THE REVELATION OF JOHN

The book of Revelation has always been a great mystery. And I will grant you that if you just sit down and try to read through it, your head will be spinning around before you are done! It is no wonder so many strange and weird interpretations have been made concerning this last book of the Bible. As I sat and prayed about what God was wanting the church to hear, I thought about the concept of ‘church’. We over the last several months have had to consider what ‘church’ is. The certainly isn’t what it once was - whether 30 years ago or 10 years ago or even 5 months ago. And that is OK because Jesus is always asking his church to evolve into what Christ needs us to be in a certain place and a certain time. We have had to consider how we work and worship together as a church while maintaining social distancing and masks and other measures to insure our safety.
For the next couple months we are going to look at the picture of ‘church’ that is presented to us in the book of Revelation. Now even though this book is a bit strange and difficult, the book of Revelation does present to us a blueprint of what Jesus wanted ‘church’ to be - and we do always need to keep in mind that ‘church’ was something ushered in by Jesus himself and as the designer of church we need to hear what he wants his church to be. We will begin this week and next week talking about the book of Revelation and then begin to look at the specific churches mentioned in these words.
The book was written by John. John had been arrested for teaching about Jesus and his punishment was for him to be put in exile on the island of Patmos. While he is there he has a vision. This vision is of Jesus who tells him that he is to write down everything that Jesus tells him and everything he sees. One of the reasons the images in this book are so bizarre, is because John is seeing things that aren’t describable in human terms. He is trying to teach us of things that are more than we can truly ever understand. The only way he can do this is to stretch our imagination to use earthly words to describe heavenly things. An impossible task! The other reason there are these images of flying dragons and multi-headed beasts and flying women comes from the fact that John is using images from popular stories that existed during the time period in which John is writing. One of the stories reflected the birth of the Greek God Zeus to allude to the miraculous birth of Jesus . If we knew that story we would recognize it, but for most of us the story is lost. Just like we use TV shows and movies to illustrate our understandings of some of Jesus’ teaching, John uses stories the people ‘back then’ would have known - and we don’t. He also uses references to Old Testament images – several times he uses the stories of the Exodus and we also see images from the prophetic books of Daniel and Ezekiel. If we know our Old Testament better, we would recognize these metaphors as well!! So the descriptions used throughout the book are not so much mysterious – but images unfamiliar to us in the 21st century!
What else we need to learn to truly understand this book of scripture is the audience. When Jesus instructed John to write this letter down, he told John to write it and then send it to the 7 churches of Asia Minor. We would know this as Turkey today. These churches were suffering terrible persecution and John is trying to give the members of these churches a message of hope – a message which reminds them of the promises of God. The overall message of the book is that as terrible as things may be right now, we have the promise of the people of God of this glorious eternity, living in the presence of God forever. Things may be difficult now, but there will be a time when we will live in peace, with no more tears and no more pain and no more suffering. However, Jesus spends the first 3 chapters explaining to the members of these specific churches that it is important how they live now. That in the face of all this persecution, they are the witness to the love and grace of Jesus Christ, and they need to live and conduct themselves accordingly!
This ‘book’ of The Revelation of John is actually a letter. John wrote down what Jesus told him and put it in the form of a letter and sent the letter to each of the churches mentioned in the book. This was a time when they didn’t have copiers, so this letter became what was known as a circular letter – there was just one copy, and as each church read the letter, they would send it on to the next church. The interesting part of this was that each church would see the good and bad comments Jesus was making about the other churches!
We will look at each of these churches over the next couple months, however it is interesting to mention that of the 7 churches, 2 churches Jesus pointed out were doing nothing wrong, 2 churches Jesus condemned for doing nothing right and the remaining 3 churches had some good some bad. The purpose Jesus tells them, is not to be condemning (although he was really hard on the church of Laodicea), but to help them correct their problems so they could be true witnesses to Jesus. As the church of the 21st century we can read these messages from Jesus to help us get ourselves as a church back on track! Many times throughout the entire book, the point is made that no matter what is going on in our life, the main thing we need to think about, is our witness to Jesus and his church. And when you read the historical accounts of the spread of Christianity, not the Bible stories, but the secular history that was recorded, it was the willingness of Christians to stand by Jesus Christ even in the face of persecution that pulled people into the faith. The people looking in from the outside felt that if these people were willing to put up with the persecution they were suffering – which often was just horrific – then Jesus must really have something important to offer.
Revelation means just what it sounds like, the word ‘reveal’ – the purpose of the book is to ‘reveal’ something – to reveal our hope in eternity with Jesus Christ. Often the book is looked at as a picture of the future – our future. And it is in the ‘heavenly’ sense. It is not a picture of our future here on earth. Many have interpreted this book as a picture of the ‘end times’; of our life here on earth. But nowhere does the book say anything about Tribulation or Armageddon or‘rapture’. What John is doing in this book is portraying in images current to that time, the awfulness of what Rome was doing to the Christians. And then Jesus, through John, is using horrific images to point out that Rome would meet her destruction some day. It is that same encouragement we receive from Jesus during his ministry – that God will make things right in the end. To these Christians getting burned up and thrown to lions and turned into candles and imprisoned, they hear that not only will they have this wonderful future in the presence of God, but that the one persecuting them, the Empire of Rome, will get theirs. And of course history proves this to be so as the Barbarians destroyed Rome in the year 390.
One of the wonders of this book, is its emphasis on worship. Revelation is a book of worship. Over 40 of the hymns we sing on a regular basis come from the book of Revelation! Every story John tells, every moment of bizarre pictures, is framed by times of worship. These wonderful pictures of people gathering together, of sharing a meal in the form of a heavenly banquet, of singing joyous songs and just praising God, of a great reunion of all the people of God from every time and every place. John is saying to us that one of the reasons we gather now to worship we are in effect ‘rehearsing’ for this great communion and this great worship we will participate in one day in the Kingdom of God. The message is also that no matter what is going on, it is important and necessary for us to take time out to worship together as the community of God. All the worship we see is a worship praising God as a people of God – all together.

While it is still a rather difficult book to read, and while it does admonish us to remember that we do have standards we need to live by, the book of the Revelation of John is a picture of the fulfillment of the promise of God – that no matter what is going on in our life right now, no matter what we are experiencing, in the end, God will make all things new and we will live forever in paradise with our savior Jesus Christ!

Amen!