[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website, globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: Hello, this is Mark Rutland. Before we begin today's message, I have a very special and very happy announcement. Our son Travis, who is the pastor at Liberty Square Church in Cartersville, Georgia, has just launched his own podcast featuring the sermons that he preaches there and elsewhere. I'm so excited to offer this to you because I believe Travis is one of the finest preachers I hear today. My wife and I attend that church and I look forward to every single message filled with application and and anointing. He is a terrific preacher and you're gonna be blessed. The name of the podcast is very obviously the Travis Rutland Podcast and you can find it on all major platforms including Apple podcasts, Spotify and others.
Or you can listen directly through the Global servants
[email protected] podcast.
His new episodes are going to be released every Thursday and they will be ready for you when you wake up and start your.
I hope you'll subscribe. Listen each week, leave a five star review and let Travis know how much his messages encourage you as they encourage me. Here I am in my late 70s and one of the finest preachers that I hear today, ever hear today, is my son. It thrills me to offer him to you through his new podcast, the Travis Rutland Podcast. God bless you.
Well, this will be my final one in the fall semester, but I've enjoyed this series on you've Got Mail. I hope you have enjoyed it. I hope it's been useful to you.
Now tonight, this wraps up the entire series on youn've Got Mail.
And in my view, the book of Revelation does not stand aloof from the rest of the series. I have never heard any, anybody else teach a series on the epistles and include Revelation.
But Revelation is a letter.
It's, it's a, it's actually eight letters inside of one letter. One letter. The whole thing is a letter to the church. Then there are seven letters to individual churches. So there's the letter, there's seven interior letters and, and it's written for our benefit. You've Got Mail. That's what I wanted to say. What does the revelation of Jesus Christ say to us to you in the life that you live in now? I Don't want to recapitulate all of last week, but let me just read a passage for today and then have a prayer and then we'll talk some. Just how many were not here on last Wednesday night? Okay. Several. Okay. I just want to give you a brief little summary of last week so that we're all on the sort of on the same page, much as anybody can be on the same page in Revelation. So if you have your Bibles, take those and turn to the book of Revelation, the fifth chapter.
And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne, a book written within and on the backside sealed with seven seals. And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, who is worthy, Digno? Who is worthy to open the book and to loose the seals thereof? And no man in heaven nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon. And I wept much because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon. And one of the elders saith unto me, weep not. Behold the lion of the tribe of Judah. The root of David hath prevailed to open the book and to loose the seven seals thereof. And I beheld. And lo, in the midst of the throne and of the four beasts, and in the midst of the elders stood a lamb.
Now just notice, they tell him it's a lion, but when he looks, it's a lamb.
Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we pray that as we approach these sacred words that we might do so in the power of the Holy Spirit that breathed them in the first place.
Otherwise we're lost in ourselves and our own ego. Come, Holy Spirit.
We believe you that when we leave here tonight, we will say to each other, surely the Lord has spoken to us in Jesus. Name the strong Son of God. Amen.
Imagine, if you will, that you pick up some literature and you think it's a novel.
So you start reading it and it just doesn't make any sense. You can't make any sense out of.
Doesn't seem right. And then you realize it's not because you can't make sense of the novel.
It is that you're not even reading a novel.
The problem is that you're in the wrong genre when you realize that what it actually is, Kabuki theater, and you're reading the script for Japanese opera and you think you're reading an American Pulitzer Prize winning novel.
So the problem is not just that the plot doesn't make any sense. It is that you're in. You're in the wrong ballpark.
So the challenge for us in the west, and in the West, I mean, America, Canada, the West, Europe, we stand like our Greco Roman forefathers with our backs to the Caucasus Mountains.
And we.
We think in a linear way.
We understand time in a straight line.
We understand the epochs of human history to be stepping stones stretched out across the front lawn of human history. And that those stepping stones cannot be out of order.
That we feel, if the stepping stones get out of order, that the fabric of the universe rips.
We are orderly.
We see that stepping stone, one must lead to 2 and 2 to 3 and 3 onto 4. If 4 comes before 2, or if 4 shows up periodically, all along, it's simply that somebody has done it wrong.
So on last week, I invited you to read the Book of Revelation at one sitting, not to study it.
In America. We're a generation of scientists. We study the life out of everything.
I just said, don't study it.
Just let it happen to you. Read the Book of Revelation at one sitting, all 22 chapters. Just let it happen.
I'm not trying to pin you down, but didn't anybody. Was anybody able to find the time to do that in the crazy life that we live in?
From the front row to the back row. Four, five, six. Good, good.
Well, when one does that, and even if you haven't done it so far, I would urge you to do that, it doesn't actually. It doesn't take long. It's not like I'm asking you to read War and Peace at one sitting.
It's really relatively brief.
But when one does that and one resists the scientific impulse to put it all under a microscope and dissect it, when one just lets it happen, one begins to have the feeling that this is not what I thought and it's not what I was taught, that this is a different genre.
So I said as a thought on Revelation, I'm not running for Congress on any of this, and evidently I should do. But I'm just saying this is a way to think differently about the Book of Revelation and therefore profit from it differently.
That. Imagine when John says, I was in the Spirit, that the Spirit takes him into a canister that descends around him. And this canister is made up on the peripheral of the circle. Poles, vertical poles, and on each pole there's a panel, and on each panel there's a picture, one on the front and one on the back.
And the panels begin to move around him.
But as they move, the panels themselves Begin to revolve so that one has this sense.
Pastor Joy said when he read. He said, I took your invitation to read the whole thing. He said it had a tornadic experience.
That is exactly what I'm talking about. It is a whirling experience.
But imagine each of the panels is whirling, and the whole thing is whirling.
So that after a while of. And this is a disorienting thing, one sees this picture. Oh, there's that picture over there. Oh, no, here it is over here. Wait, no, it looks different over here. Here it is here. Here it is there.
One cannot take an experience like that and stretch it out and make it be orderly.
It is an experience not written by a Western theology professor. It was experienced by an Oriental Jew.
So what I'm saying is we try to stretch the Book of Revelation out on the Procrustean bed of our Western theology and make it scream until it says what we want it to say.
What I'm saying to you is there's the possibility. I'm offering this to you. I'm not laying it on you like the law of the Medes and the Persians. I'm just saying there's the possibility that that's the wrong genre.
That if we could read the Book of Revelation like we're sitting in the balcony at a Hebrew opera and watching the Valkyries and the dragons and the beasts and people over here saying, hallelujah. And over here, people are saying, oh, God, how long? How long? And it's all going on at once.
So when we ask what is. What happens first?
What happens first? What if God says there isn't a first?
Because if there's a first, then there has to be second and third and fourth. And you spend time trying to figure out the order of things, and you say, well, then God, what does it say? He says, I am first.
I am Alpha.
I am first.
I'm also Zed, I'm Alpha, I'm Omega, and I'm every subsequent letter.
And if you take all of them and shake them around like a Boggle game and dump them out on the table, they all somehow or another, at the end of everything, spell Jesus.
Every page is the revelation of Jesus.
This is not the revelation of the Antichrist.
This is not the revelation of the beast or of the false prophet. This is not even the revelation. This is what freaks people out when I say this, and I know it does.
It's not even the revelation of the end times.
I'm not saying there aren't any apocalyptic Implications in the book of Revelation. I'm just saying you might even get all the apocalyptic implications correct, miss the point.
Even if you got those right, which, by the way, I'm willing to guarantee you you didn't.
But even if you got them right, you might have them all right, and miss the point.
So having said that, then there are these series of visions, these whirling panels of visions.
There are seven seals, which we just read about, seven trumpets, seven histories, if you will, or historical narratives, and there are seven bowls, but they are not necessarily in chronological order.
So many teachers on the Book of Revelation make a major point of John saying, after this.
After this. He's not saying this happens after this. He's saying, after this. I saw this.
Because he has to stand where he is. He sees things in some sense of order, but the order with which he sees them, he cannot impose on the order in which they whirl around him.
So he just says, I looked over here and I saw this, and I looked over there after that I saw that, and after that I saw that.
So I don't want to stretch this analogy too far, but let's suppose that you went home tonight and somebody said, what happened to church tonight? And you said, there's a Spanish congregation and there was music, and Dr. Otland preached and there was youth.
And your questioner said, which one happened first?
You said, no, it's not first.
It all happened. Well, you told it to me in an order. No, that's. I have no. I have to talk. One word comes after another.
I am imprisoned by the limitations of vocabulary.
I can't say all of it at once, but it might all happen at once.
The whole concept of symbolism permeates the letter.
God is trying to say, look, let me.
Let me show you things and I'll show you things in words that you can understand, but they don't mean what you think they mean.
That's what I tried to say this last week. So somebody said, the streets of heaven are paved with gold.
And if John the Revelator were standing here, having seen those streets the way he described it doesn't even make sense. It doesn't make sense. You can't have gold like glass.
How can you have gold that's like glass?
That doesn't make any sense.
So we say to him, are you saying the streets of heaven are paved with gold? That we could just walk out, like in the Rocky Mountains somewhere and pick up chunks of gold? He would say, no, not gold, gold.
He's saying, look, you. I'm trying to give you ideas of things, concepts.
So we know that we talked about the appearance of Jesus in the very beginning with coals of fire in his eyes and a double edged sword in his mouth and, and his hair white like snow and, and his feet like burnished bronze and. But you don't really think for one moment when you see Jesus, he's going to have on a white wig and a sword in his mouth and his feet glow in the dark.
That's, you know, that's not real.
But it's telling you stuff about Jesus. The white wood, he's wise, the sword in his mouth, the double edged sword of His Word that slashes one way and wounds us and slashes the other way and heals us.
But he's not really going to have a sword in his mouth, it's just that he has a sword in his mouth.
So we have these things that we know are symbolic, but we sort through and say, okay, this is symbolic, but that is literal.
So say for example, a number, 144,000.
There's an entire cult built on making the number 144,000 specific, real, tangible, mathematical. But if everything else in the story is symbolic, why suddenly does one arithmetical number, why does it suddenly have to be precise?
If gold could mean gold, why couldn't 144,000 mean 144,000?
I'm not asking if you agree with me. I really don't care. I'm just, I'm just asking, can you hear what I'm saying tonight?
So if you prowl through the Book of Revelation with a pair of tweezers and a razor blade trying to figure out, okay, this is real, this is not. This is literal, this is symbolic, I just want to say to you, it's going to frustrate you and you may miss the.
You've got mail here, you've got mail and you don't want to. You don't want to spend your time cutting and slicing it. We're not called to dissect the Book of Revelation, we're called to receive it.
So we have these calamities, famine, pestilence, warfare, conquest.
In what order do those happen?
When is the brown horse come? When does the white horse come? When is this?
Could it be that all those horses prowl the earth all the time?
When I was in the airport, in the Schiffel Airport in Amsterdam one time and I sitting next to a real elderly man and I began to talk and I told him I'd been in Africa and he said, why And I said, well, I'm on my way home from mission work we have in Africa. And he just kind of blew it off. And. Oh, he said, I'm not into all that kind of stuff. So we began to talk. And he told me he had grown up as a young boy in Poland before World War II, a little boy in an evangelical church. He said, I wasn't a Catholic. I was in an evangelical church. And he said, when Hitler began to rise and Mussolini began to rise, he said, our pastor said to us, we have nothing to fear.
He said, hitler is the Antichrist and Mussolini is his false prophet. And the rapture will come before. Before Hitler ever crosses the border. We're out of here.
And he said, when I woke up and there were Panzer tanks in the road, I knew none of it was real.
And I said to him, what if all of it was real and your pastor had it wrong?
And he said, you know, that's too big of a thought for me.
The whole thing is too big of a thought for you.
It's too big of a thought for us. He's talking about eternity.
He's talking about things that transcend time.
You read through the book of Revelation, you let it happen to you, and you think, well, this is happening now. That's happening. One, two, three. And then all of a sudden, here's the. The birth of Christ is right in the middle of the story.
And then it reverts to stuff that happened in heaven before creation began. And then it comes back to warfare and famine and pestilence. And you just want to say to God, are we all on the same page here?
And God says, no, you don't understand. There's no page numbers.
There's no page numbers.
So when he says, I turned to see the lion and it was a lamb, he's saying, in the supernatural reality that transcends the natural reality in which we live, what we see may not always be.
We think it is.
Is Jesus the lion of the tribe of Judah?
Yes, he is a conquering lion, a roaring lion.
How can a lion be a lamb?
As if crucified?
But that's the splendor that the Lamb of God slain from the foundation.
Did you see how that transcends? He's not the lamb slain from Mount Calvary.
That's just where it happened in time.
But the Bible says he was the Lamb slain from the foundation. The cross of Calvary existed in the mind of God before he ever said, let there be light.
So there are trumpets that announce judgment, hail, fire, water, Supernatural locusts.
The murder of the two witnesses.
The seventh trumpet signals worship.
So we struggle.
What are these trumpets? What are they about? What are they announcing?
But if we can come to say, God, no matter what happens.
No matter what happens, the whole book of Revelation begins with the unveiling, the revelation, the pulling away, the denouement, the pulling away of the curtain that hides our normal eyes from the transcendent reality of Christ.
That's how it begins.
And he says, look, the dragon that wants to. That hates the baby Jesus and wants to eat him. That dragon is real.
We say, God, show us the dragon. And he says, open your eyes.
Open your eyes.
So I was discussing this relatively cockamamie theory of revelation with a friend of mine when I was in seminary, right at the end of the American Civil War, and so rude to laugh at me. And we were discussing this. He had a very.
He had a very orderly and precise view of the Book of Revelation. And he was. He was freaked out.
And he said, don't. Don't you. Don't you believe that Gog is Russia and Magog is China? Aren't you clearing that? And I said, well, maybe.
I said, I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying, how do you think you know it is?
And he said, it says they have to attack from the north.
Where could come from the north except Russia and China? Where would they come from, the north and the east?
Look, I wasn't. I'm not a prophet neither a child of a prophet. I'm just saying. I was just kind of messing with the guy.
And this is 19. This is 1971. You have to remember what the world looked like in 1971. The Shah of Iran was still there.
It wasn't. Wasn't.
There was no ayatollah. The Shah was in Iran.
And I just said, just fooling around.
I said, what if there is some kind of.
Some kind of international Islamic band across the north between Israel and Russia, that it's not Russia at all, it's not China. What if it's. What if it's this Islamic multinational band? And he said, like who? I don't know. What about Iraq and Iran?
He said, are you kidding?
He said, they're a bunch of Cub Scouts and towels.
I just want to say to you, where you stand in history right this moment may not be a sufficient explanation of the transcendent supernatural reality that's called the Book of Revelation.
And I caution you over. Putting over much confidence in television ministries that base their entire understanding the Book of Revelation on nine verses.
They just keep changing them around, okay? Now you've got this many members of NATO and you've got this many members of the eu. And two drop out over here, and they've got to add one over there.
That's all reducing this incredible message from God to our manageable arithmetic.
So was Hitler the Antichrist?
Who could.
Who could kill 6 million Jews and think he's doing a good thing? Unless that's the spirit of Antichrist.
Was he Antichrist? Sure.
Sure, he was.
What about Mao?
Yes.
What about Stalin?
What about Genghis Khan?
What about Attila the Hun? What about Nero?
What I'm trying to say to you is your personal stance in history, where you are now, you pick up the New York Times. If you have any confidence at Paul in that, any newspaper. You pick up some newspaper and you try to take some headline and paste it onto the Book of Revelation. And I just want to say to you, tomorrow's headlines change it again and again and again. But the message from the Book of Revelation transcends all that.
God says, you're living in a world that's filled with pain and sorrow and agony and martyrdom. And the people who are being martyred for Christ, they cry out from under the altar, oh, God, how long?
How long are you going to let this go? And he says, patience. Possess your soul in patience. And then other people over here are saying, hallelujah, for the Lord God reigneth.
And he says, which one is happening? He says, yes, yes, it's happening.
Say, oh, Lord, when would the white horse come?
He says, open your eyes.
Death rides a white horse.
He's here.
Say, God, what about the. What about the great whore?
Is that Babylon? Babylon's gone. Is it Babylon?
Or is it New York City?
Or is it Las Vegas? Or is it Paris?
Or is it Valdosta?
Or could it be that the great whore is simply the prostituted spirit of the nations?
That the great whore is beyond some city limits of some particularly wicked city, or at least where the wickedness is more manifest and less hidden.
Will the great whore be destroyed? Yes, because Jesus stands in judgment over every city and every nation and every culture.
It brings our understanding of who we are as Americans into a certain level of balance.
I love my country. I'm a patriot.
I'm a weepy patriot. I cry if the Boy Scouts march holding the flags.
I love my country.
But at the end of everything, the reason that tyrants hate Christians and Jews, because they know deep down inside that our ultimate loyalty is not to any city here below.
I love America, but at the end of everything, we do not serve an eagle. We serve a lamb.
Now.
So what is the message?
If you've got mail, what is the message?
Turn to Revelation, chapter 14.
Almost at the peak, as the book of Revelation seems to rise to an interior crescendo and then coast toward an ending.
And I looked and lose.
A lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with him 140 and 4,000 having his father's name written in there for it. And I heard a voice from heaven as the voice of many waters and as the voice of a great thunder. And I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps. And they sung as it were a new song before the throne, before the beasts and the elders. And no man could learn that psalm but the hundred and forty four thousand which were the redeemed of the earth.
The central message of the book of Revelation is among all of the mountains and hills and valleys, and all of the riders and tyrants and warriors and antichrists that both the earth and the sea can produce. Above it all there stands a lamb on Mount Zion, and with him the redeemed of the earth. And these, these are us.
You don't have to worry if you're under the if you're part of the 144,000. Is Jesus Christ in your heart?
Is he written on the palms of your hand? Is he stamped in your forehead? Is he in your mind? You are in the 144,000.
You. You stand with him on Mount Zion.
You've got mail.
And the male is Jesus is Lord.
He is Lord in history. He was Lord before there was history. He's going to be Lord when history itself is gone, when time is swallowed up in timelessness, he is Lord.
You've got mail.
And the proclamation is, when the beast comes and begins to devour people that you love, possess your soul in pain nations, because there is a lamb.
Lambs cannot, in the natural order conquer ravenous beasts.
But this lamb is also a lion.
Jesus came before. He came as a baby, wrapped in a swaddling clothes, subject to the attack, the ravenous hunger of the dragon.
The next time he comes, he will not be a suffering servant, nor a defenseless little baby. The next time he comes as Christus Victor, he will come as a conquering Christ.
And every knee shall bow, every tongue will confess the beast, the prophet, all the beasts, all the prophets, all the false prophets, the whore of Babylon, the dragon, everything. They will all bow before him.
They Will all bow.
We can spend so much time trying to.
Trying to make Revelation work and miss the point.
The point is there's a hill called Mount Zion and on it a lamb. And with him the redeemed of all the earth.
And at the end of everything, having suffered horribly beyond anything we think of in this nice air conditioned church, Christ will come and set us free.
But what is the message?
The message is one we need.
It's not just that some woman who's being raped and murdered in Ethiopia needs.
We need.
We're not supposed to be marked by this world.
Look, everybody says, oh, it's going to be a computer chip. It's going to be a microchip, okay? I don't know.
I think long before anybody puts a microchip in your forehead, there's a moment where Satan marks you as his own in a way that you don't even see the mark of the beast.
It's not necessary, okay? Please don't go out and say Dr. Elton said we should all go ahead and get the computer chip. I'm not.
Can you hear what I'm saying tonight?
What I'm saying is the mark of the beast may be manifested at some point in history with a microchip in your forehead. I'm just saying that's not the mark of the beast.
It's just that mark of that beast.
But you've got mail.
You wake up one morning with Chinese tanks in your driveway and everything that you've stored up against your retirement is gone and your grandchildren are marched off to slavery and you're going to say, how long, O Lord?
How long, O Lord?
And he's going to say, possess your soul and patience.
There is a lamb on Mount Zion and I will make this all right.
Well, let me conclude this wild mess.
What if.
What if the message of Revelation, that if you've got mail, what if it is actually the summation of the entire Bible?
What if it's that the book of Revelation begins with Jesus in the church.
Genesis begins with Jesus in creation.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth and he spoke all of it into existence.
John says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and everything that is was spoken into existence through that pre existent co. Eternal word. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
But the book of Genesis that begins with the. With the dewy mist of Eden and the sinlessness of God's creative glory ends in a coffin in Egypt.
The book of Genesis, the whole Bible begins, in the beginning. God created the heavens and the earth.
The last words of the Old Testament are, the earth with a curse.
Turn the page and the next verse says, this is a new generation of Jesus.
And then you have the lamb devoured by Rome, destroyed, his body wracked and ruined and broken.
Who would want to kill the Son of God except the Antichrist?
Was Caesar. Was Caesar Antichrist? Sure he was.
I don't know if he was the Antichrist.
I promise you, when an Antichrist is devouring you, your house, you won't worry if it's the Antichrist, it'll be all the Antichrist you want to deal with.
So Caesar destroyed the lamb.
The only thing was the lamb rose from the dead and became a lion who is also a lamb.
And so the book of Revelation begins with the Church going through all the persecution and torture and all the things that are going on, and Jesus in the midst of it.
And how does it end?
Listen, you've got mail.
Here it is, the whole book of Revelation end with some flamboyant, operatic vision.
Do you know how it ends?
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.
So God says at the end of everything that life and history and the horrors of this world can hurl at you. He says, listen to me.
My grace will sustain you. My grace is with you.
My grace is with you all, all the way, all the time.
So you come to the entire Bible and the book of Revelation ends with an almost sweet little whisper.
Not some mighty thing like the Antichrist is going down to defeat.
That's all there.
But that's not how the Bible ends the Book of Revelation, and indeed the entire Bible ends after all this stuff.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.
In torture, in pain, in loneliness, in deprivation, in disease, in affliction, in the presence of the Antichrist. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all in blessing, in goodness, in mercy, in affluence. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all when you cry from under the altar of martyrdom. How long, O Lord? The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.
And when you worship him for his goodness and mercy and abundance, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.
You've got mail.
God bless you.
[00:40:37] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on x@drmark rutland, or visit his website, Dr.markrutland.com where you can can find information about his materials and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
