We are in a study in the book of Revelation, for those of you who are not normally with us, and we come to a passage this morning that is the most terrifying reality that this universe will ever experience, and that is what this description is intended to convey. For all those people who think we can control the climate or the environment, or determine the perpetuity of the earth or anything else that is part of God’s divine creation, that kind of folly and hubris looks idiotic in the light of this particular passage of Scripture. I want to read it to you, chapter 6 of Revelation, verses 12 to 17.

“I looked when He broke the sixth seal, and there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon became like blood; and the stars of the sky fell to the earth, as a fig tree casts its unripe [fruit] when shaken by a great wind. The sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places. Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains; and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?’”

Terrifying reality. John is given a vision of the final destruction of this earth, at least the beginning of that final destruction. You can see just by the phenomenon that is indicated here, that the earth will undergo a massive change, and so will the sky, and it will all be judgment from God.

Now when we got into chapter 6 at the beginning of the chapter we stepped into judgment. From chapter 6 all the way to chapter 19 you have laid out the future judgment of God upon this world in detail. It began, you will remember, with four horsemen in a vision that John had. The first indicated the coming of temporary global peace—we talked about that—and led by the man of lawlessness, or the Antichrist. But it doesn’t last very long because the second horse and the second seal brings war. Peace is taken from the earth. And then follows the third horse, the black horse, and famine. And then the fourth horse, death, and a fourth of the population of the planet will be killed. That would be two billion people. All of that will happen in just a very brief amount of time at the beginning of a seven-year period called the Tribulation.

We also saw the fifth seal. During that time of tribulation, those who come to faith in Christ—and many will—the 144,000 from Israel (12,000 from each tribe) become witnesses to the glories of Christ during that tribulation. They will proclaim the gospel, and they will pay with their lives because the Antichrist will martyr them. According to chapter 7 also, people will be converted from every tongue and tribe and nation. There’ll be a massive revival among the Gentiles, and they too will be martyred; and that’s why in the fifth seal, we see the martyred saints who come out of the Tribulation praying for God to bring His vengeance.

Now the earth is already suffering war, death on a massive scale, a fourth of the planet, and then the martyrdom of those who are the saints; it’s a disaster beyond comprehension every way you look at it, and it gets worse with the sixth seal, as the Lord begins His personal vengeance that is being prayed for in the fifth seal. The first five seals have human agencies, but when you get to the sixth seal it’s just God, and this should be to anyone the most terrifying thing imaginable, with regard to the future, and I want us to look at it. There’s not much to say to embellish it, but I want to point out to you that this is not new. What John saw is not new. The Old Testament prophets depicted the very same thing, and our Lord Jesus Christ did as well in His own words—and we will see that.

I titled the message “Scared to Death” because that is essentially what will happen when this hour comes. We all understand fear to a natural degree. It’s a powerful emotion. It’s sometimes an overwhelming feeling. It sometimes takes control of people; and when it does, what starts out as a fear becomes a phobia, and it can cause people’s behavior to change dramatically, and it can create all kinds of responses. Sometimes fear leads to cowardice, sometimes to heroism; sometimes to strength, other times to weakness; sometimes to aggression, other times to passivity; sometimes to reason, other times to confusion; sometimes to clear thinking, and other times to panic. It can strengthen the heart and make it beat faster, or it can stop it dead.

Fear is a part of life, and we all have reasonable fears: the fear of disease, injury, loss of family, loss of love, loss of job, poverty, death. These are normal fears, and we do everything we can to mitigate against them. But sometimes there are fears that are abnormal. I was curious to find out what kind of fears are abnormal, and I found a psychologist who’s given us a list people who have abnormal fears, and here are their fears, in somewhat of alphabetical order: certain colors, animals, bees, being alone, being stared at, blood, cancer, cats, choking, crowds, darkness, demons, dirt, dogs, dreams, elevators and closed spaces, flying, germs, height, horses, lightning, mice, spiders, surgical operations—and we can end the alphabetical list with work and worms. Those kinds of phobias border on the irrational.

Why am I saying all this? Because the world is full of people who are afraid of the wrong thing. What they really need to be afraid of is God. He didn’t show up in the list. But Hebrews 10:31 says, “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” In Luke 12:5, Jesus said, “I will warn you who to fear: fear the One who, after He has killed, has the authority to cast you into hell . . . fear Him!” You don’t hear a lot about that, even from evangelical pulpits. The most terrifying force in the universe is God Himself. There’s a day coming when the world will begin to feel the terror at a level that perhaps could only be grasped in some measure by the people who drown in the Flood, when they realize they are being completely overcome and they can’t do anything about it.

In Luke 21—and you might want to look at that for a moment; I’ll show you a few passages as we go. But in Luke 21, that’s a passage that the Lord is talking about His second coming, and He describes it. Go down to verse 25, “There will be signs in sun and moon and stars”—and we’ll see specifically what they are in Revelation—“and on the earth dismay among nations, in perplexity at the roaring of the sea and the waves, men fainting from fear and the expectation of the things which are coming upon the world; for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.” So before the Son of Man comes at the end of this time called the Tribulation, there will be signs in the sun, the moon, the stars, and the earth, and the sea.

The word “fainting,” interesting word. It’s only here in Scripture; it’s the only place it occurs—apopsuchō. That means to expel your breath. In other words, they’ll breathe their last. They will be scared to death. Their hearts will stop when this begins to happen.

So let’s look a little more closely at the specifics of it. Back to verse 12 of Revelation 6. When John looks in the vision and the Lord breaks the sixth seal—that’s a scroll in the hand of the Lord. We saw that back in chapters 4 and 5. It’s the title deed to the earth. The Father gives it to the Son because He is the heir of the earth and the universe. And it’s typical of a Roman will and testament that it was a scroll rolled up and sealed multiple times, only to be opened by the one who had the authority.

As Christ breaks the seals, judgment is unleashed. As I pointed out, the first is depicted by a white horse who brings a very short-lived peace under the Antichrist, followed by war, famine, and death—death of a quarter of the population of the earth. When the sixth seal is broken, phenomena happen strictly from the agency of God and no one else, and what happens here is described in detail that is very familiar to any student of Scripture, because the Lord talked about the same things, as did the Old Testament prophets. So let’s look at the specifics.

There will be an earthquake, “a great earthquake”—literally, the word seismos, which means a shaking—“the sun [becomes] black as sackcloth made of hair, and the whole moon [becomes] like blood; the stars of the sky fell to the earth, as a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind. The sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up, and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.” This is beyond comprehension.

Now remember the setting. They’re already having war and famine and death. The Antichrist is ruling. And if you look over at chapter 13 of Revelation and verse 8, it says, “All who dwell on the earth will worship him, everyone whose name has not been written from the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb who has been slain.” Everybody who has not been written in the Lamb’s Book of Life will worship this beast, this Antichrist. And he is very effective. And in spite of everything that’s going on, in spite of, say, two billion people dying, in spite of hell running rampant because the restraint is off, in spite of immorality, sin, and transgression everywhere, there will be indifference on the part of many.

In Matthew 24, this also records the Lord’s sermon parallel to Luke 21. This is a very familiar passage, Matthew 24:37, “For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah.” Noah’s building a boat, he’s warning for 120 years, “Judgment’s coming, judgment’s coming, judgment’s coming,” and nobody pays any attention, and the whole world drowns except Noah and his family. “In those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, they didn’t understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be.”

They aren’t going to listen. There will be a massive population of the world that does not listen to those that are preaching the gospel. In fact, there will be false teachers, according to 1 Thessalonians 5, who will be running around saying, “Peace and safety! Peace and safety! Peace and safety!” The message will be, “Well, we’re right on the brink of our utopia so long desired.” “But destruction will come on them suddenly, suddenly.”

And in that same twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, verse 29, “Immediately after the tribulation of those days”—here’s the same phenomenon—“the sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light, the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky with power and great glory. And He will send forth His angels with a great trumpet and they will gather together His elect from the four winds, from one end of the sky to the other.” But notice the phenomenon: The sun is darkened, the moon doesn’t give its light, the stars fall, and the powers of the heaven are shaken.

This is exactly what we find in the book of Revelation, chapter 6. Six frightening features are laid out here, so let’s look at them a little more closely. The first one is, “There was a great earthquake.” And there’s not much more to say except that there was a great earthquake. “Great” is an understatement, to put it mildly, because this is an earthquake where the entire earth is shaken. There’s never been an earthquake like that. Earthquakes are localized based upon the fault lines. The entire planet is in view here.

We know about earthquakes at Sinai when God gave the law, an earthquake in the life of Elijah, an earthquake when Jesus was on the cross, an earthquake when Paul and Silas were released from jail. But this is an earthquake unlike any of those. This is the word seismos, and it literally means “a shaking.” In fact, Matthew 8 uses that word of the moving the sea as “tempest,” the shaking of the waters of the Sea of Galilee. Joel 2 translates in the Septuagint, the Greek form of that passage in Joel 2, the word “trembling.” The prophet Haggai describes this in chapter 2: “For thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘Once more in a little while, I am going to shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and also the dry land. [And] I will shake all the nations,’” “all the nations.” The entire planet is going to begin to convulse, erratically shaking, trembling. Nothing remains still. Nothing stays stable.

Already, by the time this hits in the midpoint of the seven years, people have been dragged through global wars, all kinds of assassinations, famines, plagues, and other earthquakes. And the false prophets all along have kept saying, “Peace, peace, we’re almost there.” Sin is unrestrained: Immorality, wickedness, godlessness is rampant; and Satan holds the whole world in deception. And if that’s not bad enough, God gives them a deluding influence, and then all of a sudden in a moment—while some sleep and others drive, some fly and some walk, some at work, some reading the paper in their homes or watching television, or playing golf or tennis, or whatever—and all of a sudden, the entire planet begins to move in a moment.

This blows to bits the theory of uniformity that the critics offered—in the words of Peter, “All things continue as they were from the beginning.” That’s what the scoffers said. “We’re not afraid of judgment; nothing ever changes.” That’s foolish. As Peter talked about the fact that the Lord was coming and these kinds of phenomena would take place, the mockers said, “Everything is going to continue the same as it did from the beginning,” and Peter reminds them in 2 Peter, “Did you forget the flood, the universal flood?”

So first, the earth is shaking. Shaking—you could assume that, literally, the earth bursts open in the process because the immediate result is that the sun becomes black as sackcloth of hair. Goat’s hair was used to create sackcloth, which was worn at a funeral. The whole sun is blocked out by the soot and the smoke. The upheaval is so enormous that it literally blots out the sun. It’s dark everywhere. And you can imagine, too, with the fracturing of the entire surface of the earth and it convulsing in total, that whatever power grids there are will be completely disrupted, and when it goes black, it’ll go totally black, maybe like the blackness that God brought when He judged Egypt.

When God came to Mount Sinai, remember, to lay down the law, it was shrouded in blackness. When God judged His Son for our sins, the sun went out at noon and stayed that way for three hours. But the sun is going to go black here in a different way. Isaiah wrote of this very phenomenon in Isaiah 13, verse 6. It’s a picture that is parallel to Revelation.

Isaiah 13:6, “The day of the Lord is near!”—“Day of the Lord” is a technical term for final judgment. “It will come as destruction from the Almighty. Therefore all hands will fall limp, and every man’s heart will melt. They will be terrified, pains and anguish will take hold of them; they will writhe like a woman in labor, they will look at one another in astonishment, their faces aflame. Behold, the day of the Lord is coming, cruel, with fury and burning anger, to make the land a desolation; and He will exterminate its sinners from it. For the stars of heaven and their constellations will not flash forth their light; the sun will be dark when it rises and the moon will not shed its light. Thus I will punish the world for its evil and the wicked for their iniquity; I will also put an end to the arrogance of the proud and abase the haughtiness of the ruthless. I will make mortal man scarcer than pure gold and mankind than the gold of Ophir. Therefore I will make the heavens tremble, and the earth will be shaken from its place at the fury of the Lord of hosts in the days of His burning anger.” That’s the picture.

Well, John saw elements of that. First, he saw the earth shaking, and then the sun blackened. And the third feature, “the whole moon became like blood.” Maybe the taint of red is because of the volcanic action that’s going on as the entire surface of the earth explodes. Isaiah also said in chapter 13, verse 10, that “the moon would not [show] its light.”

The prophet Joel said, “The sun and moon grow dark,” Joel 2:10. And he even gave more detail. Later, at the end of that chapter, he said God has promised this: “I will display wonders in the sky and on the earth, blood, fire, columns of smoke. The sun will be turned to darkness, the moon into blood before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.” This will change everything—plants, crops, tides, men, animals—everything in complete chaos on the earth. And then the sky is the subject in verse 13.

Fourth feature, “The stars of the sky fell to the earth.” Fiery balls start careening out of the darkness, out of the blackness, and hitting the earth. The word “stars” here is asteres, from which comes the English word asteroid. And asteres refers to any heavenly body. Could be a star. A star could be a thousand times larger than our sun, but an asteroid could be the size of a truck, or the size of a neighborhood, or the size of a town, or the size of a city. It could be hundreds of miles in diameter. They know they’re up there; the astronomers are very much aware of it. There are, in fact, trillions, trillions of asteroids and comets flying around in space that God can use when He starts firing them at this earth. So God unleashes asteroids, comets, ice and dirt balls hurtling through the sky. The stars are moving out of their normal orbits as heaven shakes, and the earth is hit with this falling debris, and it’s coming almost wildly. He uses the illustration, “like a fig tree casts its unripe figs when shaken by a great wind”—just dropping everywhere. So where are people going to go to hide? Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.

And then it says, the fifth feature, “The sky was split apart like a scroll when it is rolled up”—ripped apart. If the sky were a scroll, it’s all of a sudden ripped. Maybe they had in mind the fact that if you take an old scroll and unroll it all the way, pull it all the way open, it perhaps could rip in the center. It’s the idea that the sky is beginning to shred, the sky as we would know it. The whole universe is in distress. Stars and heavenly bodies pummeling the earth.

Again, the prophet Isaiah, in chapter 34, saw the very same thing. Listen to this: “All the host of heaven will wear away, and the sky will be rolled up like a scroll; and all their hosts will also wither away as a leaf withers from the vine, or as one withers from the fig tree. For My sword is satiated in heaven.” This is divine wrath. Terrifying.

One final feature: “Every mountain and island were moved out of their places.” Well, that’s obvious if the whole earth is shaking. The earth’s surface will become completely unstable, horrendous changes on the surface—buildings collapse, highways collapse, and all of this is the judgment of God. And it’s so severe that there’s no way to stop it.

Now we have to remember, the planet is disposable, but it’s not quite ready to be disposed. This is just a transformation. It doesn’t get totally destroyed until after the thousand-year millennial kingdom, when the Lord takes it out of existence with an atomic implosion, 2 Peter 3 says. So this is the Lord working over the universe in preparation for His coming and setting up His kingdom. It’s going to be different. “There will be,” according to Luke 21:11, “terrors and great signs from heaven.”

Now, this sixth seal is describing things that run all the way to the end of the Tribulation. So this sixth seal also encompasses the seven trumpets to come, the judgments that came in months, and the final bowl judgments that came in days or hours. So this runs—this sixth seal—runs all the way to the time when the Lord returns. And more details will be given. The seven trumpets describe more judgments within the sixth seal judgment; and the seven bowl judgments, more judgments within the sixth seal and the seven trumpets. This is where this world as we know it is headed.

So the reason for fear, obvious: the collapse of the earth and the sky. The extent of fear, look at verse 15: “The kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and strong”—the people in charge—and then the common people, “every slave and free man.” You have seven different groups. Five of them have to do with those who have power, and two of them have to do with those who are the powerless, but they all have the same reaction: They “hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains.”

For believers on the earth, this will be a sign of hope because Luke 21:28 says, “When these things begin to take place, straighten up, lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing nigh.” To the believers who are in that period of time—Jewish believers, Gentile believers—when this begins to happen, the Lord’s coming is very, very soon, very soon. But the panic will engulf every human being at every level of society.

And what will be their reaction? I would like to say that it was repentance that John saw, but it wasn’t. In chapter 9 and verses 20 and 21, it says no matter what happened, they didn’t repent. They “didn’t repent.” In chapter 16 of Revelation and verse 11, “They didn’t repent.” “They didn’t repent.” And then because they didn’t repent, 2 Thessalonians 2 says, “God [sends] them a deluding influence so that they will believe what is false.” Part of judgment on those who don’t repent is God fixes them in their deception.

Nobody repents in this scene. What do they do? They “[hide] in the caves and the rocks of the mountains.” Doesn’t sound like a good place to go when the whole earth is shaking, right? What choice do they have? You can’t hide from God.

They then begin to pray to the mountains. This is where the materialist ends up: talking to the rocks. And what is so bizarre is that they start praying to the rocks, verse 16, “They said to the mountains and to the rocks”—look at this—“‘Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?’”

This is how deep-seated their deception is. They know God is doing this because of how they have offended Him. They know the Lamb is unleashing His wrath, the Lamb who is the Savior. And instead of praying to the One on the throne, or the Lamb, they talk to the rocks. This is where you end up. This is the ultimate insanity of materialism—you’re talking to the rocks while you acknowledge that God is on the throne, and the Lamb is unleashing His wrath.

Remember—you say, “How could that be?” Because all along prophets are saying, “Peace and safety! Peace and safety! Everything’s fine.” They believe the lies; and because they believe the lies, God sends them a deluding influence, and they can’t believe anything but the lies. That means the time of grace is over, and they know it’s the end because verse 17 they say, “The great day of their wrath”—that is the God on the throne and the Lamb—“has come, and who is able to stand?” Hosea 10:8 depicts this same scene. It says, “They will say to the mountains, ‘Cover us!’ And to the hills, ‘Fall on us!’” And Jesus quotes that in Luke 23:30.

It’s the insanity of ultimate rejection, that you know who is punishing you, and instead of going to Him, you talk to the rocks. They know “the great day of . . . wrath has come.” How do they know that? Because it’s been announced to them over and over and over. You can be certain of this, that whoever was converted or will be converted in the Tribulation will make these passages well-known to the people around them. The Jews and Gentiles will be warning people. There’ll be Bibles everywhere. They’ll be saying, “Look, we’re already living in the first four seals, and the fifth seal. And now you’re seeing the sixth seal, and you’ve acknowledged that you can’t survive this.”

First Thessalonians 5:3 says, “They will not escape.” Nahum the prophet wrote this: “Who can stand before His indignation? Who can endure the burning of His anger? His wrath is poured out like fire and the rocks are broken up by Him.” Don’t hide in the rocks and don’t pray to the rocks, they’re useless. Again, we’re back to Hebrews 10, “It’s a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

What about us? Well, let me close with a comforting truth, chapter 3. In the letter to the church at Philadelphia, verse 10 of Revelation 3, the Lord gives one of His promises to believers: “Because you have kept the word of My perseverance.” In other words, “Because you have been steadfast in keeping My Word.” You remember John 8, “If you continue in My word . . . you are [My real]”—what?—“disciple.” “Because you have kept the word of My perseverance, I will also keep you from the hour of testing, that hour which is about to come upon the whole world, to test those who dwell on the earth.”

What hour is about to come on the whole world to test those who dwell on the earth? The Tribulation. People say, “Are you a believer in the pre-tribulation rapture?” Well, if I’m being kept from the Tribulation, then I have to leave before. And that’s what it says: “I will”—the Greek tēreō—“keep you out from the hour of testing, that hour which is about to come upon the whole world, to test those who dwell on earth.” You don’t need to be tested; you have been proven to have a persevering devotion to the truth.

In 1 Thessalonians—and we’ll close with this—chapter 5, we can look at the first verse—and we’ll just quickly look at this. Paul writes, “Now as to the times and the epochs”—“as to the times and the epochs, brethren, you have no need of anything to be written to you. For you yourselves know full well that the day of the Lord will come just like a thief in the night.” That’s the day of the Lord that we’ve been looking at in Revelation.

The day of the Lord is coming, and they’re going to be “saying, ‘Peace and safety!’ then destruction will come upon them suddenly.” But look at verse 4. You notice they are saying destruction will come upon them; verse 4, “But you, brethren, are not in darkness, that the day would overtake you like a thief; for you are all sons of light and sons of day. We are not of night nor of darkness.” And because of that, verse 9, “God has not destined us for wrath, but for obtaining [deliverance] through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that whether we are awake”—meaning being alive—“or”—having died—“asleep, we will live together with Him.” That’s the promise. And that’s the description of the Rapture.

Go up to chapter 4, verse 13: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve as do the rest who have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with Him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus. For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. The Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.”

Judgment comes to the earth, believers go to heaven because we are not of the darkness, we are sons of light, sons of the day, and we are not destined for wrath. Jesus said, “I go to prepare”—what?—“a place for you. And if I prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself.” That’s why in the book of Revelation you see the church in chapters 1 to 3 on earth, and then all of a sudden the church in heaven in 4 and 5, and then the Tribulation begins in 6. The Lord will rescue us from that judgment. But the rest of the world will experience the horrors that, even at the best efforts that we could make to understand them, will fall far short of the reality.

Our Father, we thank You that You have sought us and found us when we were lost and without the knowledge of Your gospel. Thank You that You brought someone into our lives to tell us the truth of salvation, to give us the good news: that we could be forgiven of our sins and we could be delivered from sin and death and judgment and hell, not by any works that we have done, but purely by putting our trust in Christ, who bore our sins in His own body on the cross, paid the penalty for our sins, and who seeks to take us to glory to be with Him while all hell breaks loose on this earth. We look forward to the trumpet sound, to the moment when the dead in Christ rise and the rest who are alive are all gathered in the air to meet You there and go on into heaven for the wonderful fellowship there, never to be separated again, while all these horrible things go on on this earth.

As the apostle Paul said, “Knowing these things, we understand the terror of the Lord and persuade men.” Doesn’t make any sense, when salvation is offered and complete rescue from this, that someone would reject such a magnanimous, unparalleled gift—not that you could earn it, but you can receive it by faith in Christ. That’s the glory of the gospel. Open hearts to receive that truth, we pray even today, in Christ’s name. Amen.