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“Lamb Upon the Throne” Part One
Broadcast #1583
February 5, 2023

Transcript of message from TV Broadcast 1583 -- taken from Closed Captioning Text

— Brother Phil Enlow: Praise God! Praise the Lord! I’m rejoicing in the Lord with you today, and also feeling my weakness in a more than usual way, and a little bit overwhelmed with thoughts that I’ve had. I’m just trusting God to bring out what He wants, because it’s like more than you could think about getting into.

But it’s very interesting…if I had picked a title for the thoughts that I’ve had this morning, it would’ve been “The Lamb Upon the Throne.” And lo and behold we sang that. We haven’t sung it in forever. But did you know I’ve had this…I’ve had thoughts about the throne going through my head, since Wednesday night in particular. I think there were some mentions that somehow triggered that in my mind, and it’s just been there percolating and thinking and going through scriptures, and wow, what an amazing subject it is.

And you know, in the natural, people and groups of people throughout history have developed various forms of government and one of the most common ones is a monarchy of some kind. Now today, a monarchy is largely ceremonial. You know, they celebrate the queen, but she has no real power.

But, throughout history, a throne became a symbol of a people and their government, and generally speaking, one of the characteristics of monarchy is absolute power in the hands of a man, or in some cases a woman if she was a queen. But there was an absoluteness to the power, and it wasn’t…and you mention the throne because the throne is something that outlasts a particular king, doesn’t it, in the earthly sense? But kings had absolute power to do whatever they wanted, and it was something that was recognized as, well this is how our government works.

And so, if you happened to displease the king, and he didn’t like you, he had every right to say, take him out and execute him, or her. And that’s the extent…that’s what absolute monarchy is all about.

You think about Herod, this is one example. And how his wife had a plot to get rid of John the Baptist and she sent her daughter out there to dance in a, no doubt, a seductive way, that pleased him and his drunken guests, and so, he rashly promised her, I’ll give you whatever you want up to half the kingdom, something like that.

And, so she went and asked her mother, what should I ask? She said, ask for the head of John the Baptist. And, he…the question was not did he have the power, but did he have the will? But because of the fact that he had made this promise in front of so many people, he said, yep, go do it and, boom. That was all it took for the execution of John to happen.

And throughout history you see this principle, in fact, in some cases, the edicts of the king were binding on the king. Do you remember that? How about…in Persia, that was part of their culture, that if the king ever made an edict, and sealed it with his royal seal, even the king himself couldn’t go back on his word.

You talk about absolute power…and you remember how that played out in a couple of instances when the king did something that caused Daniel to be on the wrong side of the law, and Daniel had to be thrown into the lion’s den, but the Lord had a way of intervening in that, didn’t He? Praise God! That alone tells you something about the Lamb who sits on the throne. Praise God!

And then, when Esther…that’s a pretty good picture of how people viewed a throne as something to be…you know, take very seriously, and be very sober about. When her people were in danger, and there was another case where he had signed an edict and it was in force. There was nothing…nothing he could do to say, oops, I made a mistake, let’s do away with that.

And her uncle said, go in, and talk to the king, plead for our people. She said, I can’t do it. If I go in there and he doesn’t raise the scepter, I’m dead. Whoa! You talk about a place to be frightened and take seriously. And so, finally she gained courage, prayed, fasted, and gained courage and went in there and he raised the scepter, didn’t he?

But you get a picture of the absoluteness of earthly power. And so, we get an idea of what a throne is all about, but the reality is, we know that there is a throne that reigns over everything. It is a fact, and I believe somehow the Lord is wanting to emphasize that this morning in a way that will encourage us and cause us to lift our eyes from the earthly issues of life, the kingdoms, the troubles, the issues that are just grabbing at us from the news every day.

We talked last week about the kingdoms of the world, and how there is a kingdom that’s over all, and it’s not an earthly kingdom at all. In fact, it never will be in spite of a lot of doctrine out there. It is absolutely a kingdom that is…that cannot be seen unless you’re born into it. It’s very, very real, and it’s the one that’s gonna last.

But, you think of scriptures that we know and are familiar with, just a few of them in David’s writings, the Psalms. He certainly knew a lot about the Lord, didn’t he? He was a man after God’s own heart, but he understood who was on the throne. He had all power in Israel, but he knew that he was yet a subject of a much higher power.

And so, like Psalm 103, is one example in verse 19. After talking about how the wonders of how God deals with us, with such patience and such love and such mercy, then he says, “The Lord has established his throne in heaven, and his kingdom rules over all. Praise the Lord, you his angels, you mighty ones who do his bidding, who obey his word. Praise the Lord, all his heavenly hosts, you his servants who do his will. Praise the Lord, all his works everywhere in his dominion.” (NIV). Praise God!

What about Psalm 99? Just the beginnings of it…beginning in verse 1, “The Lord reigns, let the nations tremble; he sits enthroned between the cherubim….” And, I’ll just drop this in. Whenever you see that word, like cherubim, in Hebrew, if you want to make a plural, you add an ‘im’ to the end of it. You don’t say cherubs, you’d say cherubim. So that’s what that means. In other words, there’s more than one. All right? Little grammar lesson there.

“…He sits enthroned between the cherubim, let the earth shake. Great is the Lord in Zion; he is exalted over all the nations. Let them praise your great and awesome name—he is holy.” Does He reign, or doesn’t He? Praise God! That’s a wonderful thing to remind ourselves of.

Psalm 93 is another familiar example. “The Lord reigns, he is robed in majesty; the Lord is robed in majesty and armed with strength; indeed, the world is established, firm and secure. Your throne was established long ago; you are from all eternity.” Praise God! I don’t care what the world looks like, what your life and your circumstances look like, there is a God who reigns!

( congregational response ).

There is a throne that goes back before the world was ever established. It’s there, it’s real. The devil knows about it. But I’ll tell you, we need to know about it. Praise God! What an awesome thing it is.

And I’ll tell you, when you see the purposes of God being played out in the world, you have to realize that God’s…the reality of God’s throne is not just some, oh yeah, He reigns and so do we. He reigns! And His purposes in this temporary world have everything to do whether people are willing to bow to that throne or whether they continue in the rebellion led by Lucifer.

And it’s not…it’s not a…God is not a salesman, as He is actually almost sometimes pictured. He comes to appeal to men. Look, you’re on a bad track. I’ve got a better plan. Come and believe in Me and be religious and I’ll…you know, I’ll help you through life and I’ll give you heaven, too, as though, He’s just selling us on a better plan.

It is bow or burn, folks. His Word, His command is an ultimatum. You talk about an ultimate ruler, you talk about somebody that has the power of life and death, not just in this world, but with respect to eternity, folks, I want to bow. Thank God! Thank God for a throne.

But you know, I’ve thought of so many scriptures that I can’t even…trying to make sense of how to deal with this. But you know, His…His Word goes out into the world and it is a challenge! I’ll say this much about the wicked. It is a challenge to this world. It is a challenge to anybody who would seek to live their life in this world according to their terms.

Look at Psalm 2. Here is God’s challenge to the nations of the world. And I realize probably, very probably, David was thinking of his own rule, his own kingdom and how God had established him on his throne, but there was something prophetic in this. This was something that looked way beyond David to David’s Son, who was yet to come. Praise God!

“Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?” Do you realize that everything the devil is doing in the world, regardless of what it is, it’s in vain? Nothing he does will every undermine the thing that God has planned, not just in a broad sense, but where you and you and you, and where I am concerned. Praise God!

“The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their chains and throw off their shackles.” Do you see any of that happening today? Yeah. We’re not gonna go by Your rules anymore. We’re gonna follow our own desires and we’re gonna do whatever we think is right.

You know, just go to whatever. That’s what the world is telling God. That’s what America has been telling God for a long time. I’m not gonna get back into what we did last week, but this ties in doesn’t it? And so, they go on and they say, “Let us break their chains and throw off their shackles. The One enthroned…” There’s the throne. “…The One enthroned in heaven laughs.” Do you think the Lord is worried?

( laughing ).

He laughs. “The Lord scoffs at them. He rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath, saying, I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain. I will proclaim the Lord’s decree: He said to me, You are my son; today I have become your father. Ask me, and I will make the nations your inheritance, the ends of the earth your possession. You will break them with a rod of iron; you will dash them to pieces like pottery. Therefore, you kings, be wise; be warned, you rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear and celebrate his rule with trembling.”

I’ll tell you, there is a kind of fear that’s right. There is a reverential fear and a respect. But I’m so glad God didn’t give us a spirit of fear in the bad sense, aren’t you? Thank God. But I’ll tell you, the challenge to the world, “Kiss his son…” This was an act of surrender, of submission is what he’s talking about here. “…Or he will be angry and your way will lead to your destruction,
for his wrath can flare up in a moment. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.”

And you know, you could follow this theme through the scriptures and see the place of the world in respect to, and the rebellion against heaven and how that’s gonna end. Folks, it’s gonna end before a throne, isn’t it? And it’s not gonna end well for the wicked. They are gonna be destroyed.

You know, I thought about…I’m gonna drop this in. There’s a scripture in Revelation chapter 6, and a lot of imagery in here and a lot of…you know, the images stand for real things but they’re nonetheless images. But there’s gonna come a time when the world is gonna realize, too late, that they’ve been on the wrong side. They’ve been rebels against ‘The’ authority that is from eternity to eternity.

Verse 15, “Then the kings of the earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty, and everyone else, both slave and free, hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains. They called to the mountains and the rocks, Fall on us and hide us from the face 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 can withstand it?”

That’s an amazing phrase, ‘the wrath of the Lamb.’ You know, you think of the Lamb, you don’t think of wrath, do you? You don’t put those two together. But I’ll tell you, you cannot have true goodness without hating what is evil and what destroys. And I’ll tell you, there are people who want to cherry-pick this Bible, and talk about the Lamb as though He’s just this warm fuzzy, ‘I’ll go along with anything, because I love you so much’ kind of being.

But I’ll tell you, there’s gonna be a day when that same Lamb is gonna be filled with wrath and it will be poured out upon those who have said, no, to His love and His mercy. Amazing, isn’t it? Praise God! Well, I don’t want to spend a lot of time on the…on how the wicked are gonna fare under this throne, but let’s go back to Isaiah 6 and just look at some familiar scriptures that talk about…give you a picture.

You know, something we’ve pointed out before that Isaiah was a prophet raised up at a time that was so common in Israel’s history when they were falling away from God, involved in idolatry, in rebellion, in injustice in their society. They just weren’t really respecting God at all.

And so, he was sent with a message of warning, and chapter 5 is filled with a message where he says, woe to those who do this! Woe to those who do that! Woe to those who do this and that! And over and over again there’s a warning of judgment.

You know, you can do that, you can have God’s message and feel like, I’m one of the good guys. I’m pointing my finger out, pointing my finger at those ‘bad people down there.’ Now, if they’ll just straighten up and be like me. Well, the Lord had an answer for that, didn’t He? And it’s an answer we need to reckon with. Praise God!

I want to be in the right place with respect to this One who sits on the throne. And so, Isaiah 6 now, you come to a different picture. And it says, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne; and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphim, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of his glory. At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.”

You know, I don’t care…if we only have words, there’s no way to convey a scene like that, is there? I mean, there’s a part of me that says, oh God, I want to see that, I want to…I want to get ahold of the reality of who You are and how amazing and how powerful You are.

Do you know, if we’re gonna really be right with God, we’re gonna have to see as He is? And do you know what happens when we do? We see ourselves, don’t we? And that’s exactly what happened.

Isaiah said, “Woe to me!” He didn’t have his eyes on anybody else. There was nobody else…Lord, now I see how great You are, now I see how bad those people…no! I’ll tell you, if we really see, with our hearts…I pray for anybody that hasn’t seen in some measure the Lord, because if you ever do, you will know why you need Him. There won’t be any illusions that you are a good guy or a good gal. There’s no such thing in the human race.

“Woe to me! I cried. I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty.” I’ll tell you, the first step towards any kind of relationship with God is to see Him for who He is and then see ourselves for who we are. Then you’ve got something you can build on.

If you just try to see this in some sort of half-hearted religious way, and embrace that…and that’s what so many do. Oh God, I want to see Him as He is. I want Him as a reality. I want to see the Lord upon the throne, here, reigning! I want to be part of a people that are willingly, gladly subjected to Him, who have no illusions about their own worthiness or goodness, but they come because He invites us. He has made a way! By the way, who is this that Isaiah saw?

( congregational response ).

Well, the Lord, but who specifically? This was Jesus! This was the one who later came to earth…was Jesus. How do you know that? If I asked you to prove that, how do you know that? A little Bible lesson here. What does the Lord say, through John, about God? It says, “No man hath seen God at any time.” (KJV).

Now why is that? Because God is a spirit, dwells in eternity. He fills everything. He is alone supreme. But He has chosen to make Himself fully known, perfectly expressed in His Son, just as divine as He is, the perfect expression of the invisible God, as Paul says. And there He is. You want to know what God is like? You look at Jesus.

So, what Isaiah was seeing…you talk about…I mean, this is the one that he prophesied. God used him mightily to prophesy of the one who was coming and what He was gonna do. And here Isaiah was meeting Him! What an amazing thing!

And realizing his complete unworthiness. So, what happens? “Then one of the seraphim flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

And what an amazing…when you think about this in the context of history and how things have unfolded in God’s plan. Does a coal on an altar…I mean, does something that’s…you literally pick up a coal off an altar, does that have power to forgive sins? Did the Old Testament sacrifices have the power to forgive sins? No! The scripture says specifically, they don’t. So how in the world…where did this forgiveness come from?

It came from the death of the very one before whom he stood, that hadn’t even happened yet. You think about the throne that’s behind all of this. You think of a throne that’s not bound by time, by circumstance, by anything, that has absolute power and authority. And here is forgiveness being given freely to a man.

And from history’s point of view, from our point of view, it hadn’t happened yet! Do you see how Paul could talk about a God who can call, and set apart, and talk about how we’ve been glorified? Wow! That’s the throne I want to serve. Praise God!

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