we know we're going to be living in for eternity exists right now, right?

It just isn't on Earth because the current Earth that we are in is not worthy of the new city. And we know that when the new heaven and the new earth is created, then that city will be placed in that new earth. And how do we know that? We know that because of lots of passages, but this passage even doesn't even imply it; it shows us this. Why? Because it's referring to the city as though the city exists. Okay, that's kind of an important thing.

And some of these nuances are really important to sort of grab on to, but we have to talk about the warning that's being given here, and the warning is important. By the way, I will tell you, a lot of people read these warnings and freak out that are believers. Like, they get really scared. They think, "Oh, I'm going to lose my salvation." And there are people who build whole arguments on these two verses to claim that a Christian can lose their salvation because the idea here is, if you add or take away from the Book of Revelation, then you're going to go to hell. I mean, that's kind of what people read and what people see.

But this is referring to non-believers; it's not referring to believers. By the way, if you're a believer, you're not going to add or take away from the book anyway, so it's not even anything to be concerned with. But I can understand why that can create a little bit of paranoia. As a matter of fact, it's interesting, although I understand what the passage is saying and although I fully believe every single last bit of what I'm telling you right now, there are still those moments when I'm reading through the Book of Revelation in all of these studies and in the studies past where I want to make extra sure that I'm reading it perfectly right because if I get it wrong, I'm going to hell. I'm not, but that's kind of what you think sometimes.

Like, oh man, I don't want to do this. I don't want to read this wrong. But it's really interesting because you can actually get super paranoid about this. Like, for example, think this through for a second. If it really is what some people make it out to be, then that means all of us are probably going to go to hell right off the bat because if you look at the way the text is actually written, if you look at the way the structure of a translation is put into place, when you actually translate from Greek into English, there are English words that do not parallel Greek words because there's no way of paralleling those words.

And so it's not exactly what you might read in the Greek language. And so how it comes out in the English, would you be technically adding or taking away from the word? That's not what this is about, okay? Let me tell you what it's about because if you understand the Old Testament—wait, have I said that before? If you understand the Old Testament, you will understand very clearly what's being said here in these two verses. And if you want to know what it's all about, guess where you have to go to understand it? You have to go to the Book of Genesis.

And we have to go all the way back to the Book of Genesis in Chapter 2. By the way, can I make myself very, very clear? I am going to rip off a word that is used by one of my dear friends, Dr. Andy Woods. He's the pastor of Sugar Land Bible Fellowship in Texas. He's an extraordinarily smart man. By the way, he is the world's—not like local—he's the world's subject matter expert on the topic of Babylon. That is, like, when he did his doctoral thesis, he did it on the subject of Babylon, and he is the published world foremost subject matter expert on the subject.

Here's a phrase that I'm stealing from him regarding this, okay? I'm going to tell you right now: Revelation Chapter 22, when we read verse 18 and 19, we are looking at the bookend of the Book of Revelation. It's the bookend not of the Book of Revelation, it's the bookend of the whole Bible. And the other bookend, the one that starts at the beginning, is in Genesis. And I say that because you have to look at the parallels between the beginning and the end.

If you don't examine the parallels between the beginning and the end, you are not going to understand the exhortation and the warnings given to us at the end. Let me explain to you what I mean when I say this. You see, God creates the heavens and the earth. God forms out of the dust of the earth mankind. God gives a very specific command to Adam. And this is what He tells Adam. By the way, there's a bunch of commands that God gives early on in the Book of Genesis that we should all be familiar with because they're very important, because they're going to have a profound effect on how we live our lives today.

If you don't understand the significance of the five initial commands that were given to Adam and Eve together, then you are not going to understand the significance of the purpose of God's call on your life. Okay? If you don't understand the meaning and the depth of the command to be fruitful and to multiply and to have dominion over, to subdue, and to replenish, you are not going to understand the essence of God's call for you in the moment and in the day in which you live. If you don't understand that, you're going to have a difficult time understanding a whole lot of other things.

But there's another command that was given. And if you remember, you go to Genesis Chapter 2. This command was given directly to Adam. Look what it says in verse 16, when man was created. He tells this to Adam: "And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree"—didn't command the woman, He commanded the man. We're going to talk about that in a second. "And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat."

Okay, I want you to focus on a few very key words in that command. Very, very important that you focus on those words. "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." Now, we're going to jump forward to Genesis Chapter 3, where the devil has a confrontation with Eve. Now, I want to say this right now because up until even recently, I taught something different.

But after thoroughly digging into this and examining it over the last several months, I'm going to tell you that I can be pretty dogmatic and make a very thorough assertion on the fact that I do not believe the dogma that is told by guys that say that Adam did not correctly instruct his wife. People will often teach that when Adam shared the command about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that he did not correctly instruct his wife, and I don't believe that.

Contrary to every commentator that I have read, I think I can make a dogmatic argument over the fact that Adam instructed his wife exactly the same way God instructed him. You see, people make the assumption that Eve was instructed incorrectly because of the way that she misquoted what God had actually said, but they don't take the time to see how Satan deceived her. The Bible doesn't say that Adam deceived Eve. The Bible says that Satan deceived Eve, number one.

But number two, and perhaps most importantly, Adam, at the time he was given the command by God, was a perfect man. And not only was he a perfect man, he was a man not familiar with death. He was a man who did not and was not aware of the effects of sin because he himself had never sinned. So I can promise you that if he had the capacity to be able to name the animals, if he had the wisdom to be able to do the things that God had instructed him to do, I can promise you that he actively and correctly instructed his wife.

He told his wife exactly what God told him. I promise you. There's no way you can make an argument to the contrary. There's no reason to believe that he didn't. As a matter of fact, if he didn't correctly instruct his wife, I think the Bible would have told us that. I also believe that if he did not correctly instruct his wife, then he himself would have been guilty of rebellion against God by virtue of the fact that he changed the word of God, and that would have been the fall of mankind.

And I actually think at that point, sin and death would have entered the world. But the Bible says through one man sin entered the world when that man did what? When he ate of the fruit. We know that. So I can promise you, Eve was instructed correctly. I don't think the man was culpable from that perspective. Matter of fact, again, I can make the biblical argument that that certainly was not the case. So then you have to ask yourself, why does the Bible say that Eve was deceived, yet Adam rebelled? Because Eve truly was deceived.

Look at the subtlety that exists. And by the way, can I just tell you this right now, spoiler alert, you ready? It involves the adding and the taking away from God's word. Satan added and took away from God's word, and Eve added and took away from God's word. But Eve did not add and take away from God's word until Satan did it first. Look at Satan's words here. This is Genesis Chapter 3, this is verse one.

Look at what happens, what Satan says: "Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made." And notice what he says: "And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" Uh-oh. The imposition of the question involves him changing the word of God by default, doesn't it? Did God say you can't eat of every tree? What? God didn't say that.

God actually told Adam—and Eve knew the command—very simple: "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat." Every tree, freely. The devil changed it by the omission of several words. The devil basically said, "Hath God not said these things, right? Hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?" Look, the very moment Eve heard the devil with the imposition of such a question, she should have simply shut her mouth and not addressed him.

She should not have said a word back to him. Why? Because the premise of the question was faulty. We do this when we have Q&As. We did this yesterday at the men's retreat. We had a Q&A, and in many of the questions that guys imposed to me in the Q&A, I had to stop immediately, and I had to say the premise of your question is faulty. Because the very imposition of your question creates a dynamic by which you are forced into addressing a false assertion, thus creating confusion and propagating the false assertion that your question creates.

Think about it like this. This is, by the way, 101. You learn this in negotiations 101, you learn this in anytime you're sitting down and you're having any type of a conversation where you're trying to get anything out of anybody, okay? Interrogation 101. This is like the first lesson of interrogation 101. If you believe somebody has committed a crime, and most of the time when you sit down to interrogate them, you already have the evidence, then the imposition of your question has to be voiced in a way that makes a statement regarding the fact so that the statement of fact is entered into evidence and the response to that question becomes an admission of guilt.

That sounds kind of crazy. So I would never say, if I'm interrogating somebody and I believe that they've committed a crime, I would never say, "Did you do this?" You don't ask that question. You know what you say? You say, "When you committed this crime, did you do this?" You ask about a detail, a small detail about the bigger thing. So you would never say, "Did you steal the balloon?" You would say, "After you stole the balloon, did you pop it?"

If you say yes or no, saying yes or no still implies that you agree to the initial statement that the premise of the question was fundamentally based in an admission of guilt. So when a question is being asked to you and the premise of the question is wrong, you must correct it because if the premise of the correction is fundamentally based on an idea or a thought that is broken and not founded in the truth, you have to address it because if you don't, then you yourself will be dragged into the lie. You guys get it?

Eve should have immediately addressed the assertion of the devil because the premise behind the question was fundamentally incorrect. He repeated something that God never said. He changed it. He changed the word of God. Eve should have never engaged him. If Eve was going to engage him, Eve should have simply said, "Hey, that's not what God said. Your question is even wrong." Quite frankly, I think the better idea and the thing that we learn from the interaction that Eve had with the devil is that you just don't interact with him.

You don't talk to him, right? Jude confirms this, by the way, when you read what Judas tells us right before the Book of Revelation. Judas says that even Michael the Archangel did not engage with the devil, rather Michael the Archangel actually said, "The Lord rebuke you." There's a whole reason why we don't engage with the devil because the level of deception that he deploys with his handle and use of any functional language in existence to mankind is far beyond the capacity that we have to be able to understand or contemplate.

He's a deceiver and he's good at it. He's been doing it for a long time. People will look at me and they'll say, "Well, James, you're such a great communicator. I mean, you do such a good job." Yeah, I've been practicing it for 30 years. And I think after practicing it for 30 years, I can do a pretty good job. Imagine a devil who's been practicing it for 6,000 years. 6,000 years he's been practicing the art of deception. Do you want to engage with a guy like that? Sorry, no. Uh-uh. There's no way. There's absolutely no way.

That's why I love the Fifth Amendment, right? The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution keeps me from incriminating myself, and it protects me from sitting down with a deceiver who's going to change the very premise of the question in order to impose something rhetorical which creates an admission of guilt. Why would I want to do that? I have a right to keep myself from entering into that state. That's the whole idea behind what we're talking about here.

The premise of the question or the imposition of the question was based on a faulty premise, and the imposition of that question was based in literal deception. You get this, guys. Understand: the devil added and took away from the word of God, and he's not done doing that, by the way, because when he later on goes to seek to further cast aspersion on the word of God, he does it again, and you'll see it. But look at Eve's response.

So we've already identified the problem with Satan's question. Eve responds and says, verse 2, "And the woman said unto the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden." Uh-oh, you got a problem. She's already omitted. She's already omitted two words. Did you notice that? Look at what she says here. Pay attention to the subtlety. "We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden."

Look at the original command: "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest eat freely." She omitted the word "freely" and "every." And she even engaged by adding a new word, which is "fruit." It's kind of an interesting picture when you think about this. You start taking certain words away and you start adding words and you begin to change things, and it goes from being subtle to being very abrupt. And that abruption begins to create a condition by which you buy into the art of deception, and that deception sends you down a road of destruction.

Guest (Male): Pastor James is leading us verse by verse through Revelation here on Light on the Hill. To hear this message again, visit lightonthehillradio.com or 1place.com. It's also available through the Light on the Hill app. Light on the Hill is made possible through the generosity of our listeners. If the Lord is leading you to support this ministry, please visit lightonthehillradio.com to donate, or you can give through the Light on the Hill app.

I also want to mention the new book written by Pastor James. It's entitled "The Last Book: A Guide to Revelation Part 1." As the world heads toward its final chapter, the Bible has already revealed every detail. The Book of Revelation is God's message of warning, hope, and promise to prepare us for what's coming. In "The Last Book," Pastor James takes us through Revelation Chapters 1 through 10 and shows us why we must live wholeheartedly for God, anchored in truth and awake to the times. You can order a copy today at lightonthehillradio.com or Amazon.

If you hunger for more Bible prophecy, you may want to seek out Pastor James' videos live or on demand. Many of them relate to current events and Bible prophecy. You can access them at jameskaddis.com. You can also send us your questions about Revelation and Bible prophecy through the website lightonthehillradio.com. We hope to hear from you soon. Now let's return to the garden and see how Eve actually added to the word of God.

James Kaddis: She goes on to say this: "But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die." When did God say you can't touch it? He didn't say that. She added that. God never commanded not to touch that fruit. God didn't even say don't touch the tree. He said you're capable of freely eating of every fruit of the tree, but of this tree, you're not to eat of it. He didn't say you're not to touch it.

But guess what? When you add to the word of God, you begin to create conditions by which your mind views the word unfavorably because it's not predicated upon the understanding of human nature and the human mind that God has. And when you begin to take it into your own lap and you begin to make your own rules and you begin to do things your own way, you actually ruin the very thing that God made and intended to be beautiful.

When you go down the street and you see the churches that have the pride flags on them and you begin to see the fact that they accept individuals who wholeheartedly embrace sin, the most tragic part of all of what you are seeing is you are dealing with shepherds that choose—they're not even shepherds, they're wolves—but what they're doing is they're literally changing the word of God. They're modifying it. They're adding and they're taking away from it so that they can create some kind of a doctrine that feels acceptable to them. And it's very dark, folks. It's very dark. More on that to come.

Guest (Male): We'll finish up our study of Revelation next time on Light on the Hill with Pastor James Kaddis, a listener-supported ministry of Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.