Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies, and it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

We'll go ahead and get started. And when we get started,

in just a moment or two, are we going to be picking up in Revelation or the Apocalypse of St. John?

Other variations on the title, Chapter 9 is where we're picking up. We left off at the end

of Chapter 8 last time, as you likely deduce from me saying we were starting in Chapter 9.

So just real quickly to sort of summarize where we are, as we've talked about before,

St. John writes in this sort of cyclical pattern.

That's true of his gospel.

Obviously, I'm not going to lay that out now, but it's a little harder to see in his gospel,

but you can notice certain things even on the surface, like in terms of the order he puts things in.

So, for example, in the St. Matthew Mark and Luke's Gospels, Christ cleanses the temple at the very end of his ministry

leading into Holy Week.

In St. John's Gospel, it's like the first thing he does.

Right.

So there are surface things that let you know he's doing something different in terms of the order of events

and and when we went through first john second and third john are so short they're sort of longish

paragraphs that it's hard to you, establish a structure for a paragraph.

But first John, we saw he kind of, he introduces themes, and then he comes back to them,

and each time he comes back to them, he sort of adds a little bit, and it sort of spirals forward.

And the place where it's most clear, where we've been seeing it as we've been going through the book of revelation is we have these sequences of sevens right so we had the seven seals that we went through

several weeks ago where the lamb opened the seven seals and different things happened.

...