“The Theology of Revelation”
The Theology of Revelation
Pastor and author A.W. Tozer
March 22, 1959
Have you noticed in the book of Revelation that we’ve been dealing with, have you noticed how much theology there is in it? Some people have the idea that the book of Revelation is a rather strange, forced book of odd beings and strange creatures, but have you noticed as we went along here how many of the great doctrines of the faith are here? They’re taught, they’re taken for granted, they’re assumed, they’re referred to, they’re interwoven, they’re built in, they’re here, the great doctrines of the faith.
Now in that fifth chapter, beginning with verse 7, it says, And He came and took the book out of the right hand of Him that sat on the throne, He and Him, He being the Lamb and Him being God the Father. And when He had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps and golden vials full of odors, which are the prayers of saints.
And they sung a new song, saying, Thou art worthy to take the book, and to open the seals thereof, for thou hast slain and hast redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation. And hast made us unto our God-kings and priests, and we shall reign on the earth. And I beheld and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was ten thousand times, ten thousand and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain, to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessing.
And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth, and such as are in them, heard it saying, blessing and honor and glory and power be unto Him that sitteth upon the throne and unto the Lamb forever. The four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped Him that liveth forever and ever.
As I have pointed out before, these two chapters are one. This section of Scripture begins, after this I looked, and behold a door standing open in heaven. The first voice which I had heard was the voice of a trumpet talking with me. It said, Come up hither. Immediately I was in the spirit, and behold a throne set in heaven, and One sat on the throne.
The whole universe is in view, as I have pointed out, and the three divisions of moral creatures is before us here. For moral creatures are divided into three sections, three divisions, the unfallen, the fallen and unredeemed, and the fallen and redeemed. These are the three sections. There are the unfallen creatures. They know nothing at all about sin, because they have never sinned. They know not the joy of forgiveness, for they have never been forgiven. But they are there, ecstatically happy in the presence of God, unfallen creatures.
Then there are the fallen ones that are not redeemed and never will be. Potentially they were. For I believe, along with the man who wrote the song, Lord, I believe, were sinners more than sands upon the ocean shore. Thou hast for all redemption paid, for all a full atonement made. But they take no advantage of it, and so they are fallen creatures and remain fallen.
Then there are the redeemed who were fallen but are redeemed and saved. They are ransomed and brought out from their fallen state. There are the three divisions of the world. You will never find any other kind of people or creatures anywhere in the universe. You will never run into any creatures anywhere that do not fall into one of those three categories.
Now, right at the center of all this is the Holy Trinity. The whole universe is there in view, and the Holy Trinity is in the center. In chapter 4, the Eternal Father is prominent as Creator, and that is as it should be, because the Bible begins with the well-known words, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. That is repeated and told over and over again.
It is wonderful how the Bible says the same thing over and over again, and yet you don’t get tired of it. You find it said in a different way, and it is the same thing, but still, it sounds fresh and new. It is like a day. You don’t get tired of the day because the day shifts and changes. It is light, and then it is noonday, and then it is long shadows, and then darkness, and then the sky above, and then the moon and the sun, and later in the morning the sun rising, and the stars the next night, and clouds this day.
So, God keeps the same universe revolving around about us, our familiar little world that we know, and yet a man has to be pretty sick and pretty mentally dull to find the world dull. I don’t find the world dull at all. I find that this is a most interesting world, and you find the word like that. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Now, that ought to do, because that says that, and there it is, and God wrote that, and that settles it, and that ought to be enough, but not God. God likes to take the golden threads of truth and weave a thousand, thousand kinds of tapestries using the same threads but getting a different picture each time, and yet the pictures are very much alike. The Eternal Father is here, and it’s said that He created. Psalms 102, for instance, Thou of old has laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of Thine hands.
And the church has celebrated the Creating Father. You know that old creed, I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And here in Revelations 4, here’s the picture, they’re worshiping the Eternal Father. It says, They rest not day and night. Why, we’ve gotten to a state in our country where people feel that if they go to church once a week it’s enough, and if they go to church twice a week, they ought to have a crown. But it says here, they rest not day and night.
You know, the world has missed it. It’s missed it all together. Lent is supposed to be long enough to be serious about religion, and when you die, when you get married, or when the baby’s born. Outside of that, we’re not supposed to take the whole thing too seriously. But they take it seriously all the time. They rest not day and night, and say, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was and is and is to come.
And here’s why they worship Him. Thou art worthy, O Lord. Now remember, that’s the Father. Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power, because Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are, were, and are created. So, we have here the Eternal Father, prominent as the Creator, and the creatures of all kinds acknowledging this and celebrating it.
Then there’s the Eternal Son, prominent in redemption. Revelation 5, 7 says that He took the book, and they worshiped Him, and they said, Thou art worthy to take the book, for Thou wast slain and hast redeemed us to God. And the Church all down the years has worshiped the Eternal Son for redeeming that which the Eternal Father had created, but which in the wisdom and long suffering of the Father had been permitted to rebel.
And the Church has worshiped Him, and that same creed that I quoted goes on to say, And I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, and continue to worship Him. And in the old Latin song that we have in English, it says, Thou art the King of glory, O Christ, thou art the everlasting Son of the Father. Thou sittest at the right hand of God in glory everlasting.
Now I want to tell you that it’s impossible to overpraise Jesus Christ. It’s possible to become a religious fanatic. It’s entirely possible to overdo something and get one string and twang on that until you lose your hearing. People aren’t listening to you, and they run when they see you coming, if you’re layman.
And if you’re a preacher, they just stay away in droves, because they don’t want to hear that. You say it too much, you repeat it too often, it becomes monotonous. But there is one theme that the Church has always majored on, and when she’s majored on it the most, she has been the purest. And when she has preached it the most vigorously, she has been the most active and most wonderful, and that is the glory of the Eternal Son.
It is impossible to praise the Lord Jesus Christ too much. You can go back into the Old Testament, and you find him there. You find Him before you have gone three verses into the book of creation. You find Him in Exodus as the Lamb, and you find Him in Numbers as the Star that shone on Israel and the Scepter that rose above Judah. And you’ll find him in every book of the Bible down the way through, even in the salty, stodgy book of Proverbs.
You’ll run on to Him there, rejoicing with the sons of men, being as ancient as the Father. And you’ll find Him in the Psalms, in Isaiah, in Jeremiah, in Ezekiel, in Hosea, in Daniel, in Amos, and all the rest, down to the end of the Old Testament when the man of God named Malachi saw Him coming, saw Him sitting as a—what did he call him there in the last of Malachi? Brother McAfee sings it sometimes. He says, He shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he shall purify the sons of Levi.
Behold, I send my messenger before thee, and who shall abide the day of His coming? He is found all down through the Old Testament, and He is found, of course, in the New. Try this sometime as an exercise in futility. Try reconstructing the New Testament with Jesus Christ left out of it. Just try that. Try putting the New Testament together and not having the Lord Jesus in it. Try finding only the Father in it. Try finding only history there. Try finding only philosophy there. Try putting the New Testament together.
Go through in your memory, in your mind, and think, now, let’s see, where could I start? And just for the sake of it, I’m going to rule Christ out of the New Testament. You won’t have any New Testament at all. Do you know that? You won’t have any New Testament. You will find either Christ is in it or there’s no New Testament there. It starts back there in Matthew, and in that very first chapter of Matthew, it tells us about him.
The very first chapter starts out by saying the book of the generation of Jesus Christ. One, two, three, four, five, six words, and then comes the name of Jesus Christ. And all the way through, it is the same. He’s everywhere. He’s in all of this. Nobody can write a letter. Nobody can make a speech. Nobody can offer prayer. Nobody can see a vision. Nobody can be caught into the Spirit, but Jesus Christ is there.
It’s Christ all the way through. It’s impossible to overpraise Christ. And the church that is dedicated to the glory of the eternal sun can go through hell and high water and terror and fears and storms and shipwrecks and still come through whole alive and clinging together and will find her feet and get on and get going again. She’ll never perish as long as Jesus Christ is in the middle.
It’s an ominous thing that when Jesus threatened to remove a church’s candlestick, he threatened it on the grounds that your love for Me is not as great as it used to be. He said, you have lost your first love. And everybody knows that doesn’t mean first in time, it means first in degree. They got so busy and so active and so theological and so social that they were doing everything but one thing, and that was they were losing, they weren’t keeping up their love for Jesus Christ the Lord.
So, if you’re going to be an extremist, be an extremist on the right thing. If you’re going to play one tune, get the right tune. If the church is going to go too far in anything, let it go too far in that, for you can’t go too far in glorifying the person of the Son. It’s impossible, I say once more, to overpraise him.
Well, then, the Spirit is also prominent here in these chapters, in front of this throne, for the three persons are of one substance and having identical attributes. What you can say about the Father and the Son, you can say about the Holy Spirit. You can say that the Father is eternal, but you can say that He’s the Eternal Spirit. And you can say that the Son is eternal.
You can say that the Father is uncreated, and you can say that the Son is uncreated, but you can also say that the Spirit is uncreated. You can say that the Father is holy, and you can properly say that Holy Thing which shall be born of Thee shall be called the Son of God. And you can also say the Holy Ghost. So, you’ll find the attributes that belong to the Father also belong to the Spirit and to the Son. So, the Spirit is here.
You have the Trinity before that throne, on that throne. You have the Trinity. And the acts of God are attributed to all three persons. This may confuse some people. I talked on the Trinity one time, and some Bible teacher told me I made it sound as if there were three gods. He was just tired, because I’m sure I wasn’t that dumb. I’m sure that I didn’t do it that badly. The truth is that there are not three gods, there’s one God. There is the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, yet there are not three Fathers, and there are not three Sons, nor three Holy Spirits, but One.
And if you notice in the creation that the Father is more prominent than the Son or the Spirit, but the Son is also said to create. In Colossians 1, Paul celebrates Jesus Christ, Who is the image of the invisible God, by Whom, that is, by Jesus, all things were created in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones or dominions or principalities and powers, He created them. But it had said the Father created them, of course.
And then you’ll find in the 102nd Psalm, Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, and they are created. So, we have creation attributed to all three persons of the Trinity. Is there confusion there? No, there’s identity, not confusion. The reason the Bible can say that the Father created the heaven and the earth, the Son created the heaven and the earth, and the Spirit created the heaven and the earth, is that the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit never work separately. They work together because they are One, eternally One.
And then there’s the incarnation. It says, The power of the Most High shall be upon you, the Spirit shall come upon you, and that holy thing shall be called the Son of God. The Father and the Spirit and the Son of God were at work in the incarnation. Again, in the baptism, I have pointed out before, in other contexts, that when Jesus was baptized, we have the Trinity simultaneously present.
It says that the Spirit came out of heaven, the Son came out of the water, and the voice of God spoke from above, saying, this is my beloved Son. So, we have in the baptism of Jesus all three persons simultaneously present. And you’ll find also in the atonement that the Scripture says that He, Jesus, the Son, offered Himself through the Eternal Spirit without spot unto the Father God. We have all three persons there working together.
The resurrection of Christ is attributed to all three persons of the Trinity. The Father is said to have raised His Son. This Jesus, whom he crucified, has God raised up. But it also, Jesus said, destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. And it’s also written in Romans 1:4 that it was through the Eternal Spirit that He was raised.
And then in salvation, Peter tells us that the three persons work in salvation, that it’s through the election of God and through the sanctifying of the Spirit and the cleansing of the blood that salvation comes. And in John 14, it tells us of the indwelling. We will come unto Him and make our abode with Him. Don’t be afraid of a plural pronoun before the Deity. Jesus used it. Jesus said, I will send another Comforter, and He will be with you, and the Father will come, and We will dwell with Him and dwell in Him.
So, we have the three Persons here, the three Persons simultaneously present, working and laboring. And while the Father is more prominent in the creation, the Son and the Spirit are there also. And while the Son is more prominent in redemption, the Father and the Spirit are there also. While the Spirit is more prominent in conviction and regeneration, the Father and the Son are not absent.
Now, here we have in this chapter that I have read, the part that I have read, in you hearing the general assembly. Presbyterians have what they call the general assembly. I’m sorry they took it. I’d like to have that. You know, I’d like to call the brethren together and say, let’s have a general assembly. I like that expression. I like some of those big, booming, rumbling, musical, organ-toned expressions the church uses down the centuries. And one of them has been the general assembly.
Well, here is the general assembly, my brother, chapters 4 and 5. Here are the four living creatures, and here are the 24 elders. You know, your associate pastor and I don’t agree on who the 24 elders are, but we’ve not been fighting about it. He’s still been wheeling me around in that glorified kiddy car of his. We’ve been having a good time together, but he believes they’re the prime ministers of the universe.
And you know, I was sitting in Brother Brian’s study the other day over in Toledo while the preliminaries are going on, and I was hearing over the loudspeaker, the missionary talk, and also thinking of my sermon and also looking at books. I can do all three of those things.
And I pulled down a translation, and it said, you know what it said, and I reacted from that something terrible. It said, and when He had taken the book, the four beasts and the four and twenty senators fell down before the Lamb. Yeah? Senators. I’ve had enough senators, you know, and I don’t want any more of these senators. But somebody thought that they were senators, four and twenty senators. Well, it says elders here, and elders, those are good words, Old Testament and New Testament words, and they refer to the leaders of the redeemed.
And then there were angels, and how many angels? You notice how many angels it says, that there are ten thousand times ten thousand. There’s a hundred million to start with, and thousands of thousands, and every thousand, thousands of millions. And since it’s merely plural, and you can put as many ciphers or as many ciphers as you want to on there, there’s just no way of knowing.
But I, as my colored brethren say sometimes, I hear on the radio, they have a little saying. A preacher will be preaching along, and he’ll say, you know what I like about God’s this. And I kind of like that myself. I like that expression. It may not be, wouldn’t be irreverent if a learned professor used it. He’d be slanging, but for a good colored brother preaching away, that just fits. That’s the way he feels about it. He says, what I like about God.
And what I like about God is this, my brethren. I like the fact that God is big and generous, and there’s lots of Him, and that what He does, He does in big vastness and, and hugeness. So, that God isn’t, isn’t small about things. Now, let me, I didn’t intend to say this. In fact, it just struck me now.
But what I want to say now is that you got to watch you don’t get cheap and stingy when you’re serving God. Be awfully careful, awfully careful and watch it. Let’s watch it in this church. You know, we’ve endured. We’ve, we’ve gone through the gristmill and been chewed up here in the last couple of years by our people moving out of the city and the population changing and all that. But let’s watch that we don’t give up and panic. Let’s watch. Let’s keep generous because God is generous. And everything God does is big and generous.
When God makes rivers, he makes them 10 times bigger than they need to be. And when he makes oceans, he makes them 50 times bigger, 100 times bigger than they need to be. And God put leaves on a tree, puts enough leaves on one tree to do for 50 trees.
The average church, you know, with a poor little preacher and a small church board counting pennies would say, I think we can do with the leaf less here on this twig, don’t you? And they’d take that off and say that. Say, now this twig over here, I think you see five leaves. No use to go out on a limb here, excuse the pun, but we take that off. And you can keep trimming back and trimming back.
But God is generous, brother. God gives too much of everything, always gives too much of everything. Think of space. People are talking about space all the time. Think how much space God made. God could have packed all the heavenly bodies there are.
If He’d been careful and kept the tracts from crossing each other, He could have packed them in too. Why, you ever read astronomy and find out how many times, how many, how many earths could have been put in the sun? I forget how many, I always forget numbers, but it runs into millions of earths. You could toss them into the sun and the sun could rumble them around if it was hollow.
And we have too much earth. We got too much earth now. This idea you got to leave the earth in order to, you go off and to Venus. If the right people would go, I’m for it, you know. But the trouble is the right people aren’t going and some of them will come back. But it’s just a vast world.
God is big, but God’s bigger than we know He is, and He’s, He’s vaster. The immensity of God. I wonder if I shouldn’t, I wonder if I shouldn’t preach a sermon on the immensity of God and include that in my book on the attributes. Is immensity an attribute? I think it is. It ought to be because everything God does, he does big and, and immensely. It’s, he’s huge.
And I think it hurts God. God being God and being capable of emotion, I believe it hurts God when we get little. I think so. I believe it hurts God.
Dr. Brown says, you know, that the way to do, to keep God blessing you is when you get out of it–get right back in. Start something else and get right back in. I think it’s all right.
I read an article by a fellow out here in California who establishes churches, and he keeps them down to four to 700 and never lets them get any bigger. Now they start getting any bigger. He promptly goes up to a lot of his members and says, now you get out of here and get yourself a church started over across here. And so out of that one church, he started 10. God just keeps, keeps going.
When they, they could sit back and say, now, isn’t this wonderful? Everything is paid up and it’s just delightful. Absolutely delightful. But you got to keep in trouble if you want to keep blessed. So, I don’t know how I got off on that, but it’s a part of the sermon anyhow.
Now, my brethren, these living creatures, these 24 elders, these angels, a hundred million and thousands of thousands. He doesn’t mention other creatures. He mentions them elsewhere. He mentions them in the fourth chapter here. Each one had six wings about him. Why did they need six wings? And they were full of eyes within. But he said, why are they full of eyes?
A fellow came up to me, Toledo. He was very sincere and he was a sincere man, no question. He wanted to know about all those eyes. I don’t know, brother. I don’t know. But to me, it just means that God just fills them with eyes, that God’s just generous, that’s all. He liked that. Well, now there were harpers and there were crowns and there were golden vials of sweet incense and the hearts of all these redeemed ones and these unredeemed who hadn’t needed to be redeemed because they’d never fallen, these unfallen creatures.
Here they were and their hearts were so excited by the presence of the Trinity that their joy became so intense that it passed on to ecstasy. And it was a chastely, pure intoxication, a bliss so bright and so deep as to become uncontrollable. And so they threw their crowns before the throne and they fell down before the lamp.
And yet reason wasn’t dethroned, though they were tasting the purest, purest ecstasy, drinking deep of the fountain of intense delight, delight in which there was no impurity. Yet reason was not dethroned because their delight had reasonable grounds. They worshipped the Father because he had made the heaven and earth and all things, and for His pleasure they are and were created.
They worshipped the Son, that is the Holy Son, because He was slain and has redeemed us to God by thy blood out of every kindred and tongue and people and nation and we shall reign on the earth. They had grounds for their delight, though their reasons had passed to ecstasy. You see, there is a kind of Christianity that is so theological that it can give you ten reasons for everything it does and believes. But it never passes to ecstasy, quite. These brethren passed to ecstasy, these wondrous creatures. Their joy was so deep and pure, I say, their bliss so unalloyed that they were sent into spiritual intoxication.
But they had reasons, there were reasons underneath it all. This was theology on fire, this was reason incandescent. If we try to be happy without reasons, we simply become fanatics and beat our foot, you know, and try to get blessed that way, the way they do in rock and roll. But if we allow reason to rest on the Scriptures and then are filled with the spirit and meditate and contemplate and worship, I believe that we can taste some of this even now.
Now I know it’s possible to be saved and to live and to die and to go to heaven and be a very ordinary Christian and never go very far. I’ve also seen in a few cases and have read in a great many more, people that were lifted up in the spirit to such a degree that ecstasy took over.
I heard a man one time, a good, serious-minded, sensible, good man, father of a family and a good worker in the church. The man was in every way a man that you could trust, an honorable man, a good man, a sensible man, was never charged with any fanaticism or any being overheated in any way. And yet I saw him at the communion table one time, suddenly burst out into holy laughter.
And he tried to restrain it, but he couldn’t. He knelt and he tried to restrain it, but he laughed, and he actually reached his hands around him and hugged himself as though he would keep himself from coming apart with the ecstasy and the delight of it.
Now we have it here, and if God wanted to send a little taste of us to man here below, it was a man named Thomas Upham. Thomas Upham wrote The Life of Madame Guyon. And incidentally, Madame Guyon happens to be a writer I care nothing about. I read her works years ago, but I never read them anymore. But he wrote her life. She was one of the great mystics you know. But this man wrote a little book called A Night of Great Grace, and that was a testimony of the night God visited him.
And I quoted to you here what Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician, had said. That wonderful, awesome night when God visited him, and he passed out from being a mathematician to being a happy, joyous Christian. And he tried to write it, but he could only write it in ecstatic phrases. He would say, fire, fire, fire. And he said, glory to God the Father, not the God of the philosophers, but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who can be known only in the ways of the gospel. And he wrote joy, joy, joy.
And though here was a man that ranked easily at the top in all of the mathematicians of his time and great thinkers of his day, declared to be one of the three great thinkers ever produced by France, three greatest ever produced by France, yet that man folded that testimony up and put it here in his pocket close to his heart and wore it there until he died. Never did he forget that one night of glorious ecstasy. And after that, he took over and he wrote in defense of the faith of our fathers so wonderfully that he’s never been answered.
His tremendous logical argument about believing God, I won’t repeat it now, but why we should believe God is one thing nobody’s ever been able to answer down to this hour. And yet that man, with a mind such as only maybe a half a dozen have ever had in the history of the world, yet this man was carried out of himself until, like these creatures, rising like a fire, the heat of his joy, the winds of God played over the harp of his soul, and in the presence of the Lamb he was filled with joy and delight. Here they were, too, and they will be.
Now, I don’t say you must know that kind of spiritual experience in order to be converted or to be saved. I don’t say it. But I will say this, that a generation or two ago it was taken for granted that if a man believed on Jesus Christ and didn’t have some kind of a visitation that would confirm his faith, they wouldn’t believe he was converted. But nowadays we just get them in anyway, you know, just any way at all, get them in.
Well, now notice here what he says, every creature heard I saying, verse 13, Every creature heard I saying, Thou art worthy, Every creature heard I saying, Blessing and honor and glory and power. Every creature, John, what do you mean? Every creature in heaven he found that familiar.
John had walked with his Lord and had been many years since the cross now, and he found they in heaven He found that easy to understand. I heard every voice in heaven saying, Worthy is the Lamb. Then he said, I heard them on earth, and he certainly found that familiar because he had been a man and was a man and had been on the earth and was on the earth.
So, it was easy for him to identify the voices of them on the earth. But now he hears a strange sound, another sound. It isn’t heavenly and it isn’t earthly. It doesn’t belong to the ransomed. It doesn’t belong to the unfallen creatures there by the throne. And it doesn’t belong to the redeemed on earth.
To whom do these voices belong? This strange, raucous, dissonant, discordant choir. It’s the choir of the damned. Under the earth heard I them saying, Philippians 2, 9 to 11 says, Wherefore, God also hath highly exalted Him and given Him a name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow of things in heaven and things on earth and things under the earth. There’s the same division and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
Remember, my brother, every moral intelligence will someday confess Jesus Christ is Lord. But not every moral intelligence will enter the bliss of the redeemed. God has said it must be now and it must be under His conditions. But John said, I heard not only the ransomed, not only those upon the earth who love the Lord, but I heard the strange sound of those in hell also. And they were forced to say, worthy, worthy is the Lamb that was slain.
Now I want to close with just a little word that seems to be maybe a little bit off the track. I’ve heard, I know what they say, never tack anything on a sermon, and I don’t want to tack anything on. But I will ask you to note here, who are these redeemed? Well, they’re the blood-washed. They’re the blood-washed, it says, of every kindred and tongue and people and nation. And I point out again that when Jesus comes, there will be nations and they will not be one nation fused together, one smoky colored nation made up of all integrated races. There won’t be.
There will be nations, it says. And when He comes, he’ll call the nations before Him. And we’ll never, no matter how the starry-eyed dreamers talk, there will never be a time when all the nations of the world will speak one language until Christ comes.
They tell us, you know, there’s Esperanto and there’s basic English. And I don’t know whether everybody’s getting ready to speak Russian or not, but brother, there’s one language I won’t talk; I’ll tell you that now. But we’ll never have a smoky race speaking one language around the world. There will be kindred and tongue and people and nations, not one superior to the other, but different from the other. And now the logic of their presence, here’s the logic of their presence, here’s how they got there. They were saved by faith, and their faith came by hearing.
And they heard because there were preachers, and they preached because they were sent. And there we have the logic of missions. There we have the theology behind missions. They came from every kindred and tongue and people and nation and tribe around the world, and they were saved by faith, and their faith came by hearing the gospel. And they heard the gospel when it was preached to them, and it was preached to them when somebody was sent to preach it.
Now, I want to tell you this, that I would never continue to be associated with any denomination or missionary society or local church that would let anything stand in the way of the carrying out of the plan of God. For there must be people before that throne out of kindred, tongue and people and nations. They’re not to be white people from Chicago, but they’re to be people from all over, and they can only be there if somebody preaches to them. And that somebody can only preach to them if somebody else sends them.
And therefore, we have the logic of continuing missions. You know, when the eagle gets old, he gets to be fifty years old, they say. He grows something on his beak here, a bony substance that he can’t get his beak open, and he can’t eat. When he’s fifty years old, he can’t eat anymore, and he begins to droop and get thin, and his feathers fall out, and he’s a mess to look at, and he’s too weak to fly, and he’s dying of starvation. Because he has a bony structure that’s come over his beak, and he can’t get it open, he can’t eat.
Well, nature takes over about that time and renews his youth. He shall renew his youth like the eagles. You ever hear that? What does it mean, renewing his youth like the eagles? That’s what it means. So, he hunts himself out on real rough, sandy rock, say, the naturalist, and he goes over there and he scrapes. And he works away there, he’s poor, weak head. Why didn’t we think of it sooner? That’s what I don’t understand.
But you know, we never do. We never do, you know. We never think of it in time. So he scrapes his beak there, and pretty soon that comes off and he can chew again. He looks around, there’s a mouse, and the mouse said, that old eagle, he couldn’t, he can’t even open his mouth, he couldn’t eat a baby mouse. So, he gets familiar around the eagle, but he forgets the eagle’s working on his beak. Pretty soon, the eagle gets his mouth open, grabs a mouse, and feels better.
Pretty soon, he gets something else and feels better. In a very short time, he renews his youth, gets a new set of feathers, and his eyes get bright again. And pretty soon, he’s screaming in the sun, and he lasts another 50 years.
How long have we been around here, some of you old timers? I’m sorry, I don’t mean old timers, but some of you people that have been here longer than these children have. How long has this church existed? Thirty, Mrs. Hines, 38 years, is it? You don’t remember that far back, but is it 38 years we’ve been here? I mean the church? About 38. Let’s call it 38 years. What’s year, give or take, year between friends? But say 38 years. It’s not quite 50.
But you know what I believe? I like to run down our list and see those 38 missionaries that we got on our list. Not all of them went up here, but most of them did. The others joined us, but most of them did. Now, what are we going to do? Are we going to say, weep on each other’s shoulders, and say, the time of my departure is at hand, and woe be to Zion for the foxes are running over the walls? Or are we going to say, listen, there’s been a hard lump going over our beaks here.
We’ve been pushing in all directions here, and everybody else has fled. We’re an island here all by ourselves, enjoying ourselves immensely, but we’re going to go. But listen, why can’t we scrape our beaks, feather out again, and send twice as many in the next 30 years, and if the Lord tarries. Twice as much money in the next 30 years if the Lord tarries. When kids now back there in the baby pen will be our missionaries. Why can’t we? I don’t think if you’ve got God, you ever have to give up to discouragement, ever start counting your pennies.
Now listen, God, I’m sorry, but you know we only have two nickels there, and here we’ll give you one. I don’t think God wants us to act like that at all. And I refuse to beg, and I’m not going to beg, and I don’t have to beg. You’ll never get me to stand up here and spend a half an hour begging. I’m not going to do it. God is on His throne, and Christ is at His right hand, and the Holy Ghost is here, and the truth is loose in the earth, and the eagle can scrape her beak and start over.
And I foresee the time, I see it in vision, when the 38 missionaries that we count on our roster will have 38 more beside them. There’s no reason why it can’t be so, because they’ve got to come from kindred, and tongue, and people, and nations. They’ve got to come.
Tibet, they haven’t come yet, and they’ve got to come. They’re over there fighting Russia, but they’ve got to come from there, and they’ve got to come from the valleys, and everywhere. And some of the doors that are now closed, God’s going to open wide until you can hear them when they bang back on their hinges. You can hear it around the world, you see. Don’t you think for a second that God is going to let that old boy over in the Kremlin close all his doors? He’ll do nothing of the sort. He says, I open doors and no man can close them. And I don’t think the Church is made up yet, and I don’t think they’re all in.
Now, I’ll say one thing more, and then I’ll be done for tonight. The cause of missions does not belong to the Christian and Missionary Alliance. It belongs to Jesus Christ the Lord. He is the Head of His Church, and as long as we serve Him, we’ll be part of that plan. But if we stop that and get interested in something else and get sidetracked, He’ll choose somebody else, but He’ll have people from tongues, and tribes, and nations.
And I never yet have listened to a missionary complaining about, if we don’t go, the Lord can’t do His work. The Lord will do His work. Jonah wouldn’t go, but Jonah went, and you’ll find it always so.
God, the Sovereign God, will have them there from every tongue, and tribe, and nation, but He won’t necessarily use you. He will if you let Him, and He’ll use me, and He’ll use this church. But if we fail Him, He’ll pick some little old Pentecostal Church down here, Baptist Church, or something else, and they’ll do the work we should have done, but God will do His work, because He says, I saw them there from every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nations, and they shall reign on the earth.
The Sovereign God will do his work, all right, but what I’m eager about is that He’ll let me have a little part in it, that He’ll let me help a little, and do my little part, and work through me. That’s what I’m eager about, and that’s what I’m eager that this Church should do, that we should never allow ourselves to become so ingrown that we forget kindreds, and tongues, and peoples, and nations, because He’ll have them, but I don’t want Him to have to say, I’m sorry, but I have to pass you up, you’re too preoccupied. We mustn’t be preoccupied.
We do what was before us, and we’re going to do it, and we’re going to get it done. But in the meantime, we’re not going to forget them out there, and we’re not going to forget the peoples, and tongues, and tribes, and nations. They’ll believe when they hear, and they’ll hear when somebody preaches, and somebody will preach when he’s sent. Believe it? Amen. Well, amen. I guess that’s all for tonight.