Light on the Hill

Guest (Male): Pastor James says as we take in the word of God, it's both sweet and sour.

James Kaddis: We hear the word of God, we're excited about the word of God, it's really powerful. We love listening to the word of God being taught to us. Oftentimes, we have these emotional experiences as we take in the word of God and it can be a very sweet thing. But sometimes, it can leave a very sour feeling in our stomachs. Why? Because as we begin to digest it, we begin to internalize it. Do you know what it does? It shakes us up a little bit, doesn't it?

It causes us to think differently about the way we live our lives. It forces us to move in a direction that we never thought we would move. It makes us sick to our stomach because it causes us to realize how broken we are, how messed up we are, and how real God is.

Guest (Male): From Calvary Chapel Signal Hill comes Light on the Hill. Today, we return to Revelation chapter 10. This chapter is a chance to catch our collective breath after the cataclysmic events in chapter 9. We're in between the sixth and seventh trumpet judgments. There's been much speculation about what the seven thunders are here in this chapter, but God chose not to tell us what it is for a reason. Pastor James Kaddis says we should accept the fact that we really don't know and that's okay.

James Kaddis: And why is it, for example, when I put up our YouTube post for the live video that we're doing, I actually write the title, "The Seven Thunders of Revelation 10"? If I'm going to emphasize that, then why in the world would I come up with an answer that basically says I don't know? It's really simple because when we think of the seven thunders, there's a lot of things we should be thinking about immediately, right away.

I'm not going to talk about how they symbolize something. I'm not going to talk about the metaphorical implications that might sit or not sit behind it. I'm not going to make an argument for the fact that it's a simile. A lot of people do that kind of thing. I don't think that any of that is necessary. I think that's all superfluous. I think the thing that we should do when we look at the story of the seven thunders and we understand what's being said here is that we realize several very amazing things.

Number one, I already talked about, right? As we hear the word of the Lord, we should be writing it down. John in this case was told not to write it down. God had a reason for not wanting John to write it down. He didn't want us to know about it. Perhaps it was one of those things, one of many things that we're going to find out at a later time. And that brings us to the second point. The way God has designed our futures and the way God has designed the world and the way God has designed so much of what's around us, we have so much to look forward to.

We have so much to look forward to. I was talking to somebody the other day who was telling me that they were going to bring bad news to somebody very close to them, and that there was some time that they had to bring them that bad news. They said something that really struck me and it was very encouraging to see this. They said that they were going to wait to bring that person bad news until the day before church because that person loves doing children's ministry, looks forward to going to children's ministry and serving in children's ministry, and knew that if they got that bad news the day before, they would be cheered up because they had hope of the idea that they would go and serve in children's ministry the next day.

I love something like that because that is the way God engineered us. God engineered us with the understanding that there is hope and that hope is founded not only in the moment that we're in, even when we're discouraged, but there is hope in the future. We have hope in the future and we're reminded of that hope in the future when we read the word of God. What's exciting about reading the story of the seven thunders and recognizing that there is no message that was written down regarding what those seven thunders were saying is that we're reminded of the glory of God that awaits us and the fact that we are going to know these things, that eventually we're going to be aware of those things. When it does come together, it's going to be spectacular.

I think of when God told Daniel to seal up the words that he was writing down and I think of all the prophets that wrote in the past, all the different things that they wrote about concerning the future of what would take place. You guys understand that virtually none of those prophets knew what they were talking about. When I say that, I mean it isn't like they were dumb, they didn't know what they were talking about meaning they were ignorant or they didn't know what they were saying. No, they didn't know what they were talking about in that when they were writing these words, they had no idea what the construct of words even meant.

They were writing these words not even realizing what they were talking about. If you think about what was written when Isaiah wrote the story of the crucifixion of Christ, you would have thought that he actually watched the crucifixion and then wrote about it later. I mean, the way that it was just written so spectacularly. So it's kind of funny when you think about this, but so many of these men were told to write things down that they didn't understand. Even Daniel when he was told to seal up the book, think about this.

He was told to seal it up knowing full well that we would at a later time be able to understand it because God said that. And God has multiplied knowledge, he's increased knowledge in the world in which we live today. And now we know the book of Daniel. If you would have read Daniel at the time that Daniel wrote it, sometime around 400 or 500 BC, then it would be very puzzling. I mean you would look at that—Daniel probably would have written the book around 540 BC, but anyway, that's beside the point.

Remember when Daniel was first taken away, he was taken away in 605 BC by Nebuchadnezzar, and so by the time he was already writing Daniel chapter 9, that probably would have been somewhere in the neighborhood of, I'm guessing, probably around 435 BC. So we know that Daniel had been written by that point, and the funny thing about it was a lot of stuff that Daniel wrote was sealed. No one understood it. If you had read it right around the time that Daniel had written it, let's say you even read it around 200 BC, you wouldn't have understood anything of what Daniel was saying.

It wouldn't have made any sense other than some of what maybe an account of what happened with Antiochus Epiphanes and so on and so forth. That would make sense when you match that up with a certain portion of the end of Daniel. But what's really funny is now that we look back on Daniel and now that we look back on the Gospels and now that we look back on what we know in the New Testament, Daniel comes to life. It's easy. It makes sense. Now that we have the book of Revelation, Daniel is almost like a history book.

What's interesting is it's so convincing that even secular critics that look at Daniel actually believe that Daniel wrote it at a much later time and it wasn't the real Daniel, except they have a really hard time with that because how do you reconcile the stuff that Daniel wrote about that's beginning to happen right now? Do you understand that? It's kind of interesting, and pretty much the existence of the Dead Sea Scrolls shut up that argument because we found fragments of Daniel, critical fragments of Daniel in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which predate any of the times that people said this new author may have existed to actually write what Daniel wrote.

The whole idea behind what I'm talking about is the fact that when God says to seal up these words, don't write it down, understand the idea that it leaves us something to be excited about and to look forward to because that's another area our knowledge is going to grow and increase. And that's the wonderful thing about serving God. When we worship God, we're never going to arrive. We're always going to walk in this expansive way, we're always going to learn, our intellect is always going to grow, we're always going to increase in our stature and our knowledge.

Such a powerful thing when you think about it. I really believe this. I mean, I think we should probably do a clinical test because I think the numbers would probably be absolutely astounding. Find somebody that has an average IQ and doesn't know the Lord. Get their IQ tests, find out what their intelligence quotient numbers are, and then allow them to experience walking with God, serving God, allow them to basically entertain a large regiment of reading the word, getting to know the word, and then a few years later go back and test their intelligence quotients.

By the way, it's interesting, a lot of people say your IQ numbers don't really change with time, your IQ is your IQ and that's what you've been given with. I actually have a theory, and allow me to pontificate a little bit, that as you start growing closer and closer and closer to the Lord, your IQ increases. I do believe that your intelligence quotient increases substantially because as you open yourself up to the creator of the universe, the creator of the universe begins to open you up in ways that you would not even begin to imagine.

I think there's some really powerful stuff to that, which is why I think that when you look at all the different trades that are out there and you look at the things that people do, people that really truly love the Lord that are really walking with the Lord, they're going to be the best at their trades. They are. You don't even have to look at the trades. You can look at law enforcement officers or lawyers or you could look at somebody who for a living they go and they take out trash or whatever it might be that you do.

All this work is honorable, and if you're walking with the Lord and you're truly being inspired by him, you will be the person who expresses ingenuity in all that you do and you will be better and better at as you do it because God's gifting upon you will increase and so will your intelligence. As you grow in the Lord, you become more like him and your insight begins to grow, your understanding begins to grow, and I think it's a really interesting thing as you think about how God has changed those things a lot.

He got told not to write it down, and then verse 5 it says, "And the angel which I saw stand upon the sea and upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven and swore by him that liveth forever and ever, who created heaven and the things that therein are, and the earth and the things that therein are, and the sea and the things that therein are, that there should be time no longer." It's interesting because this is another interesting thing and this is kind of why I have a difficult time with it.

There is an argument that says that this guy swearing, whoever this angel is, is him swearing upon himself because there is nothing greater than himself to swear on. The book of Hebrews actually gives us that, that God swears by his own name because there is no name greater than himself to swear on and that could exactly be what's happening here. I'm not completely convinced of it. But what is interesting is the swearing that he does when he makes this very stern promise is he says that there should be time no longer.

In other words, there's not going to be any time any longer. Now, I think this is a bad translation, I think the translation doesn't do it justice because a lot of people will do Bible studies on how God is going to destroy time and the dimension of time is going to be gone at this point. No. What he's actually saying here and the way that it should be translated is time's up. In other words, things that are going to happen are going to happen quickly from this point. It's going to happen immediately. It's going to happen right away.

By the way, I do think that it is important to understand the events that we're reading about, thirty years ago could have never happened, forty years ago could have never happened because we wouldn't have had the technology to make it happen. We'll see that when we get into the discussion of the two witnesses next week, but it is interesting to think about how all of this is structured and to understand this basically it means when this declaration is made, whether it be an angel or whether it be Jesus himself that makes this declaration, it means basically time's up.

We're not going to have much time left. It's over. Everything's going to start happening immediately. And if there's one thing we learned from everything that happened with COVID in the last couple of years, we learned how fast things can change. We learned how immediate things can change. Isn't it funny how that works? Literally one week you're sitting and if I told you that there would be cities around the country that would burn themselves down to the ground and then have people come into those cities after burning a police department down to the ground and renaming the city, you would look at me and you would say, "You're a nut, James."

Or if I went to you and I said, "You know what? 160 countries are just going to shut down right away." You would look at me and you'd go, "That's nuts. There's no way that that could happen." But we saw it all happen. Not only did we see it all happen, we watched how quick it could happen. We watched how fast things could change. We watched how quickly, how dramatically things could change. And we're warned, we're told yet once again God has made it very clear to us. He's said it, "I'm going to do what I say I'm going to do."

And here in Revelation chapter 10, it's a little scary for those that are on the earth because basically Jesus is saying time's up. He's not saying I'm throwing time out the door, he's saying time's up. It's over. You don't have any time anymore. It's a wrap. And that's kind of a scary declaration to make. So he says in verse 7, "But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel when he shall begin to sound, the mystery of God should be finished as he hath declared to his servants the prophets. And the voice which I heard from heaven spoke unto me again and said, 'Go take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel which standeth upon the sea and upon the earth.'"

So we'll talk about what he tells him to do with the scroll in just a second. But let me just say what he says here with the seventh angel. He says that in the days of the voice of the seven angel when he shall begin to sound what? The mystery of God should be finished as he hath declared unto his servants the prophets. This is so interesting because I just talked about this. You guys know that when the prophets wrote the prophecies that they wrote, they didn't know what they were saying. In many cases they were writing about events that they had no idea were going to take place.

They didn't even understand the construct of the words that they were putting down on parchment or on some kind of scroll. They had no idea what those words would mean. There were some prophets, one that I can think of namely right now, who actually prophesied about a king that did not exist by name. Prophesied about a king by name hundreds of years before the king came on the scene. And we all know about that story. We know about the story of these prophets that did these things, how the word of God came to life.

As a matter of fact, it's interesting because Daniel takes the very words of the prophet Isaiah and brings it to the king that Isaiah prophesied about and said, "This is talking about you in the Bible." And God had named him by name. Can you imagine what it would have been to have been a person like Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel or any of these prophets that God tells them something and they write it and they have no idea what type of weight what they write bears? Imagine this guy's writing about a king that did not exist until hundreds of years later and yet God spoke to him.

So when it talks about the mystery of God being revealed through these prophets, understand the picture that it's talking about here. And by the way, I think it is very interesting when it talks about the completion of the mystery. People talk about mystery as though it's an inspector, like you're talking about a detective who's going around trying to solve the mystery. That's not what this word mystery means. Mystery means information that you would never have had unless it were revealed to you.

It's not information that's obtainable by you being an investigator. It's information that is obtainable by it being revealed to you and what's pretty substantial is as you investigate the word of God you will find the revelation of those mysteries because God has revealed it to us in his word. But there will come a point in time where there'll be certain things that we don't understand that we will eventually understand that God's word will reveal to us. I think about the many writings of the prophets. I mean, go back and just read the end of Isaiah 52 into 53.

You would think that Isaiah was there when the crucifixion had taken place. Or when you start reading the many prophecies of Daniel and the things that he writes and you begin to realize, oh my goodness, what in the world? He must have been completely just—it's almost like he was transported into the future and he was writing about it, especially when you start getting into all of the different stories of what happened closer to his time period. It's amazing. You guys should read or listen to my teachings from Daniel 9 all the way on.

It would blow your mind to see the kind of prophecies about the near future being fulfilled that Daniel would have never known what he was talking about. Same thing as Ezekiel. I mean can you imagine what Ezekiel was thinking when he was writing Ezekiel 37? People coming back to Israel in unbelief as he's beginning to put all these thoughts down in Ezekiel 36 and 37. Or what about when you get into 38, 39? He has no idea what's going on here. Now as we're getting closer to that time it makes a lot of sense.

The idea here that the Bible is giving us what John is telling us that he's witnessing is he's basically saying that these mysteries are going to in essence be finished because of the words of the prophets and I think that that's a very important thing. So what does John get told to do with this little book? Verse 9: "And I went unto the angel and said unto him, 'Give me the little book,' and he said unto me, 'Take it and eat it up and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.' And I took the little book out of the angel's hand and ate it up, and it was in my mouth sweet as honey and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter. And he said unto me, 'Thou must prophesy again before many peoples and nations and tongues and kings.'"

Okay, so this is pretty heavy. He gets told to eat this scroll. Now I have heard many people teach that when he talks about eating the scroll then it's a figurative piece of terminology because it follows along with the same kind of English precept where we walk around basically saying, "I just ate that book up, it was just so great." The problem is if you don't understand the construct of the culture that surrounds the Greek language or the Aramaic language, you would never use a term like that connotative of what happens when you read something.

That's terminology that we've adapted in the 21st century. It's not terminology that we did use back then. What happened here is John literally ate the scroll. He did. He ate it. And there are some very significant things here because John actually not only talks about the fact that he ate it, he talked about how it tasted when it entered his mouth, he talked about what it did when it was in his belly. We do not want to lose sight of what actually happened. John ate this scroll and whatever this scroll was, this scroll had something to do with the word of God being declared about what the future was going to be.

It is really funny because when you talk about him actually internalizing it, here's the message that you get from John eating the scroll. Think about this. What kind of lesson are you going to get out of some guy eating a little scroll? It doesn't even make sense. Well, the sense is powerful because if you think about it, if the words that are in that scroll or on that scroll are the word of God, which we know that that's the case because it tells us that, if the declarations of that scroll are powerful concerning what we should know in the future and what we know about mankind, then think about it.

As John eats it, it's first sweet in his mouth, but then it becomes bitter in his stomach, which means this. The word of God does exactly that for us. If you think about the declarations that God makes for the future, for those of us that are believers, for those of us that take it in, you have to understand it is very sweet to our mouths. We hear the word of God, we're excited about the word of God, it's really powerful. We love listening to the word of God being taught to us. Oftentimes we have these emotional experiences as we take in the word of God and it can be a very sweet thing.

But sometimes, it can leave a very sour feeling in our stomachs. Why? Because as we begin to digest it, we begin to internalize it. Do you know what it does? It shakes us up a little bit, doesn't it? It causes us to think differently about the way we live our lives. It forces us to move in a direction that we never thought we would move. It makes us sick to our stomach because it causes us to realize how broken we are, how messed up we are, and how real God is. And so the idea that we walk away with when we look at this is as we take in the word of God, what are we supposed to do?

We're supposed to recognize the power that it has in our lives to give us all the things that we need that pertain to life and godliness. And so the things that we learn from internalizing God's word is how radically it can change us. And folks, I can attest to this. I've never been told by God to eat my Bible, and I've eaten a lot of things but I've never done that. And I've never been told by God to do anything like that, but I can identify with the emotion that John is experiencing and the physiological feeling he's experiencing.

Because as I internalize the word of God, as sweet as it is to my mouth at times, there are many times that when it goes past the superficial. Many times I hear it, it's soothing to my ears. There's something very comforting about reading the word of God especially considering the upbringing that I have and how the word of God was always central in my life and my family's life, my parents' life, and everything that was about our lives. When I hear the word of God it's very soothing to me, like there's something about it that's very sweet. But when I take time to internalize it, it doesn't feel good.

And by the way, I can just tell you this right now as a pastor: there are certain passages that I just don't like to teach. And the reason why I don't like to teach them is because God makes me internalize them when I teach them. And when I internalize them, you know what it does? It stirs me up, and it's not in a good way sometimes. I mean it's always in a good way, but for me the way it makes me feel sometimes is not in a good way. And the idea behind it is because it's convicting me, it's dealing with me, it's confronting me, it's making me face things that I don't want to face. And that's what the word of God does.

So this is pretty powerful because John, his stomach is getting sour about what he's about to see in the future. The word of God has been given to him and what he's going to see would make anybody's stomach sour. It's not going to be good. And here's the thing, ready? We've done this before, we'll do the exercise again. One, two, three, praise the Lord! Say that with me. Praise the Lord that we won't be here for this! Praise God because we're delivered. And the thing that's wonderful about all of this is we can allow the word of God to change us as we internalize it and let God radically, dramatically do something in our lives and in our hearts. Amen?

Guest (Male): You're listening to Pastor James Kaddis on Light on the Hill. He'll be right back with more. As we go through this study of Revelation, there may come a time when you miss a message or would just like to hear a program again. If so, visit lightonthehillradio.com and click on radio, or listen through our app. We have a Light on the Hill app available for iPhone and Android users. Just search for Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.

Light on the Hill is heard all around the world and it takes a team to bring these shows to the radio and internet. With your help, we're able to reach people with the truth of God's word at a time when they really need to hear it. You can donate today at lightonthehillradio.com. You can also give through our Light on the Hill app. As we're going through Revelation, this is a great time to mention Pastor James's new book entitled *The Last Book*. It will share what you need to know about Revelation, the rapture, and the end times.

This guide to Revelation is part one of two and you can order it today at lightonthehillradio.com or at amazon.com. We hope you'll join our online communities. You'll find James Kaddis on YouTube, Rumble, and Instagram. You can also hear our weekly prophecy show, *Countdown to Eternity*, wherever you get your podcasts and at countdown2eternity.com. Let's close our time now in prayer.

James Kaddis: Father in heaven, we just thank you, Lord, for your word and we thank you for the insight that we gain, Lord, knowing what your word has to say to us. Thank you, Father, for all that we've learned from it and all that you've taught us. I pray that you would strengthen our hearts and our minds, Lord, that you would cause us to understand and know the things, Lord, that you would have for us, that we would grow in you, Lord, that we would learn of you, and that we would experience you more on a deeper level. So Lord, we just love you and we thank you. Go before us, Lord, as we partake in communion, and we ask these things in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

Guest (Male): Next time on Light on the Hill, we'll hear about the power of two witnesses who come onto the scene in Revelation chapter 11. This program is brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.