If you visit the reading room in the rotunda where the Library of Congress is, and you look up at the pillars that are supporting the dome of that rotunda, you'll see a series of plaques above those pillars.

And there are quotations from different people, and this lettering

is in gold. One of those plaques reads, one God, one law, one element, and one far-off divine

event to which the whole creation moves. Now, those words are from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem

in memoriam. Probably thousands and thousands of people visit the Library of Congress every week.

Very few people really even reflect on any of those, especially this one.

What does Tennyson mean by one far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves?

He wants to remind us, first of all, of the brevity of our life, all of us.

But he also wanted to remind the world that the world, the whole world,

is moving toward a global event ordained by God, which will bring about the close of history

and the end of time as we know it. And here in the book of Revelation, I hope you've turned already with

me to chapter 5 and 6 and 7, we come to see this divine event as a reality. It's in the future,

but he paints a picture for us as if it's happening now. From Revelation chapter 5 all the way to chapter 19,

we found ourselves having a front seat from which we are watching the culmination of history.

We're watching the ultimate judgment of evil and sin in the world.

We are watching the ultimate justice of God

comes about writing the wrong. These judgments are in groups of sevens. The seven seals,

seven trumpets, and seven balls. And while I'll be spending two messages talking about these

sevens, given my druthers, I would rather just focus on heaven and skip those, but I can't do that.

And the question is this, do these upcoming catastrophic events frighten me?

And the answer is absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

...