Transcript
We are going to the capstone of the Bible. The book of Revelation is not only the end book in your Bible. But when historians in Oxford, England, and Cambridge began reassembling the manuscripts, there were 25,000 Greek manuscripts, they began looking at what we call the post-apostolic fathers, the early pastors. We're talking about the 3rd century, the 2nd century, the 3rd century on. They started collecting their sermons, translating them, and making indexes of them. That's what those scholars do. Do you know what they found? They found that they could reconstruct books of the Bible from the quotations in the sermons to see what version of the Bible they were teaching from. Do you understand what I mean? Think about that.
I'm going to quote verses. I was just in here with Daniel. You notice he quoted many verses. They started taking out of these recorded sermons, all the verses that were read, discussed, and taught on. Guess what? They couldn't get a complete copy of Genesis, so those early teachers didn't teach on every verse of Genesis in the extent of their sermons. They couldn't even get a complete copy of the book of Romans or any single Gospel, not even John. But guess what? What book of the Bible do you think was in the Early Church fathers' sermons? I'm talking about John Chrysostom, if you've ever heard of him, the pastor in Constantinople. Do you know what book of the Bible every single verse was taught from, read aloud, and explained? That one. Isn't that interesting? Did you know this is the favorite book of the Early Church? This was the favorite book of the suffering Christians.
Nowadays it's not. It's the most well-known book in the Bible. Do you know why? There's one word in Revelation that you'll hear on the news, if not every day, every week. It's only mentioned once in the whole Bible. It's only mentioned there and nowhere else in the world, yet everybody in the world has heard it. It's the word armageddon.
I heard Elon Musk say it yesterday. Do you watch the news? He's talking about the Tesla protest. You know they're scratching everybody's Tesla. You guys watch the news, right? They're burning them. Have you seen that? Has anybody seen the burning Teslas? Yeah. He said in his inevitable accent, where's he from? South Africa. He has that nice British accent. He said this is not Armageddon or however he talks. He alluded to a word that's only once in the Bible, and yet everybody watching television knew what he was talking about, right? What's Armageddon? It's something bad. It's big, it's dangerous. It's like something's going to happen. That's how influential this book is.
So, what we're going to look at just for this hour, and I'm going to have to watch the time because I'm used to teaching in a lot of places where they don't really keep track of the time. When I teach, like in Eastern Europe or when I teach in any of the South American countries, I'll go for an hour, and they'll go, hey, don't stop. It took us so long to get here on buses. I was just teaching in Mexico. Some of the people rode 16 hours on a city bus and a rural bus to get there. I got done with my 50-minute session, and they said, you’re not done, are you? I said, Uh huh. They said, we went so long, so far. Will you please keep going? They had us keep going. They pushed the podium closer to the window because they had no lights there, no electricity. They kept pushing the podium closer to the window so I could see my notes in my Bible. They didn't want to end. Is that how you guys are? No, I think I'm on hour three. You have five today, right? In a row.
Okay, let's get going, or I'll never get done. God sent us a plan. That's the theme of the book of Revelation. You heard Daniel talking about context. I'm going to be talking about that too. The second generation Church, the people who were dealing with this book, the ones who were hearing the sermons from this book, the most preached book in the Early Church, they were looking at their world, and it was very confusing to them. It appeared God was not winning. That's the context of this book. It looked like Rome was winning. Rome was getting bigger and bigger. It was enslaving everybody in its path. The Roman leaders were proud and cruel. They had witchcraft, open satanic worship, and Christians needed hope.
Now, this little chart, you can't see it very well. Thank you for letting me borrow your laser here. This is Jesus's ascension. He was crucified around 30 A.D. We call the first generation Church from 30 to 60 A.D. By the 60 A.D. mark, the Gospels and epistles were finished and spread widely. But look at this, Peter Paul, and most of the apostles in the sixties are gone. Dead. Hunted down by Rome and barbarians outside of Rome when the missionary tripped away.
Now we're in the second generation Church. By A.D. 70, Jerusalem was destroyed, and a million Jews were massacred. It's pre-Holocaust. Hitler killed 6 million, the Romans did one. They killed and enslaved everybody they could get their hands on of the Jews in Israel. Do you know what they did with most of them? They shipped them to Alexandria. Then they shipped them from Alexandria to Rome, and it was Jewish, 100,000 Jewish men, who built the Colosseum.
Have you ever seen the Colosseum? In Rome? The most visible building in Rome? The Colosseum was built by Jewish captives of war who were enslaved, and they worked them till they died. If you couldn't carry a block of stone on your shoulder, they'd whip you, and if you didn't carry it, they'd whip you. They died. So, 100,000 Jewish captives built the Colosseum with the money that Vespasian, he's the one that was the builder of the Colosseum, started it actually, stole from the temple. The temple was the greatest repository of gold. I'm talking about Jerusalem in A.D. 70. They stripped the gold out of that place and took everything and built their Colosseum with it. So, every time you see a picture of the Colosseum, think about Christians needing hope.
I mean by A.D. 70; the Jewish people are being erased. Christianity is being hunted down. Everybody is facing the almost unstoppable Roman Empire. So, now 80 A.D., 90 A.D. John is left, and Jesus, who ascended to Heaven around A.D. 30, comes back and visits the local churches. That's what Revelation's about. Revelation 2 and 3 are Jesus walking around churches with them, not seeing Him. He's seeing how they operate when they don't know anybody's watching. Okay?
So, Revelation is the most powerful dose of hope God could ever send. He shares the history of the future.
Now, most people don't like history. It's a little boring. You know what I mean? A lot of people think history's boring. They have trouble with the continuum, the timeline. It just gets so confusing. It's like the Philistines and the Egyptians and the Amalekites and the termites. It's just so hard to understand. Where do the Egyptians fit? Is Moses before or after Job? You know what I mean? History is confusing. God sent a history of the future. A history of the future.
Now, I know it's the halfway point of this day, but I want you to think about the perspective of Revelation. Jesus allows John to go up to Heaven, stand right in front of the throne of God, and when he's standing up there, he looks back at the Earth, and John is watching not what will happen. He's watching what's happening. From God's perspective, and any of you who are in higher math, you know that God, who is in eternity, does not see time the way we do. He sees, the book of Isaiah tells us, the end from the beginning. He sees it all at the same time. Time for God is flat. So, He's looking down and He sees Adam and Eve and the last person in the Millennium, all of them are existing at the exact same time from His perspective, because He is outside of time. He's not in that dimension. He doesn't need to have what we have. We need this. We need a sequence. We cannot figure out what that would be like.
John's looking down at the events in Revelation. He was watching them happen. That's the best history you could ever see. You're not seeing what might happen. You're not seeing what John said was going to happen, and you wonder if he saw it. You're seeing a picture as it happens, and it's written down. God wins. That's the conclusion of Revelation. Christ returns. That's chapter 19, and we're forever with Him. So, God knows the future. That's what Revelation is about.
In fact, God explains human history. Now that's way too many things for you guys to see, but this is the history according to the Bible: creation, the fall of man, the flood, Abraham, all the way through to Israel in 1948. Look at the book of Genesis. Does Mark Strout still teach Genesis? Yeah. Look at this! Genesis covers more space than the other books till we get to Revelation. It's unbelievable. Then we have all the rest of the Old Testament, which goes from the Exodus through the Exile. Then we have the 400 years of silence, the Intertestamental Period. Then we have the New Testament, and then the ending of the New Testament gives us the history that goes to the end. It picks up with John on Patmos, and it goes all the way to the end. So, it's very exciting.
So, every verse of Revelation in your Bible has the weight of all the rest of the Bible upon it because it's the ending. It's the conclusion. It's the explanation.
In fact, there are 404 verses in Revelation. I heard Daniel talking about do you use the center column cross reference. Do you remember when he was talking about that? The most famous cross-reference tool that's been created so far is called TSK. In Logos, do you all still use Logos? Yes. It's called TSK, Treasury Scripture Knowledge. That's the initials for the book. It was written about the time of R.A. Torrey. R.A. Torrey was Dwight L. Moody's successor. You all know Dwight L. Moody, the great evangelist. Dwight L. Moody's successor was R.A. Torrey, and R.A. Torrey oversaw a group that did every cross-reference found in the Bible. He found almost 500,000. So, it's a book, it's part of Logos. You can just open it, and it hyperlinks to everything. If you look through the TSK, you'll find that there are 800 direct quotations, allusions, and I don't know what you could call it, but a framework that's directly taken from 800 other verses in the Bible.
So, what I'm saying is Revelation is the most connected book in the Bible. It looks like a switchboard. Have you ever seen a computer data center where they have all those cables just going everywhere? The book of Revelation has a cable going to every other part of the Bible. It explains it. So, it's very interesting.
This is my personal biblical framework. So, if you wonder where I come from, I would say, number one, I'm an evangelist. Remember, Paul said, do the work of an evangelist. I believe people need to be saved. Nobody's born saved. They're not in the covenant because their parents baptized them and did whatever when they were little. I'm an imputationist, that only Christ can save, and He saves us by imputing, by placing upon us His righteousness and taking our sins upon Himself. I'm an inerrantist. I really believe the Scriptures are inspired. By the way, all of them. I'm a creationist. God made everything in six solar days.
Did you know there's only one part of the Bible that God actually wrote Himself with His finger? Does anybody know what He wrote with His finger? The 10 Commandments. So, we're talking about Exodus 20, and it says God wrote the 10 commandments with His own finger. What does the fourth one say? For as in six days, God created the heavens and the Earth and rested on the seventh. So, you Jewish slaves who are living in Egypt should work six days. Rest on the seventh.
So, what does the word day mean when God says, I created the whole universe in six days? You go to almost any Christian institution other than Word of Life and a handful of others, and they say we're not sure what day means. It could mean millions of years. It could mean eons. It could mean epochs; it could mean billions. So, God theistic evolved the universe in six time periods that we're very unsure about. I always say, what part of the Bible did God actually think was so important? He actually wrote it with His own finger in stone, those words. He said, I made this universe in six sunrises to sunsets. He even says that the evening and the morning were the first day. So, I'm a creationist.
I'm a catastrophist. That means Noah's flood really happened, and God said it happened everywhere on this planet, and it was higher than the tallest mountains. That's why the more people travel, they're finding fossils at the top of the Andes, the top of the Rockies, the top of the Himalayas. They find fossils, squashed marine life, everywhere. There's a guy from Australia, Ken Ham, who spent his whole life promoting the truth of the Bible.
I'm a cessationist, and Word of Life, you probably are too. We don't believe that God is still adding to the Bible. I. There's nobody who says the Lord inspired me to say this, and this is equivalent to the Word of God. Now, it doesn't mean that God's miraculous work has stopped, and it doesn't mean spiritual gifts have stopped. It means there are no people alive on Earth that you can bring a blind person, a lame person, a deaf person, a sick person, and they can lay hands on them, and they get well because they are a healer. Now, God can heal anyone, and all of us know people. In fact, many of us have prayed and seen God do amazing things, but a cessationist has to do with the cessation of the sign gifts that were foundational for the Scriptures.
I'm a maximalist. What that means is that God's historical and scientific facts are true. If we studied just the book of Job, just the book of Job, we see it. By the way, who wrote Job? You probably have a class on that. The Jews say Moses wrote it. They say he wrote it to encourage the Jews while they were in their persecution in Egypt. God wrote it. It's breathed out by God. Wow, I have to watch out. I'm going to lose my microphone. I'm waving my arms too much. There we go. Thank you, Mr. Finchem. He was ready to do something to help me. I didn't clip my microphone. But a maximalist believes that God's historic and scientific facts are true.
What that means is that the book of Job talks about the guidance system of birds. It talks about fish. It talks about migratory powers. Did you know scientists are just realizing that there's a sensor inside of animals, so they don't need Elon Musk's Starlink? They actually can navigate sockeye salmon that are laid as eggs, and they can go back to the very spot in the river upstream where they were spawned. They weren't even conscious, moving fish. They were inside an egg sack, and they can go back there. When they leave their eggs, their descendants will go back to the same spot. They'll even go upstream and fight the grizzly bears to get to the very spot. They know where it is and they don't forget.
Have you ever lost your car keys? Have you ever forgotten, well, you don't because you have digital, but in the old days, we used to have to know our address and our phone number, so we didn't get lost. They'd almost tape it on you when you get on the school bus, when you're four or five years old. Sockeye salmon never get lost. Migratory birds, they'll fly across the ocean, and they know right where they are. It's unbelievable. Every historic fact, every scientific fact is true.
I'm a dispensationalist. Israel is not the Church. There's a distinction in their purpose, in their destiny. God reveals Himself.
So, let's go to Revelation, and I'm going to read it. Oh, this is a scary moment. It's 10:32. Here we go. The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show, what are the next two words? His servants. Very good. Oh, they're on the screen too. The things which must shortly take place. God reveals Himself. It's the revelation of Jesus Christ. God is unveiling Christ, and it's to show His servants the map of the future. So, that's what Revelation is all about. God says it.
Here's the theme of Revelation. Jesus is all we need. That's why He's revealed. That's what John needed to know. Jesus is all we need to live for God in an ever-darkening world. If it was darkening in John's time, it's darker today. Okay?
Do you know why? In John's time, they heard about horrible things from traitors and caravans, but they never saw it. They heard about it. Now, everything good and everything evil is instantly accessible in your pocket, in your hand, on your desk, everything. You understand that. You're living in the most intense time of exposure to everything good and evil that's ever been in history. It's going to increase, by the way.
So, now let's look. You've heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Somebody said that a long time ago. Here's a picture of Revelation. Revelation has seven parts. I'm going to show it to you right now. Chapters 1-3 are the Church on Earth. Chapters 4 and 5, and again in 19:10, are the Church in Heaven. Chapters 6-18 are the Tribulation. 19:11-21 is the Second Coming of Christ. By the way, this section is when you should sit up. This is the most important. This is what the 20 questions on the final exam are about. All of it is somehow some kind of multiple choice, matching, fill-in-the-blank. True and false about the book of Revelation. So, I'll be saying this every class hour, the seven parts. Chapter 20:1-6 is the Millennium, verses 7-15 are the Great White Throne. Chapters 21 and 22 are Heaven and being with God.
So, what Revelation does is it connects together 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Corinthians 15, Acts 1, Luke 24, John 14, and it explains to us a word that isn't in the Bible. There are two big Christian words that aren't in the Bible: Rapture, Millennium. Those two words are not in the Bible anywhere. Yet we spend so much time arguing about them. Mille annum, millennium, is a Latin word, and it's from Jerome's translation of the Bible. So, that's how we got that word. In the Bible, it says a thousand years in chapter 20. He translated it into Latin, the Vulgate, to mille annum. So, it's not in the Bible as an English word, but it is a Latin word from the Greek.
The word rapture isn't in the Bible either, but it's in the Vulgate. It's the Latin word rapturos, which is the word translated from the Greek word harpazo, which sounds a lot like the English word harpoon, and it's the same idea. Harpazo is that God snatches, pulls. Like when you drop something in the fire, you pull it out, or you drop something in the water, you pull it out. He harpazos believers out, and that's where it came from.
Now, let's go from the picture to the words, Revelation 1. What is Revelation 1 about? Saints love and serve God as we struggle through life. John is struggling through life. He's a lot older than I, and he's in prison on a Roman prison colony, kind of like Alcatraz or something, San Quentin or Leavenworth. God shows Jesus coming to him as risen, God, the Son, and all His power and glory, and He comes wherever we are and stands with us. Jesus knew John's address, and He came right to where he was. Jesus knows your address. You think I don't have as many problems as John does. No, but yours are more pressing than John's because they're yours. Jesus wants you to know He comes right where we are. He knows where we live.
Revelation 2 and 3 are Jesus walking among us. He walked through the church, and they didn't know He was there, and He took notes. That's what Revelation 2 and 3 are all about. Jesus notes on His onsite visit to the church, and He looks to see what we're doing both right and wrong. Whether we're obeying what we know to be the truth of the Word of God.
Okay, back to the picture. Revelation 4 and 5 are about the Church in Heaven and explain to us what the Bible teaches about the bema seat of Christ. 1 Corinthians 3 talks about the fiery judgment. 2 Corinthians 5 talks about the bema seat. What is that about?
In Revelation 4 and 5, Jesus brings us each safely to Heaven. We see ourselves around the throne. We are standing around the throne. We've finished the plan God made for us, and we have these crowns, which are a distillation of our lives for the Lord.
The next part, now this is the part everybody knows in Revelation, it's the boom, it's the Tribulation. The Tribulation is made up of these events.
Chapters 6-8 are lost humanity believing in evolution, which denies biblical creationism. So, God says okay, I'm the Creator, and I'm going to show up. All you Earth dwellers worship Mother Earth, so I am first going to allow what you are all watching this week. Have you noticed what's going on this week? They just said that the earthquake that hit Myanmar and Thailand was the biggest in 200 years. Now they're saying that the ice storm that just hit Michigan, and trees are falling on cars, killing children sitting in their cars, they're saying this is a generational storm. It's just the beginning.
Revelation says God is going to, first of all, pull out the control rods of our environment, and He's going to let it go crazy. There are going to be the biggest storms, the biggest solar storms, the biggest heat waves, all described in the book of Revelation at every level, but they're all natural. Revelation starts with a ramping up of natural disasters.
Lost humanity is fascinated with demons, so God opens the pit. He actually lets humans taste the torments of Hell in chapter 9. For all those who love demons, Apollyon, the destroyer, a lot of them have made their way into gaming. They're actually names, Greek names of Greek gods that are demons that people are entertained with in gaming. God says, you like the game? I'll show you the real thing.
Then, in chapters 10 to 13, the lost humanity wants to rule themselves and reject God's Messiah, so God sends a fake Jesus. Satan has always wanted to bring his Anti-christ in. He's had one every generation. Nero was one, Alexander the Great was one, Stalin was one, and Mao Zedong was one. These are great anti-Christian leaders of the world who are very successful. Hitler was one. Hitler came so close to winning World War II. He made two fateful mistakes. One, he didn't take the Romanian oil fields. If he had, he would've had enough to keep his tanks going permanently. He shouldn't have attacked Russia, as stretched out as his supply lines were. He should have waited, actually, about six months. It would've been a totally different outcome. But God was orchestrating that because it wasn't time for the Anti-christ. He becomes the fake Jesus. The Anti-christ is the worst human who has ever lived, and he leads all of humanity to destruction. That's 10 to 13.
Lost humanity believes in evolution, reveres the Earth, and denies biblical creationism. So, God, the Creator, systematically destroys. Now, it becomes unnatural. It's supernatural destruction, and God sends earthquakes, the strongest that have ever hit the Earth. Smoke and fire, red tides. Everything in the ocean dies. Have you ever been in South Florida or anywhere else they, have it? It's where the red tide comes, and every week, a new level of sea creatures are dying and rotting on the beach and stinking. The whole world will be like that. Tsunamis, volcanoes, asteroids, comets, meteors. The final divine environmental destruction sits in Revelation 14 to 16. Then Revelation 16 ends with Armageddon.
Humanity loves religion. God destroys religion in 17. Humanity loves comfort and possessions; God destroys all that in chapter 18.
Now the next three, so that's one, two, three of the seven events. Number four. (When you're old and you hit the wrong button, you end the presentation.) Number four is the Second Coming of Christ. Number five is that thousand-year rule. Number six is the Great White Throne judgment. The whole Earth rebels.
Then we come to the final event. Lost humanity rejects their Creator and Redeemer, so Jesus, the King, returns, sets up His kingdom, and nearly all humanity rebels. The final judgment, they're cast into the Lake of Fire.
Then the happy ending, here it is: Heaven. We dwell in the house of the Lord forever. I think that's why the Early Church loved Revelation: it had a happy ending. As Saints, we see ourselves enjoying God's invitation. We come to a banquet and we sit down with the Saints of all the ages. God is with us, and we're at home in Heaven forever.
Now we have seven minutes. So, there are the seven parts, and it's in your notes, and you'll see this in every form. I'll remind you of it every hour.
The Bible is outlined by Paul in the book of Acts, chapter 17, as three parts. Genesis 1 and 2 introduce an ignored Creator. The Redeemer is rejected from Genesis 3, the fall, all the way through Revelation 5. The coming Judge, that's what we're seeing in Revelation. Paul shared the Gospel with the flavor of impending doom. It's one way you can share the Gospel.
So, I said this to you already when I was reading, the whole book of Revelation is about God wanting us to be His servants. Paul illustrates servanthood by using galley slaves. You've all seen movies with galley slaves, Ben Hur, or whatever. A galley slave was completely chained down and obeyed whoever told them. How did Paul apply it? He said do you want to please the Lord? Make a daily choice to submit yourself as His bond servant. We could study that all day, but it's not in Revelation.
But here is what's in Revelation verse 3. Blessed, and this is the beauty of Revelation. Blessed is he who reads and those who hear. So, right now, I was just blessed by God. I thought about this morning. I woke up at four, and I was reading all the passages that we're covering. I was enjoying it and looking at all the misspellings of my slides. I was getting blessed reading the book of Revelation. It's the only part of the Bible that you're blessed to just read it. So, I just got blessed reading it and hearing it. Look at the last one. Keeping it. Reading is exposing yourself to the Bible. Hearing is focusing on what God is saying, and saying I want that. Keeping it is saying I'm actually going to do this.
The great missionary pioneer C.T. Studd used to have two pens, a red and a blue. He would go through the Scripture, and he'd find all the things God desired for him to do. He'd put a red check mark by it, and he systematically, through his lifetime, would bow, kneel, and say God, I'm going to obey you in this area. He'd put a blue check mark by it. His children tell us that at the end of his life, almost every red check had a blue check next to it. What a servant of the Lord he was.
Following Jesus is for all believers. John says to the seven churches, seven? There were probably a hundred. Paul was a busy church planter, and he multiplied all the time. Why seven? Because to the Jewish mind, remember the context? Seven was a complete set, just like there are seven colors in the spectrum, just like there are seven notes in the scale. When you get to that eighth note, you've started over again, and that's reflective of the complete set kind of thing. Verse 5, Jesus loved us and washed us from our sins. Jesus wants us to walk in the boldness that comes of knowing that we're cleansed.
Revelation explains all the Old Testament prophecies. I told you it quotes it 800 times. It's going to be fascinating going through this with you. Everything that you wonder and puzzle about in the minor prophets and the major prophets is illustrated with a picture in Revelation, and Jesus offers Himself. Look at the last word of verse 8. He calls Himself the Almighty. It reflects the Old Testament word El Shaddai because that's from the book of Job. But the Greek word that it reflects is the fact of the all-powerful One. In fact, in Jude, the word is used as pantokrator, pantos all, kratos power. He is the almighty One. That's where we have security. So, that's the plan of God.
Now we have three minutes. I'm going to cover. [Audience: We go until 11:00] Really? I'm going to slow down. Thank you. I've got to look at my seating chart because you are a blessing. Does anybody know Mr. Blessing? Second in. William Michael. Is that you? Yeah. You're a blessing. Oh, I'm going to slow down. Oh.
Did you know that last year, Russia unveiled the Sarmat missile? You say so what? The people of France were a little troubled because one Sarmat, see it right up there? One Sarmat has 16 independent reentry vehicles that are individually targeted; each one of them can take out one city. Putin said, I have the entire country of France mapped out. I have one warhead hitting each of your top 16 cities. I can destroy all 250,000 square miles of France with one missile. He put it on a mobile truck, and he built this. I think you all know this. He's built this elaborate tunnel system where the trucks are always driving through these miles and miles and miles of underground tunnels. They have little pop-up patches where they can open it real quick and shoot the missile. What they're saying is, there is no way America, with all of our bunker buster bombs, can stop him from his Sarmat missile.
Do you know how fast that thing travels? Seven times faster than a bullet. The missile is hypersonic. Multiple, independent, unstoppable, and each one of the warheads is much larger than Hiroshima's and Nagasaki's put together. They're so powerful. Do you know what that does? Do you know what knowing about that does? Do you know who's building more atomic bombs faster than anybody else? China. Our satellites are showing they are planting missile silo fields in China. They're boring and tunneling and installing thermonuclear missiles as fast as their little engineering department can make them. They're building larger and larger submarines. They just launched a submarine so big it sank. They don't care. They're building another one. They are just unstoppable, the Chinese.
Now, we find them in the Bible called the Kings of the East, and they figure largely at Armageddon. They come from the East. But God says that this fearfulness is what He returns to stop. Do you know why Jesus comes back? Because He stops humanity from destroying itself. It's going to get so bad that Jesus said if He didn't come, all flesh, all human life would end. If you read carefully what Revelation says, it's very close to what we would call nuclear winter and thermonuclear war, and biological warfare. It's all going at once.
So, do you know what that being on the news does, plus the ice storms and all the tornadoes yesterday that swept through the country? Now, the tornadoes are coming further, going this way. You know what I mean? We're not having any problem here. We just have hurricanes here, so it's okay. But all that bad stuff scares people. So, this is what happened to us.
It's a great time to witness. As I told you, Bonnie and I teach in Bible institutes like this and travel all the time. We landed at about 11:30 p.m. at RSW, the airport down here. I had a rental car, so I picked up Bonnie, put the bags in. I said, Honey, I feel awful. We've been traveling all day. Can I stop at 7-Eleven and get milk? When you get old, you need milk. So, I wanted to get my milk. I pulled into a 7-Eleven. By now it's like 12:30 a.m. 7-Eleven, after midnight or whenever, they have glass; the one we went to is all glass, and there's only a little hole like this. You can get stuff through the hole, but it protects the worker. I guess it's dangerous where that one was.
So, I'm standing in line with my milk at 12:35 a.m., right here. There's someone in front of me and they paid with money, but I didn't have any money. Who carries money these days? I had my Apple Pay so that I could just beep. They had four of those terminal things that you stick your card in and put in your phone number, whatever you do with them. I was standing there a little bewildered. It was 12:30 a.m. and we had flown for a long time. I'm looking like this, and I noticed behind me, this guy walked up. He had a durag on and was totally tattooed, you couldn't see any skin. Have you ever seen someone like that? They tattoo every part of it. He was wearing this leather and black stuff and these big boots. It was scary for me because the worker was behind glass. I thought, is this really a dangerous area?
So, I crept up with my little bottle of milk, looked behind me, I leaned down to the little hole, and I said, which of the four terminals do I use? I'm starting to think this [phone] costs hundreds of dollars. Is the guy behind me going to steal my phone when I take it out? You know what I mean? Do you ever have all these bad thoughts when you're at the ATM or whatever? So, I said, which of the four do I use for my Apple Pay on? And the lady leaned over to talk to me through the little hole when I heard a voice behind me, Mr. Durag, Mr. Tattoo. He said, Dr. Barnett, I've never seen you in my life. I've listened to your voice for hundreds of hours. I am a truck driver. I drive my rig all over the country. I don't watch YouTube videos; I listen to them. He said, that's you! I became a Christian in my truck. I was scared to death about that, Russia. He said, I wondered if I would get blown up while I'm driving my truck when Russia attacks. I was scared to death. So, I typed into my computer, knowing God, and he said, your course from Word of Life came up.
I taught the book of Isaiah in Korea to 13 students. 13. So, it's two rows of you guys. It took me over a hundred hours to get through it. Do you know Isaiah's 66 chapters long? I had to reduce it to 15 hours, and I taught it. One of the lessons was Knowing God, and he found that. Google put that in his feed. You know how they drop things in that they think you're interested in? When he typed knowing God, they dropped in that boring Isaiah class. You think this class is boring? Isaiah is really boring, especially for unsaved people.
He said, I listened to Isaiah. In fact, I listened to six hours at a time. You guys only do five. He does six in a row, driving his truck. He said, I pulled my truck over. I came to Christ. He said, I asked God if I could ever meet someone who pointed me to Christ. He said, I just pulled my truck in, I came to 7-Eleven. I heard your voice. I thought, isn't that God? Look at this. What a time to evangelize. People around us are a bit shaken, and God wants to use us to lead people to Christ.
Now, what happened to me is that I have brilliant children. I have a missionary to Honduras right there. My boys, they said, Dad, you shouldn't teach these classes for 13 people. You should record them and put them on YouTube. I said, YouTube? That's only for how to gut a deer and how to fix your sink, right? Isn't that what YouTube's for? He said, no, Dad, that's for old people. He said young people do YouTube and Instagram and everything else. So, they took my class on Isaiah that was in 2021, when Korea wouldn't let me go in because of COVID. They posted it on YouTube, and within six months, 1 million people watched that class. That guy is one. On Sunday, we were at a church service. Everywhere we go, I meet people who got saved during COVID, watching classes with you guys on YouTube. They hear the Gospel, and because they're afraid, God moves their hearts.
Well, what does that mean to us? Oh, by the way, that QR code, all the classes I've ever taught my whole life, 3,500 classes, are on YouTube. Now they've made them because young people don't like to watch 50-minute classes. My kids have made them into clips that are only like three minutes long. That's about the right length for younger people, and those are going crazy, and it's really fun to see what the Lord is doing.
So, what is the Book of Revelation about? Now I have three minutes. I'm going to get done early. I can't believe it. God wants us to know His plan. His plan is that we know Him and love Him and trust Him and serve Him. And that we are the ones that, and let me back up here. We are the ones that realize, here we go, that even though all of that is going to happen, the good news is that we're going to dwell in the place of the Lord forever.
Okay. I have two minutes for questions or three. I talk so fast, I'm sure I said something probably wrong when I was thinking about something else, and I'd like to correct it, or any other question, or anything I quoted. So, do we have any questions? Yes. Oh wait. I have got to get my little paper. This is so exciting to meet another one of you. Our goal is to meet every one of you. [Counting] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Christian. Yes. Old friend. I was going to say, what Bible translation do you use, and is there a way we can get the PowerPoint slides on here because it looks like it's accessible on Canvas, but it's locked. Locked? Yeah. You ought to talk, Mr. Fanning. Tell him to unlock it because I gave it to him.
Christian asked what version of the Bible do I use? When I was a little boy, my parents only allowed me to memorize the King James. So, I have memorized about 1,500 King James verses. So, if I ever look up from my notes, it's coming out in King James. The one I teach from is the New King James, which takes out those hard-to-translate words like lasciviousness, contumacious, indomitable, whatever. You know those funny old words, and it puts them into modern words.
Can you get the slides? Yes. Mr. Fanning can get them to you because I sent them all to you, or at that YouTube site, that QR code I showed you. Every class I've ever taught is also on our website, called the DTBMA Academy. For every class, it has a transcript of everything I say. So, you can actually see the spellings of all these words. Plus, it has the slide as an individual picture that you can download. So, yes, you'd have to go either to Mr. Fanning or Oh, he left, sorry, or to our website, DTBM Academy. Thanks, Christian. What a good question.
Anything else before we go? Yes, ma'am. Oh, just tell me and I'll find you. Biju. Oh, Biju Klein with an asterisk. What does that mean? You're smart? It means I'm an RA. Oh, some of you have asterisks. I didn't know if it was the problem people or the good people. Okay. Yes ma'am. Your bio says that you studied under Francis Schaeffer, and I was just wondering if you could give us a very brief...I'll give you a very brief, I don't know if I can do anything very briefly. I was smuggling Bibles, working for a mission in Germany, taking Bibles into Northern Africa and Eastern Europe. We worked really hard, and we were always under pressure because if they caught you, they put you in prison. It's really something.
So, they said, you need a break. The missionaries in Germany. I said, oh, what do you want me to do? They said, here's a train ticket. Go to Switzerland and stay with a friend of ours. I went to Switzerland, I got to this commune, and there was an old guy with a beard wearing knickers, crouched down, pulling weeds in a garden. They said, your job for dinner is to pull weeds with him. I didn't know who he was, but every word he said was longer than anything I'd ever heard. It was Francis Schaeffer. I was staying at his house. I stayed there a whole week and ate dinner with him every night and his family. It was really wonderful. He's a Christian philosopher and an amazing servant of the Lord. Have a great break. See you soon.