- 6/2/2025
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00:00Banish to a cave, a persecuted man has a vision.
00:19He sees the end of time, the return of a gentle Christ turned merciless warrior.
00:26Plague, disease, holocausts, oceans of blood, wicked beasts, and a brutal judgment day.
00:35Believers go to heaven, unbelievers are sent to a bottomless pit of fire.
00:41This is John's revelation, the final book of the New Testament,
00:46and millions believe his apocalypse is near, that we are the last generation before the end.
00:53I think that we are living in the twilight of human history.
00:56Those who have rejected God and lived selfish lives, they're cast in the lake of fire.
01:01It's going to be horrendous.
01:03Was John foreseeing the future of the human race, plotting a revolution against an evil empire?
01:10Or was he a man on the edge of insanity?
01:13The book of Revelation has been the brutal book of the Bible.
01:17It basically scared the hell out of us.
01:19Why does this ancient book still haunt us?
01:22Can we unlock the secrets of Revelation?
01:25539-636, we've got to get it set, speaking about the chemtrails.
01:37Copy.
01:42Negative FB-130, code ford. No evidence. We are going to be cleared. You guys have a safe night.
01:49Jesus Christ, what the hell is that?
02:04The four horsemen of the apocalypse.
02:09It's written war and disease follow in their wake.
02:15Soon after their appearance, the wicked will be punished.
02:19With eternal damnation, the righteous will be saved with everlasting life.
02:26The Book of Revelation.
02:28It is both a horror story and the promise of a paradise soon to be.
02:34Everybody is afraid of the end of the world.
02:37Everybody is intimidated about the end of the world.
02:39What's going to happen?
02:41Worldwide, there are two billion Christians.
02:44Many believe the Book of Revelation is a precise blueprint for Jesus' second coming.
02:51In the United States, 55% of adults believe the Bible is the Word of God, without error, to be read literally.
02:59Most people think that the Book of Revelation is a prophecy of what's going to happen in the future.
03:06For believers, it remains an absolutely contemporary text, just as relevant as the morning newspaper.
03:15I'm convinced that God meant us to take it literally.
03:18And if you don't take it literally, you can't understand it.
03:21If you can't understand it, you can't be blessed by it.
03:23The book was probably written about 60 years after Jesus' crucifixion by a man named John.
03:35His revelation came in a series of dreamlike visions.
03:41Many of these images are to this day seared into the popular imagination.
03:48John sees an angel, a messenger sent by God.
03:51A voice speaks.
03:58Come up here and I will show you what must take place after this.
04:03John finds himself before God.
04:06God holds a scroll fastened shut by seven seals.
04:12The scroll contains God's secret plan for the future.
04:17John weeps, for he cannot open the scroll.
04:19A sacrificed lamb appears.
04:23This is Jesus.
04:27The lamb opens the first four seals, unleashing the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
04:33They bring war, disease, famine, and death upon the earth.
04:38The fifth seal raises dead martyrs.
04:42The lamb opens the sixth seal.
04:44The sun grows black.
04:46The moon turns to blood.
04:48Earthquakes destroy cities.
04:50The seventh seal brings a half hour of silence, a pause before the wonders and horrors to come.
05:02John sees angels carrying trumpets.
05:06Each trumpet blast ushers in worse terrors.
05:08Hail, fire, and blood reign upon the earth.
05:14Forests are destroyed.
05:16The oceans become blood.
05:18Monstrous locusts attack any human without the mark of God on his forehead.
05:23And I heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice,
05:31Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabitants of the earth.
05:40200 million warriors on horseback swarm across the globe and destroy one-third of mankind.
05:47A beast appears.
06:04It is all that is evil.
06:06A woman John calls the Whore of Babylon comes forward.
06:20And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus.
06:29John sees Jesus vanquish the whore.
06:32And then, on the plains of Armageddon, Jesus and the armies of Satan fight the war to end all wars.
06:44Christ the Lamb becomes Christ the warrior.
06:49He defeats Satan and casts him into a burning lake.
06:55Jesus rules on earth for 1,000 years.
07:00Destroys Satan for all time.
07:02And then judges all who have ever lived.
07:07Revelation ends as a new Jerusalem descends from heaven.
07:12And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.
07:16And there shall be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying.
07:24For nearly 2,000 years, John's book of Revelation has haunted mankind.
07:29The effort to decode the symbols in the book of Revelation, ultimately, that is the quest.
07:34To find the ultimate answer to the ultimate human riddle, which is, how does this story end?
07:41Does Revelation predict the end of the human story, or does the book reveal other secrets, a coded political manifesto, or the rantings of a madman?
07:54No matter how we interpret Revelation, we cannot avoid the fact that it is part of all our lives.
08:03It influences elections, wars, the future.
08:07People throughout time have found in Revelation what they want to find.
08:12And some people find messages of hope, and some people find the most nightmarish scenarios of what lies ahead.
08:22Perhaps the key to unlocking the secrets of the book of Revelation is to explore who the author was.
08:29A man on the run from one of the most ruthless tyrants of all time.
08:33Tradition holds John wrote the book of Revelation at the end of the 1st century A.D.
08:46Jesus was a living memory, and Christianity was a Jewish sect trying to survive the horrors of the Roman Empire.
08:54For preaching about Jesus, the Romans had banished John to a small island off the coast of Turkey.
09:00I, John, who also am your brother and companion in tribulation, was in the isle that is called Patmos,
09:10because I proclaimed God's word and gave testimony to Jesus.
09:17Exiled from his fellow Christians, John believed their only hope for survival was the return of Jesus.
09:26The Romans must have seemed omnipotent.
09:30The emperors then were cruel and masochistic.
09:42Men of vast power and desires.
09:49The most infamous, Nero.
09:52He ruled an empire that stretched from Britain to Africa and included the holy city of Jerusalem.
10:03In 64 A.D., Rome burned.
10:07Rumors spread that Nero himself started the fire.
10:11To avoid the wrath of his people, he needed a scapegoat.
10:15He chose an easy target, the renegade Jews known as Christians.
10:22His wrath was brutal and bizarre.
10:24The early Christians were being very actively persecuted by the Romans.
10:33Life was likely to be nasty, brutish, and sure.
10:36You had to keep on the run.
10:40If they caught you, they'd banish you, they'd kill you, they'd torture you.
10:44One form of torture, animals were set loose to devour human victims for the amusement of Roman soldiers.
10:51Death was considered a relatively mild punishment for somebody.
10:59The Romans forced their subjects to worship the emperor as if he were a deity, a sacrilege for Jews and Christians.
11:09In 66 A.D., the Jews fought back.
11:13They gained control of the temple in Jerusalem.
11:18It was a short-lived victory.
11:21The Romans sacked the temple, overran the city, and evicted the Jews.
11:27They would not return for nearly 1,900 years.
11:36The author of Revelation may also have fled Jerusalem in the aftermath of the revolt.
11:41Under the cover of darkness, he preached the gospel to covert gatherings of believers.
11:51Christians of John's generation believed Jesus had promised to return quickly in their lifetimes
11:58to rescue them from the tyranny of Roman rule.
12:01But Jesus had failed to appear.
12:05Eventually, the Romans banished John.
12:07John was an angry person.
12:13Hurt, frustrated, and vengeful.
12:20He's sleeping with a rock for his pillow on the earth,
12:24and he doesn't know how long they're going to leave him there.
12:26And he has these dreams and visions and nightmares and fantasies and hallucinations,
12:31and he writes it.
12:31The brutal images of Revelation come from a life of anguish.
12:44Jungian psychologist Paul Watsky claims the book itself can reveal clues to John's mental state.
12:50Are the strange images of Revelation the result of insanity?
12:56Anybody who's living that kind of life is going to be under enormous psychological stress.
13:01We can speculate about who John was and how he was constituted psychologically.
13:06He could have believed that what was going on in his own mind was, in fact, going on in the cosmos in a major way.
13:15What I doubt very much, though, is that he was psychotic in the most severe way,
13:21for instance, schizophrenic, because in schizophrenia, people's thoughts are not that well organized,
13:27such as they wouldn't produce a great work of literature, which I would consider Revelation to be.
13:31Watsky is not alone.
13:34Many scholars believe John was not a madman, but quite sane, a strategic revolutionary.
13:41The book may be a coded message to the beleaguered faithful that Jesus will soon return
13:47and destroy their enemies, the Romans.
13:52Writing against Rome at the time meant death.
13:55So John may have disguised his message in a secret language only Christians would have understood.
14:03The clues are littered throughout the book.
14:06The most famous, the number of the beast, 666.
14:12Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man.
14:19Its number is 666.
14:21John was asking the reader to solve a riddle.
14:26Who is 666?
14:28For nearly 2,000 years, people have tried.
14:32Some answers have included popes, kings, dictators, business leaders, presidents.
14:41But all these people lived well after John's death.
14:45Who did he mean?
14:46In John's time, numerology was used to encode words.
14:55Every letter in the Hebrew alphabet was paired with a number.
15:00666 equals the value of the letters in the name of John's nemesis.
15:06Nero.
15:07There is another clue that the beast of Revelation is a symbol of Rome.
15:14John writes,
15:16And I saw one of the beast's heads as it were wounded to death, and his deadly wound was healed.
15:24An event that mirrors the legend of none other than Nero.
15:27In 68 AD, Nero tried to commit suicide.
15:38Too timid to do the deed, he asked his scribe to kill him.
15:42Soon after his death, rumors began to spread.
16:00There was a legend which said that Nero did not die, that he would come back at some point.
16:15Just as the beast had a mortal head wound that healed, Christians feared that Nero also survived,
16:29and was in hiding, preparing for battle, soon to return with an army to slaughter them.
16:35The beast is accompanied by a whore.
16:47A symbol that clearly represents Rome.
16:52John writes,
16:53The whore fornicates with the kings of the earth.
16:57On her forehead, words.
17:00Mystery.
17:01Babylon.
17:02The mother of whores and earth's abominations.
17:05The whore is dressed in purple.
17:11Purple was the royal color of the Roman Empire.
17:15She sits on a beast with seven heads.
17:19The city of Rome sat on seven hills.
17:24The whore is Rome.
17:26John saw the emperors as sinful and blasphemous.
17:35He exacts revenge against the Romans the only way he can, in his book.
17:43He writes that Jesus will annihilate the beast that is the emperor.
17:48The whore that is Rome will fare no better.
17:50The king shall hate the whore and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh and burn her with fire.
17:59I think that revelation is written for people who are experiencing injustice, and it was very important for them to know that evil would be judged.
18:11That Rome could not continue to inflict evils and injustices on the world forever and get away with it.
18:17They thought Jesus was going to topple the Roman Empire.
18:20They literally thought it was going to be a war.
18:23In the book of Revelation, John writes of the events that will happen in the days before the Battle of Armageddon.
18:42Disease, plague, and drought will spread across the planet.
18:48Oceans and rivers will turn to blood.
18:50The sun will go black.
18:52A massive earthquake will destroy cities.
18:56And then, Satan will gather the kings of the earth in preparation for battle against Jesus.
19:03And they assemble them at the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.
19:07This is Armageddon.
19:12It is an actual place 50 miles from Jerusalem in the Jezreel Valley in Israel.
19:19The name Armageddon comes from Megiddo.
19:23In the original Hebrew, it's Har Megiddo, which means mountain of Megiddo.
19:29And from Har Megiddo, we get Har Megiddon, and from there, Armageddon.
19:34When John wrote Revelation, Megiddo was occupied by his mortal enemy, the Romans.
19:44We've got one of the largest Roman legions in all of the Holy Land parked and ready for battle.
19:52It made perfect sense for John to locate this battle between good and evil at Megiddo.
19:58Thirty-four times, armies have waged war in Megiddo.
20:06In Revelation, the corpses of Satan's army will bloody these fields again.
20:11So here we're at the site of Megiddo, biblical Armageddon, the battle between good and evil.
20:30We are told that the kings of the armies of the world are going to come in from all directions, like so.
20:39Jesus is going to come down on a white horse from the heavens, along with the forces of good.
20:47They're going to meet in the Jezreel Valley.
20:51Jezreel Valley is shaped like a triangle on its side with its tip over here at the Mediterranean,
20:57and its base by the River Jordan.
21:00Megiddo is here.
21:01That's Armageddon.
21:02As we're told in the book of Revelation, the forces of good, led by Jesus, are going to vanquish the forces of evil.
21:11Armageddon is going to, of course, be the culmination of all of the wrath of man and the wrath of Satan against God.
21:19According to the book of Revelation, the kings of the world, led by Satan, swarm across Armageddon.
21:37Jesus descends from heaven.
21:41He obliterates Satan's army.
21:45Satan is imprisoned in a lake of fire.
21:48Jesus banishes all evil from the earth for 1,000 years.
22:01John died around the beginning of the 2nd century, leaving behind a mystery.
22:08The ultimate question is, what did John mean in writing the book of Revelation?
22:13Is it meant to be taken literally?
22:16Is it just symbolic?
22:21In the late 2nd century, a prophet named Montanus believed the Battle of Armageddon was all too real and was soon to happen.
22:31He was among the first to preach that Revelation was a blueprint for the future.
22:35He attracted many followers.
22:58They cut themselves off from society and awaited the new Jerusalem to descend from heaven.
23:03Jesus never did return in Montanus' lifetime, but the belief that Revelation predicts the future did not die out with Montanus.
23:21It has spread through nearly 2,000 years of Christendom.
23:25The early Catholic Church tried to rein in interpretations of Revelation.
23:49The church forbade attempts by those outside the priestly hierarchy to interpret the Bible.
24:02Located a few blocks from the Vatican is the Valdez Church.
24:06Eight centuries ago, this Christian sect was bold enough to interpret the New Testament for themselves,
24:17directly challenging the authority of the church.
24:21They wandered from town to town, preaching messages not sanctioned by the Vatican.
24:26For the Catholic Church, the Valdensians represented a threat.
24:39The Book of the Apocalypse is a passionate announcement for the believers.
24:44To resist and to conduct with firmness their testimony without giving in, without being intimidated.
24:56It was a dangerous time to defy the church.
24:59The Vatican declared the Valdensians heretics.
25:02They were viciously persecuted.
25:06Many died for their beliefs.
25:08Against all odds, the Valdensians have endured to this day.
25:15And the Bible is no longer the dominion of just the Catholic priesthood.
25:21Today, there are as many as 3,000 Christian denominations.
25:26Each with its own interpretation of Revelation.
25:29The fevered imaginations of passionate religious believers set loose on this text can produce a lot of chaos.
25:42Late in the 20th century, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo became obsessed by the Book of Revelation.
25:50They thought they could hasten the apocalypse through murder.
25:53A poison gas attack in a Tokyo subway killed a dozen people and injured thousands.
26:04An apocalyptic cult called the Order of the Solar Temple in Switzerland believed a 3-month-old boy was the Antichrist.
26:12They murdered him by driving a stake through his heart.
26:16With investigators on their trail, 53 believers died.
26:20Some committed suicide.
26:22Others were murdered.
26:24In Waco, Texas, the Branch Davidians led by David Koresh believed the apocalypse was near.
26:32David Koresh convinced the Branch Davidians that he was, in fact, a figure foretold in Scripture
26:39and that the final apocalypse was at hand.
26:42And they were the small group of redeemed souls who were under attack by the forces of Satan.
26:50After a 51-day government siege, Koresh and 73 church members died in fire and flame.
26:59Christian institutions over the years have always been made exceedingly nervous by the Book of Revelation
27:07because it's the kind of thing that very quickly slips out of control.
27:10And it's not just extremists who believe Revelation is a description of how the world will end.
27:17Sir Isaac Newton, mathematician, physicist, and biblical scholar.
27:24He believed the symbolic language of the Book of Revelation could be decoded with the same accuracy as any of the laws of nature.
27:35Newton spent 55 years trying to figure out the date of Jesus' return.
27:42Was Newton a kook, a fanatic, a man of his time, a man of his time, a man of his time, a man of his time.
27:51Until the 19th century, the ultimate scientific quest was to understand God's plan for the universe.
27:57Newton would have seen no difference in his study of biblical prophecy and his experiments in physics.
28:04They both revealed God's secrets.
28:06Science and prayer were two paths to the same destination.
28:11That is, an appreciation of the mind of God and God's will for the physical universe.
28:15Near the end of his life, Newton scribbled a date on a scrap of paper.
28:20A prediction for the apocalypse.
28:232060 A.D.
28:26We'll have to wait and see if he was correct.
28:29The most famous explorer in history wasn't so patient.
28:37He tried to trigger the apocalypse in his own lifetime.
28:471492.
28:49Christopher Columbus sought trade routes to Asia.
28:52He also had a secret mission.
28:56To usher in the last days of the book of Revelation.
29:01Columbus wrote,
29:02God made me the messenger of the new heaven and new earth,
29:06of which he spoke in the apocalypse of St. John.
29:12He hoped to discover a westward route to the Middle East,
29:15so Christian armies could capture Jerusalem.
29:19Once in control, they would convert the Jews to Christianity.
29:24Only then, Columbus believed, would Jesus return.
29:30Columbus never made it to Jerusalem.
29:33Instead, he landed in the Americas,
29:36and the apocalypse did not take place.
29:48Columbus's plans for the Holy Land live on into the 21st century.
29:53You can make a very strong case historically that the origins of Israel
30:02are deeply connected with evangelical Christian prophetic belief.
30:08early Jewish settlers were supported by American and British Christians,
30:15who believed Jesus would only return after Jews possessed all of the biblical Holy Land.
30:23Decades later, with Christians looking on in anticipation,
30:26Israeli soldiers captured Jerusalem in 1967.
30:32For the first time in 1900 years,
30:35Jews controlled the Western Wall, the last remnant of the temple.
30:40That was, in our minds, the fulfillment of prophecy that was given 2,500 years ago.
30:44We sobbed and wept and wept and rejoiced.
30:46We knew Jesus Christ was coming back in our lifetime.
30:50Evangelical Christians around the world waited.
30:53And, again, the end did not come.
30:57So some believers reinterpreted the prophecy.
31:01They proposed that the Antichrist must desecrate the temple in Jerusalem before Jesus would return.
31:06But there is a problem.
31:09There is no temple to desecrate.
31:12The Romans sacked it in 70 A.D.
31:15So, in order for Jesus to return, the temple must be rebuilt.
31:20In the way is the Dome of the Rock, the third most holy mosque for Muslims.
31:26But raising it would risk holy war.
31:33Jesus has to come back.
31:35And we want him to come back soon.
31:36And he can't come back until the temple is rebuilt.
31:38So, get the heck out of the way and let us rebuild the temple.
31:41That's the mentality.
31:46But it's powerful.
31:47It's prolific.
31:48It's our religion.
31:51It's our culture.
31:52And it's sacred to us.
31:57Christian groups donate millions of dollars a year to Israel.
32:01And nowhere is that support stronger than in the United States,
32:05where evangelical beliefs continue to gain in popularity.
32:15Millions of young Americans today believe they are living in the last days.
32:20The second coming is near.
32:21In megachurches like Guts Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the message of Revelation is being preached in all new ways.
32:36And I will trust in you, Lord.
32:39And I will not seek my hope.
32:43That you would be glorified.
32:45When we started the church, we just thought about taking our approach to younger people and to people that weren't attracted to church.
32:58You've got to make it enticing to them.
32:59You've got to make it attractive to them.
33:00I watched you by hell.
33:05And to be alone.
33:11Churches like this one preach that the book of Revelation is perfectly clear.
33:17God will condemn non-believers to eternal hell and bless believers with everlasting life.
33:30I don't have a shred of doubt right now that we're in the end times.
33:35Things change so rapidly and things are becoming so intense and things are so passionate today that something has to happen.
33:46I look at the book of Revelation as a wonderful outline or map of the future.
33:55Many believe the apocalypse is imminent.
33:58I am of the firm opinion that we are living in the last days.
34:04For the believer, the signs of the end are everywhere.
34:07Jesus said there will be an increase of wars and rumors of war.
34:20There will be earthquakes and the sea and the waves roaring.
34:29There would be an increase of wickedness in the last days because love grows cold.
34:42And while it is true that no man knows the day or the hour,
34:45Jesus said when you see these signs begin to happen,
34:51then lift up your head for your redemption draws near.
34:56People feel powerless and they want to know what the future holds.
35:02Prophecy. Prophecy is there to save us.
35:07More than half of all Americans, according to a nationwide poll,
35:11believe the prophecies of the book of Revelation will come true.
35:16One of the most influential apocalyptic prophecies is called the rapture.
35:23The rapture has been popularized by the left-behind series of books and other apocalyptic Christian media.
35:31In the rapture, Jesus comes to rescue believers from the horrors of life in the end times.
35:38They rise in the air like helium balloons to meet their savior who takes them back to heaven.
35:47We meet our loved ones in the clouds and we meet the Lord in the stratosphere because he has come from heaven to take us to the Father's house.
35:58What a great getting up morning that's going to be.
36:00I can't wait to meet my mom and dad and many other friends.
36:04We're going to get out of here before all hell breaks loose or before it freezes over.
36:08We're out of here. Praise God.
36:10Glory to Jesus. Let's be prepared so we can get out of here before all this hell takes place.
36:13With the faithful safely in heaven, the end as described in Revelation now comes to pass.
36:28There's going to be a colossal evil rule on the earth.
36:33There's going to be genocide. There's going to be, it's going to be horrendous.
36:37What happens to the unbeliever is probably the most difficult thing for us to cope with.
36:44I see no hope for the unsaved after this life.
36:47Doug Batchelor was one of the unsaved.
37:00A petty thief, a dropout, a runaway.
37:07As a teenager, he left civilization and headed into the wilderness.
37:11This personal journey would eventually become a desire to bring a prophetic reading of the Book of Revelation to the entire world.
37:24The last thing I was interested in really is Christianity.
37:28So I went through a litany, a kaleidoscope of different religions, a lot of Eastern religions.
37:35Tried to mix them all up and try and find out what the purpose of life is.
37:41By chance, someone led me up here and I fell in love with the place.
37:47And moved into the cave.
37:50Batchelor lived in a self-imposed exile for over a year.
38:03Alone in the cave, he discovered a discarded Bible.
38:08Reading the Bible, as much as I didn't want to believe it,
38:12because I thought it was just full of fables and allegories,
38:14something about it told me that this really is true.
38:19And I can't put my finger on the day when it happened,
38:23but somewhere along the way, I found as I was reading it, I was believing it.
38:27And I'd like to think I'm not gullible.
38:29I'm very cynical growing up in New York City,
38:33kind of cynical about, you know, con artists and what is real.
38:35But I began to try what I found in it.
38:43And the principles that Jesus teaches were so revolutionary and unique
38:51that it just got a hold of my heart and mind, and that's been 30 years ago.
38:55Every sinner is punished according to what they've done.
39:05Batchelor now takes his end-time message to the world.
39:09He is one of many preachers who use television and the Internet
39:13to export the American interpretation of Revelation across the globe.
39:17For God, the punishment of the wicked is a painful act,
39:21but it's something that His justice demands.
39:23It is a strict reading of Revelation.
39:28Only born-agains go to heaven.
39:30The rest of mankind goes to hell.
39:33And it is no longer confined to Sunday morning church services.
39:37A lot of decisions in our government are made either directly or indirectly
39:41related to the religious evangelical consciousness.
39:45In God we trust.
39:48One nation under God.
39:49Many Americans take that to mean in Christ we trust.
39:55One nation under Christ.
39:58If we're representative of 40% of the population,
40:02then 40% of the Congress and 40% of the Senate,
40:0640% of the Supreme Court should be Christians.
40:08For believers who understand the Bible to be God's inspired word,
40:14the Bible trumps everything else, including the United States Constitution.
40:19Of all the apocalyptic prophecies, the rapture stands out for evangelicals.
40:25But there's a catch.
40:28John never wrote a word about the rapture.
40:31The author of the book of Revelation believed Christ's return was imminent.
40:45The God of the spirits and the prophets has sent His angel to show His servants what must soon take place.
40:54See, I am coming soon.
40:57Nearly 2,000 years later, believers still await the arrival of Jesus.
41:03The Bible talks about the coming of Christ being immediate and we have to be ready for it at any moment.
41:10Many believe Jesus will reappear in the rapture.
41:13For many theologians and scholars, however, the rapture is questionable theology.
41:22We as scholars think there's a range of possible interpretations of which a number are legitimate,
41:29but the rapture idea would be outside of that range.
41:32That's not in the book of Revelation and that's not in the Christian tradition as it's been understood for the last 2,000 years.
41:38I think many believers think that the idea of the rapture must have very ancient origins,
41:54that it must be sort of part of Christian belief from the very beginning and actually that's not the case.
42:00In 1830 in Northern Scotland, 15-year-old Margaret MacDonald had a vision of Jesus returning to earth, not once, but twice more.
42:15She saw Jesus taking true believers to heaven and then returning again for the last judgment.
42:32A British preacher named John Darby incorporated Margaret's vision into a precise end-time plot based on passages found throughout the Bible.
42:41The centerpiece of his prophetic system, Jesus would rescue believers before the horrors of the book of Revelation.
42:55Margaret's vision of Jesus' return was spread by Darby throughout Great Britain and America as the rapture.
43:02In the early 20th century, Darby's ideas were taken up by one C.I. Schofield,
43:11embezzler, reputed adulterer, and biblical scholar.
43:16Schofield annotated a Bible based on Darby's end-time prophecies.
43:20It was a stroke of genius to put his notes on the same page as the biblical text because readers often couldn't remember whether they had read something in the book of the Bible itself or whether they had read it at the bottom of the page.
43:36It has sold over 11 million copies worldwide and is still in print in seven languages.
43:42Like countless ministers across America, Bishop Carlton Pearson preached Schofield's interpretation of Revelation.
44:01Everybody say hallelujah.
44:02With thousands of followers, he believed that the book of Revelation was God's blueprint for the future.
44:10But as his influence grew, his convictions began to crumble.
44:15The way we were raised, God is intolerant, distant, cold, harsh, bitter, and he's sitting there waiting and looking for some sin to judge.
44:25And then after execution, he tortures you forever.
44:32That's not only absurd and profane, it's vulgar.
44:42So I'm now coming to my own conclusions, and that's upsetting the cart.
44:47Now here's what I'm trying to get us to.
44:49I'm trying to get you to still feel God, but not fear him.
44:55I want you to be able to approach the book of Revelation without panicking.
44:59Panic, the word panic comes from the Greek mythological God of fear.
45:03Pearson now preaches the hell of the book of Revelation does not exist.
45:08The revelation is the revelation of Jesus Christ.
45:11Those of you who want to do this end of the world freak stuff, go ahead.
45:15Continue scaring everybody and scaring yourself and being miserable doing that.
45:22If that sounds like a denunciation, it's really an observation and hopefully a correction,
45:27because it really brings destructive responses and habits on the planet.
45:32And we can make it better.
45:34This radical idea has cost Pearson dearly.
45:37Most of his congregation abandoned him after leading Pentecostal bishops declared him a heretic.
45:42Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
45:45But Pearson might find an ally in the most surprising of places.
45:49The Vatican.
45:53The International Theological Commission, which is the chief advisory body to the Vatican on doctrinal questions,
46:01is today working on a document.
46:02It will, for the first time in official form, say this, that Christians can hope that hell will be empty.
46:14The belief is that even the worst sinners may be redeemed and sent to heaven.
46:20This revolutionary idea cuts against the beliefs of most Christians who think the book of Revelation is all too clear about the existence of hell.
46:33The fearful and unbelieving and the abominable and murderers and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.
46:46Those who have rejected God, they're cast in the lake of fire.
46:53Hell is a life without God forever.
46:59It's torment. It's weeping and gnashing of teeth. It's no hope.
47:03Who is damned? Who will be saved?
47:09These questions have haunted mankind since before John's revelation.
47:18John came face to face with the final terror.
47:22His own death. The deaths of those he loves.
47:25A cosmic drama of good and evil played in his mind's eye.
47:29If you look at the human side, the realistic human side of John's plight, you really care about the man.
47:38He was in hell.
47:42John asks the questions many ask.
47:45Is there justice? Will evil be punished?
47:48Is there life beyond the here and now?
47:50He goes on a journey through darkness and misery in a search for the meaning of life.
47:59In the end, God promises him that the blessed will win.
48:02The last sentence is, may the grace of God be with all of his people forever.
48:10So it starts with a revelation of Jesus Christ and it ends in grace.
48:16Not hell, not brimstone, not lakes of fire.
48:19It ends on this soaring note of an era of peace and an era of happiness and justice.
48:27No more death, no more tears.
48:30That may be why the book of Revelation has endured for so long.
48:35It is the ultimate story of good triumphing over evil.
48:38But John took to his grave the answer to the question that has been haunting humanity for two millennia.
48:49How did he intend Revelation to be read?
48:52Many scholars agree that the book is a symbolic manifesto against the horrors of the Roman Empire.
48:58But millions of people believe Revelation is God's plan for the future and that we are the last generation before the apocalypse.
49:09For believers eagerly awaiting the end, wars, natural disasters, pollution are all part of the script of Revelation.
49:23To date, apocalyptic prophets have always been wrong.
49:26But if you are predicting the end of the world, you only have to be right once.
49:35Once.
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