Eyes of Fire - Part 1

**Jim Scudder, Jr.** (0:03)
The first three chapters of Revelation are dealing with the church and then gone.
Why? Again, it's because I believe the rapture is coming before the seven year tribulation period.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:22)
Welcome to InGrace with Jim Scudder, the senior pastor of Quentin Road Baptist Church in suburban Chicago. He is the author of Why Life Hurts, Healing Hurt and co-author of Evangelism Made Simple.

**Jim Scudder, Jr.** (0:37)
Hi, this is Pastor Jim Scudder. Thank you so much for joining us today here on InGrace. And if you're listening on a radio station, please let us know. If you're listening on the podcast, please let us know. And you can get the InGrace podcast almost everywhere podcasts are available. And you can hear InGrace on many radio stations, our 300 stations carry InGrace. And today we are excited because we're going to continue our series Armageddon's Dawn, understanding what does the Bible say about the end times and Bible prophecy as we are going through the book of Revelation verse by verse. And today, we're in Revelation 1, 9
And in Revelation 1, 9, we start to get a little bit of the setup of the book. It's John, the apostle, we call him the Revelator because of this, and he was in exile. Well, you know, he was the only one that didn't die as a martyr, but he was in exile. He was persecuted. And I've been to this place, and I've been to a little cave that they think could be where he was exiled to. And there's like a natural stone platform where you can almost see him penning what God was revealing to him about the end times on the Isle of Patmos. But today, we're really gonna focus on the one who was revealed in the book of Revelation, who is Jesus. You know, we see Jesus, at least in our mind, as we read the gospels, and then there's different TV shows or movies that portray him. But it's really hard to comprehend Jesus because we're gonna be able to see him in his glory. And Revelation, in these verses that we're gonna be in today, especially once we get to verse 13, which will be tomorrow, it describes the glorified Christ. And there are incredible descriptive words like his hair is white as wool, his eyes are a flame of fire, his voice is like the sound of many waters. And I think of Niagara Falls and the roar of the voice of Jesus. So this is much different than the person you're thinking of on the chosen or whatever it is, but this is the glorified Christ. Remember, he is mad, but he is God in flesh. And so we're gonna be able to see him in his glory, revealed as he really is. So this is exciting. My message title today is Eyes of Fire, which should concern us because he can see right through us. He can see the real us. We're not fooling him. And that's really what we want. We wanna live honestly before a righteous and holy God in his righteousness, in his holiness. And we can only do that by yielding to the Spirit every day. So this is exciting. I also wanna invite you to get the Armageddon's Dawn Prophecy Chart. It's absolutely free. Contact us right now, and we'll send it to you 1-800-78-GRACE, 1-800-78-GRACE, or go to our website ingraceradio.com.
This is an epic study, because we're talking about the future. How are we to know the future? Because we are finite beings. We don't have the insight into what's going to happen in the next five minutes, let alone the next five years or the next 500 years. But we serve and love and know an infinite God who is outside of time, and he does know the past, the present, and the future. And we're gonna talk about the future. We're gonna talk about Jesus Christ being revealed. And today, we will learn a lot more about the way the glorified Christ looks. We often think of Jesus as very white, very hippie hair, kind of wimpy. What we're gonna see today is anything but what we normally think of. I don't think he looked like that when he was on this earth. I think he had more tanned skin right in the middle, probably, of the pigment that we all have. We all share the same really skin color. We just have different shades of brown. I think he would have probably been right smack dab in the middle. I don't think he would have had long flowing straight hair. I think he would have had a shorter hair. He would have had a beard and he would have been someone that wouldn't necessarily stand out to you physically, but his essence would. The way that he spoke would stand out. The way that he would look at you would stand out. We're going to talk about one of the features that is revealed to us about the glorified Christ today, and that are his eyes. And it's described as Eyes of Fire. So as we look at the Lord Jesus and as we think about those eyes, I started to think about eyes. You know, the human eye is very different than animal eyes. And anytime they draw the kind of the ape-like creature that they say that we evolved from, by the way, if you teach people that we came from apes, we're going to act like animals. And we wonder why kids are shooting kids in schools. It's because the schools have been teaching the kids that we are ancestors of animals.