The Beginning Of The End: Revelation 11:15-18 Series

11 15 The seventh angel sounded his trumpet, and there were loud voices in heaven, which said:

“The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.” 16 And the twenty-four elders, who were seated on their thrones before God, fell on their faces and worshiped God, 17 saying: “We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the One who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and have begun to reign.

18 The nations were angry; and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your saints and those who reverence your name, both small and great— and for destroying those who destroy the earth.”

This is the 7th Trumpet. . . the 6th was in Chapter 9. . . and the next judgment, the beginning of the Bowl judgments, begins in chapter 15

15 I saw in heaven another great and marvelous sign: seven angels with the seven last plagues—last, because with them God’s wrath is completed. . . .

This is, therefore, the introduction of the end of human history, and the judgment of God. The natural thing for the host of heaven is to praise God for bringing an end to injustice and war and misery and pain and sorrow and hunger and suffering and illness and the reign of Satan. This morning I’d like to focus on the three things Jesus is coming to do

1. Judging the dead

2. Rewarding God’s servants, saints & those who reverence His name, both small and great

3. Destroying those who destroy the earth

1. Judging the dead

In John’s day, there may be many candidates who deserved God’s judgment, including Caligula and Nero. In our day, we don’t have to go far to find tyrants and people of unimaginable evil who’s record cries out to us for a justice beyond this world.

Josef Mengele

(from wiki) Josef Mengele (German: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈmɛŋələ] ( listen); 16 March 1911 – 7 February 1979) was a German SS officer and a physician in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. He earned doctorates in anthropology from Munich University and in medicine from Frankfurt University. He initially gained notoriety for being one of the SS physicians who supervised the selection of arriving transports of prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer, but is far more infamous for performing human experiments on camp inmates, including children, for which Mengele was called the "Angel of Death".

. . . . Mengele's experiments also included attempts to change eye colour by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, various amputations of limbs, and other surgeries such as kidney removal, without anaesthesia.[17] Rena Gelissen's account of her time in Auschwitz details certain experiments performed on female prisoners around October 1943. Mengele would experiment on the chosen girls, performing forced sterilization and electroconvulsive therapy. Most of the victims died, because of either the experiments or later infections.

Once Mengele's assistant rounded up fourteen pairs of Roma twins during the night. Mengele placed them on his polished marble dissection table and put them to sleep. He then injected chloroform into their hearts, killing them instantly. Mengele then began dissecting and meticulously noting each piece of the twins' bodies.[13]

There are more descriptions, but they are too grotesque to recite in this kind of public meeting.

Mengele escaped to South America and lived there until he died while swimming in the ocean at the coast of Brazil. He was 68.

Mao Zedong

Through various purges, Mao is credited with the death of at least 10 million people.

(wiki) [Other] campaigns took several hundred thousand additional lives, the vast majority via suicide.[176]

In Shanghai, suicide by jumping from tall buildings became so commonplace that residents avoided walking on the pavement near skyscrapers for fear that suicides might land on them.

Through his “great leap forward” campaigns he was responsible for the deaths of another 30 million or more through starvation and diseases related to malnutrition.

We don’t need to go back even a few years in history to see similar evil.

We can look at this week’s headlines:

Suspected al Qaeda linked militants launched simultaneous attacks on army targets in southern Yemen Friday killing at least 40 people. An estimated 30 soldiers were killed and many others wounded when two car bombs exploded at a military base in the town of al-Nashama in Shabwa province. In the town of Maifaa, gunmen killed 10 soldiers. While no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, military officials believe they were carried out by Yemen's al Qaeda affiliate, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

Two bombs hidden inside air conditioning units at a Sunni mosque south of the Iraqi city of Samarra killed an estimated 15 people when they exploded during Friday prayers.