Identifying Gods People in Revelation 12

How does the dragon, how does the devil recognize who belong to God? It says they keep the commandments of God, which is love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, and your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. It's the greatest commandment, and all the other commandments fall under this. Jesus said they all— if you're doing that one, you'll be doing those. So you say to love God means to live the way he wants me to live, and so you, you don't take his name in vain. You don't break his Sabbath. You don't steal from people. You don't kill. You know, those kind of things. That's just like natural. If you're living a life of love, you're not doing things that show you don't love other people and you don't love God. Um, so that's what the devil's looking for. The devil is looking for those who keep the commandments of God and hold firmly to the testimony about Jesus, which testimony is just a fancy Bible word for story. It's what you tell your own story, or your— the story as you know it. So your testimony about Jesus would be you saying John 3:16, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever should believe in him will not perish but will live eternally. So that is my understanding of Jesus. So that's my testimony. About Jesus. There is a verse that's in the middle of that beautiful section I said before where I wanted to come to it at the end that shows how God recognizes his people. Now it doesn't mean that this, this definition isn't true. It is, but it's not where our focus should be as God's end-time people. In verse 11, it talks about these people who have received Um, well, verse 10: They've received the salvation and the power and the kingdom of God and the authority of his Christ. They have now come because the accuser of our brothers and sisters, who accuses them before our God day and night, has been thrown down. And then it talks about who these people are. They conquered him— that's this dragon who's thrown down— they conquered him by the blood of the Lamb. Well, who's the Lamb? Jesus is the Lamb. He's the perfect Lamb who's come to take away the sins of the earth. All through the Old Testament, they sacrificed lambs to represent one day the ultimate act of forgiveness would happen. They didn't understand what it meant exactly. They just knew that God had said do it, so they did it. And they were very faithful in the way that they would offer lambs for their family as sacrifice for sin annually. And then when Jesus came, John the Baptist said, "Behold," when he walked out of— when Jesus was baptized, or I think before he's baptized, Jesus— John just stops and says, "Whoa." Here he is, the Lamb who's come to take away the sins of the earth. So Jesus is introduced to the readers in the Bible and to the people at the Jordan that day, to Jesus, as this is him, this is the Messiah, this is the Lamb that's come to take away the sins of the earth. So here's the identifier, how God recognizes his people. They conquered him by the blood of the Lamb. So how do we conquer the devil? Jesus does it. Jesus died for us on the cross. They conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony. You notice, there it is again, testimony. But now it doesn't say their testimony about Jesus, it says their own story. So we conquer the devil— there shouldn't be an 'and' after the cross. We're saved by the blood of Jesus on the cross and What? And? But it's because we're talking about it. That's all it means, is it's happened and now you're saying, whoa. And some of the ways in the scripture that I once was lost but now I'm found, I once was blind but now I see. And there's, there's all these kind of before and after pictures. And we all, everyone who's received this aha moment of recognizing the God of the universe saw separation between you and him, and it was so painful to him that he said, I would rather die than leave that gap between us. And so he did. He came and he allowed himself to be crucified on a cross so that that chasm would be crossed and we could be reconciled with God. And so he did that for us so that the devil's grasp would be defeated. Sin is defeated. The devil has no hold on people who have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb. And so often we focus down on that definition of how the devil knows what we are, because by what we look like. But we're the ones keeping the commands of God and telling the Jesus story. And he's like, those are things I can see. I can see how they're acting. I can see what they're saying. And they— he can come, and they're true of God's people, but they are not what makes God's people. What makes God's people is that They conquered the devil by the blood of the Lamb. They conquered sin through the cross. Jesus did it all, and they're talking about it.