WE HAVE PREVIOUSLY TRACED FOR YOU SOME OF THE MANY REFERENCES TO ISRAEL IN THE NEW TESTAMENT. This shows that the New Testament is as much an Israel book as the Old Testament is. The two books in the New Testament we haven’t covered as yet, are Hebrews and Revelation. In this lesson, we want to examine the book of Revelation, to show that this too is an Israel book.
No book in the whole Bible is so little understood as the book of Revelation. It is a prophetic book, history prewritten. It is much more difficult to understand than any other prophetic book, because it is written principally in symbols.
The period of time covered by this book is the entire Christian era and even beyond, into the beginnings of eternity. When the prophet Daniel wrote his prophecies, these were not for his own times, but for the remote future. In Daniel 12:4,9 the angel Gabriel told Daniel,
But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal up the book, even to the time of the end: Go thy way Daniel, for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.
In contrast to this, the angel told John in Revelation 22:10, Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand.
So the book of Revelation prophetically covers all the time from Yahshua to our own day and onward.
Nobody can hope to understand this book unless he knows that it is an Israel book, most of the symbols are Israel symbols. When we recognize this, many of the difficult passages become fairly clear. Let’s examine some of these.