Revelation | Week 3 · Rewind

Pastor Bill Bush · Mar 18, 2018 · 72 min watch · 4 min read

Revelation | Week 3

Big Idea

If your goal is good rather than God, you will ultimately miss both — because God is not the one who does good best; He is the very definition of good.

Drawing from Revelation 13, this sermon traces Satan's strategy of using a counterfeit trinity — the Antichrist, the Dragon, and the False Prophet — to offer genuine-looking goods (peace, prosperity, order) that ultimately enslave and destroy. The deeper warning is that this tactic is not limited to the end times; it mirrors the lie in the Garden of Eden and operates in everyday life. When people — even churchgoers — make 'good' their primary goal rather than a relationship with God, they fall into the same deception, because God does not merely do good; He defines and is good.

Key points

1
1The Antichrist rises to world power by delivering real, tangible goods — peace, prosperity, and stability — before revealing his true nature, mirroring how deception always leads with something genuinely appealing.
2
2Satan operates as a counterfeit of the true Trinity — a fake father (the Dragon), a fake son (the Antichrist who dies and 'resurrects'), and a fake Holy Spirit (the False Prophet) — because his ultimate goal is to be worshipped in place of God.
3
3The mark of the beast (666) is best understood as the symbol of man's highest achievement apart from God — complete but ultimately incomplete, representing allegiance to the world's best attempt at good without God.
4
4Satan's core tactic — seen in Eden, in the Antichrist's rise, and in everyday temptation — is to convince people that there is good apart from God, shifting the goal from God Himself to the goods He provides.
5
5Jesus's parable of the two roads is not merely about quantity of people but about the nature of each path: the wide road promises freedom and expands with good things, but it is a funnel that narrows to enslavement; the narrow road seems confining but opens into true freedom.
6
6When 'good' becomes the goal rather than God, good eventually becomes your God — you reshape your view of God around your list of what seems good, making yourself the authority rather than Him.
7
7Genuine service, parenting, and Christian living must flow from a relationship with God, not from what feels productive or good; without that foundation, commitment will evaporate whenever it stops being convenient.

Application

The sermon lands on one clarifying question: What is your real goal? If it is simply a good life — good outcomes for your family, good feelings from serving, good standing in your community — you are running the same play Satan has always run, the same one that deceived Adam and Eve and will deceive the world in the last days. The antidote is not to stop doing good but to reorder the goal: pursue God through His Word, through worship, through genuine community, and let good flow out of that relationship as a natural result. Practically, this means examining how you parent (are you modeling God-pursuit or just good behavior?), how you serve (does it flow from knowing how much Jesus gave, or just from what works for your schedule?), and whether you are willing, like Peter and Andrew, to lay down the nets — whatever currently defines your security and identity — and follow Jesus into the freedom that only the narrow road can open up.

Take it into your week

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Scripture in this message

From the transcript
“we're looking at a leader like Hitler. Only imagine a Hitler who was better and actually more successful. He actually does end up ruling the world. And he's known in this last book of the Bible as the Antichrist or the Beast. The Beast. And we're gonna read about him and take it apart. We're in Revelation 13 is what we're gonna go through here in a minute”
From the transcript
“So we're starting off. Let's read this. Lot of imagery and that's why I'm not gonna show all my work and you're gonna be yeah. Here we go. Verse one of chapter 13 says, then I saw a beast rising up out of the sea”
From the transcript
“The part about the leopards and the bear, that is a direct reference to a prophecy in the book of Daniel. Daniel chapter seven, go read it. Don't have time to get into it, but it's literally, it's it's a prophecy about the the Babylon, Medo Persia, the the Greek, Macedonia, and the Roman”
From the transcript
“But he goes not just from a leader that's a hero, is is look what happens next. In verse three it says, I saw that one of the heads of the beast seemed wounded beyond recovery, but the fatal wound was healed, and the whole world marveled at this miracle and gave allegiance to the beast”
From the transcript
“look what everybody does. Verse four. They worshipped the dragon for giving the beast such power, and they also worshipped the beast. Who is as great as the beast, they exclaimed. Who is able to fight against him”
From the transcript
“if you look skip down to verse seven and eight, it says, and the beast was allowed to wage war against God's holy people and to conquer them. And he was given authority to rule over every tribe and people and language and nation”
From the transcript
“because it says in the end times that God removes the restrainer. The Bible says very clearly the restrainer is the Holy Spirit. And and you think our world's bad now. God allows free will. He allows evil to happen”
From the transcript
“And then if you look at verse 11, the the fake Holy Spirit shows up. Says, then I saw another beast come out of the earth. He had two horns like those of a lamb, but he spoke with the voice of the dragon”
From the transcript
“if you look down at the second half of verse 14, it says, he ordered the this false prophet, the fake Holy Spirit, orders the people to make a great statue of the first beast who was fatally wounded and then came back to life”
From the transcript
“And so what you have happened next is verse 16. He required everyone small and great, rich and poor, free and slave to be given a mark on the right hand or on the forehead, and no one could buy or sell anything without that mark”
From the transcript
“Wisdom is needed here. Let the one with understanding solve the meaning of the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. His number is six six six”
From the transcript
“So the Bible says there's a way that seems right to man, but in the end it leads to death. So if that's true, then why do I need to know this? What's the so what”
From the transcript
“it's interesting. Jesus said a parable about this. He has a story. He goes he talked about two roads. One leading to life, one leading to destruction. And what did he say about the road that leads to destruction? It is wide. What do you say about the road that leads to life? Narrow”
From the transcript
“we know Jesus walked right up to this area about as wide as this stage, and would have called them to say, hey, what did he say? Cast down your nets, drop your nets, and follow me. Right? You know what that meant”
From the transcript
“Does that mean it's always easy? No. Jesus said, take up your cross. But that's where our good should flow from who God is”

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7-day devotional

A personal reading plan from this message — scripture, reflection, and prayer for each day.

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There is something important to notice about how the Antichrist rises to power: he doesn't arrive as an obvious villain. He arrives with answers. Peace where there was conflict. Stability where there was chaos. Real, tangible goods that desperate people genuinely need. The sermon made this point clearly — deception almost never leads with what it truly is. It leads with something appealing, something you actually want. This is worth sitting with, because it reframes how we think about being deceived. We tend to imagine deception as obviously bad, something only the naive fall for. But Revelation 13 describes a system so convincing that nearly the whole world follows along in wonder. The question the sermon was quietly asking is: what makes something feel worth following? And the honest answer is usually that it seems to deliver good things. This isn't a reason to distrust every good gift in your life. It is a reason to ask a prior question before you ask 'is this good?' — and that question is 'where does this lead, and what does it ask of me in return?' The Antichrist's goods come with a cost that only becomes visible later. That pattern didn't begin in Revelation. It began in a garden. And it shows up in ordinary life more often than we might like to admit.

For reflection

Where in your life right now are you evaluating something primarily by whether it delivers good results — without asking what it's quietly asking of you in return?

Pray

Pray for eyes to see past what looks appealing to what something is truly asking of you.

Related passage

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Small-group discussion guide

For leading a group conversation about this message.

Open

This message digs into one of the stranger chapters in the Bible — Revelation 13 — and lands on a question that is anything but strange: What is the real goal driving the way you live?

Discussion questions

1
In Revelation 13, the Antichrist rises to global power by delivering real things people actually want — peace, order, prosperity. What does that tell us about how deception tends to work, and why a counterfeit that offers genuine goods might be harder to resist than one that is obviously bad?
2
The message describes Satan's strategy as a counterfeit of the true Trinity — a fake father, a fake son, a fake spirit — each mimicking something real. Why do you think the goal of that imitation is worship specifically, rather than just obedience or control?
3
The sermon traces a single tactic from the Garden of Eden all the way through the rise of the Antichrist: the idea that good can be found apart from God. Where do you think people today — including people in church — are most likely to encounter that same shift without recognizing it as deception?
4
Jesus describes two roads — one wide, one narrow — and the sermon suggested the wide road does not shrink options at first; it actually expands with good things, and only later narrows into enslavement. How does that reframe the way we might typically picture what a 'dangerous' path looks like?
5
The message drew a contrast between serving or parenting that flows from a real relationship with God versus doing the same things simply because they produce good outcomes. What is the practical difference between those two starting points, and how might the two look identical from the outside while leading somewhere very different?
6
Peter and Andrew left their nets — the thing that defined their security and livelihood — when Jesus called them. The sermon held that image up as a picture of what reordering our goal actually requires. What makes that kind of relinquishment feel costly, and what does the message say we are trading it for?

Pray together

Asking God to reorder our goals — that we would pursue Him first and let good flow from that, rather than making good itself what we are after

Made by Rewind AI from the sermon transcript. Always trust the sermon itself over anything here. How Rewind uses AI

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Go deeper

Continue the series

Revelation

Week 3 · 4 messages

Where these passages are preached

Revelation 13 Daniel 7 2 Thessalonians 2 Proverbs 14

Explore related topics

Counterfeit Deception God vs. Goods Satan's Tactics Spiritual Compromise The Two Roads

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