Living Words

Mark Three: A Biblical Understanding of the Gospel

by William Klock

Faithful preaching of God’s word is the first mark of a healthy and faithful church.  These last two Sundays we’ve begun to explore what that looks like.  First, we saw that we must preach the word in such a way that we give it priority and let it be our guide, and that means that we commit ourselves to preaching expositionally.  And last Sunday I talked about the importance of allowing the Bible, as we preach it and immerse ourselves in it, to shape and define our understanding of God.  The Bible is, after all, his revelation of himself to us.  We cannot know him apart from his word.  And that leads us to today’s topic: A healthy church will have a Bible-informed understanding of the gospel.  Now, no one ever sets out deliberately to preach an unbiblical gospel, but that doesn’t mean such things aren’t preached.  Sometimes we unwittingly allow unbiblical cultural ideas, values, and philosophies to colour our gospel.  Sometimes, when the Church is beset by controversy over gospel issues, we can over-react to one error by falling into its opposite.  Sometimes the errors are small, but sometimes they’re great—to the point of apostasy.  The antidote, Brothers and Sistes, is to preach God’s word faithfully and systematically.

So what is the gospel?  Our English word “gospel” is from Old English god spel, literally meaning “good news”.  The Greek word used by the New Testament writers and the ancient Jewish translators of the Old Testament is euangelion.  Originally euangelion was the reward that was given to someone for bringing good news, but by the time the Bible was written it had come to mean the good news itself.  The related verb, euangelizo, means to proclaim this good news.  This is where we get the English word “evangelical”.  We are people of the good news.  This is a good place to start.  The gospel is good news.  For example, think back to the death of Saul and Jonathan in 2 Samuel.  David mourned their deaths and the messengers came with the news, he said:

Tell it not in Geth, and proclaim it not in the exits of Ascalon…lest daughters of the uncircumcised exult. (2 Samuel 1:20 NETS)

In the Greek Old Testament, when it says “proclaim”, it’s using this word for proclaiming good news.  The Philistines would take the death of Saul as good news.  When the messenger brought this news to David, he thought it was good news, too.  David’s enemy had been defeated.  Now, for personal reasons David didn’t take it that way.  To him it was bad news, but he knew that to everyone else it was good news—a victory had been won and that victory meant things were about to change.  And, notice, the natural thing to do with good news is to proclaim it.  The heralds were ready to do just that until David told them not to.

Or think of Isaiah.  Israel had been defeated, but he saw a vision of Jerusalem as the herald of good news.  The Lord would come and deliver his people from their exile.

Go on up to a high mountain,

         O Zion, herald of good news;

lift up your voice with strength,

         O Jerusalem, herald of good news;

         lift it up, fear not;

say to the cities of Judah,

         “Behold your God!” (Isaiah 40:9)

And Isaiah uses this concept as he envisions the messenger, running across the mountains with this good news:

How beautiful upon the mountains

         are the feet of him who brings good news,

who publishes peace, who brings good news of happiness,

         who publishes salvation,

         who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.” (Isaiah 52:7)

Something was about to happen.  The Lord was going to act and he would act in such a way that things would never be the same.  God was finally going to take up his throne as King.  This is exactly what Jesus had in mind when we read Mark’s account of him saying:

“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.” (Mark 1:15)

The Lord was about to act.  Specifically, he was about to act as King in such a way that everything was about to change.  And Jesus isn’t just saying that people in Judea needed to “believe” in the sense of giving their intellectual assent to some new theological truth.  When “good news” happens, it’s a world-changing event.  To “believe” means to change one’s life in order to take part in what’s about to happen and be part of its benefits.  In Jesus, God was becoming king—as he had promised so long before.  To refuse to believe, to refuse to recognise this change and this new reality is, at best, to be left behind and, at worst, well…it wasn’t good.  Let’s look at how the Greeks and Romans used this term, “gospel”.

If you’re familiar with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra or Mankiewicz’ 1963 Cleopatra with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, you know something about the aftermath of the Roman civil war.  On the death of Julius Caesar the Empire was plunged into conflict.  On one side was Caesar’s heir, Octavian, and on the other his friend, Mark Antony.  Octavian defeated Antony in a great naval battle at Actium.  Antony fled to Egypt, where he eventually committed suicide with Cleopatra.  Octavian was enthroned as Caesar Augustus and euangelion—the good news—was proclaimed throughout the empire.  Augustus had defeated the enemies of Rome.  He had brought peace at last and, with it, prosperity.  He even started using the title “son of God”.  He was the saviour of the empire.

Now, what did this good news mean to the people of the empire?  Imagine if you’d been a local official or ruler and you’d been a firm supporter of Mark Antony during the war.  The good news about Caesar Augustus meant that everything had changed and you had to make a choice.  There was no continuing on supporting the losing side.  That was treason and it would lead to only one thing: execution.  This was the choice King Herod faced when this good news reached him.  He’d backed Antony.  He was no dummy.  Hearing the news, he went straight to the new Caesar and pledged his loyalty.  The world had changed and he committed himself to the side where he got to live—and keep his throne.

So, now, think about “good news”.  It means that something has happened—or is happening or is about to happen—something that changes everything.  Nothing will ever be the same again and, in light of it, everyone has got to make a choice.  There’s no fence sitting.  And there are consequences if you make the wrong choice.  If Herod, for example, had continued to back Antony’s forces it would have meant the end of Herod.  In Jesus, Israel’s God has become King and he calls for our allegiance—to him, to his kingdom, to everything it stands for.  Sin and death are defeated and everything about the world that was shaped by them is being undone by Jesus and his act of new creation.  The gospel calls us to make a choice, to announce our allegiance.  Do we continue to give our allegiance to—as we say in our baptism—the world, the flesh, and the devil, or to Jesus, his new creation, and the Holy Spirit?

And this points to something else important about the gospel.  Good news isn’t quietly whispered.  It’s always proclaimed.  It’s announced with great fanfare.  The announcement that Jesus is Lord, that in him the God of Israel has come as King, that’s not some private truth to keep to ourselves or to whisper to our friends.  But that’s not far off from how many people treat it.  Something changed in the first half of the Twentieth Century and we started talking about “sharing” the gospel.  Christians had never used that kind of language before.  But it goes along with a shift that slowly took place over the last two hundred years or so.  Instead of seeing the gospel as good news, we started treating it instead like good advice.  We’ve made this shift subtly in how we do evangelism.  We often present the gospel—the good news about Jesus—as if it’s just another offering on the religious or philosophical smorgasbord and suggest that people give Jesus a try. Maybe they’ll like him and believe—or maybe they won’t, which would be sad, but…whatever.  But, Brothers and Sisters, the gospel is not good advice.  It’s not like a stock tip or a life hack or a new recipe.  It’s good news.  It’s not just a message that will change your life.  It’s a message that will change your life, because it’s a message that in Jesus the whole world has changed.

Consider Peter’s sermon on Pentecost, recorded in Acts 2.  He starts out:

“Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. (Acts 2:14)

I think we pass over this introduction too quickly in order to get to the meat of his sermon, but notice how he proclaims this good news like the royal herald that he is.  This isn’t a good piece of advice.  It's not a pro tip.  It’s not something that might be worth giving a shot.  It's good news.  It demands action.  And Peter goes on, reminding the people of the promises the Lord had made to Israel—promises to set things to rights by sending his King.  He tells them:

“Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves know—this Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.  God raised him up, loosing the pangs of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by it. (Acts 2:22-24)

“You killed him,” Peter says, “but God raised him up.”  What does that mean?  Peter, again, looks back to the promises God had made to Israel—particularly through David.  For Peter, Jesus’ death was vitally important, but the crucifixion of Jesus wasn’t the thing that changed the world.  Ultimately, it was his resurrection from the dead that did that.  In his resurrection, Peter says, God has loosed the pangs of death.  By his resurrection, he says, Jesus has been exalted at the right hand of God and given to his people the gift of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus has fulfilled all the Lord’s promises.  But Peter ends with the most powerful note of all in verse 36:

“Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and [Messiah], this Jesus whom you crucified.”

 

By raising Jesus from the dead, God has declared him to be Lord and Messiah—to be not just any king, but to be the King—the one who will set all to rights—not just his people, but eventually the whole of this broken creation.

The crowd, Luke says, were cut to the heart and asked Peter what they should do.  In other words, they knew this good news meant that the world has changed and they wanted to know what they had to do to in response.  And Peter says to them in verses 38-39:

“Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.  For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.”

 

Luke says about three thousand were baptised that day.  But what did Peter mean by “repent and be baptised”?  To repent is to turn around.  The good news is the announcement that in Jesus the world has changed, there’s a new King, and God’s kingdom is breaking in.  The good news calls us to turn aside and to leave behind the old regime, the old order—our rebellion, our sin, our idolatry—and to take hold of the new King and his kingdom in faith.  In Jesus, God has become king.  Peter’s sermon is incredibly important, because in it he reminds us of what the Lord had promised to Israel, and then he explains that it has all been fulfilled or is in the process of being fulfilled by Jesus—and those promises point to what the good news is all about.  The promises remind us that what Jesus has done is far bigger and all-encompassing than what we often think.  It’s about all of creation being set right and made new.  It’s about Jesus binding the devil and triumphing over the powers and principalities that have corrupted this world.  It’s about the old gods being cast down and the true God being raised up.  It’s about humanity being made right with God to finally live in his presence and to take up our vocation again—the one that Adam and Eve rejected—to be his image-bearers, the priests of his temple, as we steward his creation.  It’s about heaven and earth, about God and man finally being reunited.

Jews knew that one day God would set things right and that when he did so he would judge—and destroy—everything and everyone who was opposed to him.  They called that day “the day of the Lord”.  Throughout his ministry Jesus warned that it was coming—and soon.  When he warned about the easy way that leads to destruction and urged people to follow him on the hard and narrow way that leads to life, that’s what he was talking about.  He was pointing to the events we read about in our study of Revelation when Jerusalem and the temple were thrown down by the Romans as an act of judgement by God on his unbelieving people—much as he’d done six centuries earlier, although that time it had been the Babylonians.  Jesus wasn’t warning about some event thousands of years in the future.  He was warning of a judgement that was just around the corner.  That judgement certainly foreshadows that last great day of final judgement when every last enemy of God will be wiped from creation.  But Jesus—and Peter—were focused on Israel and her near future.  Again, Peter’s hearers were cut to the heart, because they realised that this is what Peter was talking about too.  They wanted to know how to escape the coming judgement and to be part of God’s new people in the age to come.

If people thought the victory of Octavian over Antony was a world-shaking event—so much so that King Herod went to grovel before the new emperor that he might have a place in it, imagine how much greater, how all-encompassing this good news about Jesus is.  If the Lord was going to come with both salvation and judgement to set Israel to rights and to deal with the unrepentant in her midst, one day he will surely do the same for the whole world.

This ought to put our attention on another aspect of the good news.  Herod could only speculate about where he stood with Octavian.  He could very easily have gone home headless.  By his resurrection Jesus has inaugurated God’s new world, and Brothers and Sisters, by his death he has shown his mercy.  We need but repent—to turn aside from the old gods, the old ways, the old systems—to believe—to take hold of him in faith and to give him our allegiance, and we can be sure of where we stand before him.  The first step we take after repentance is to be baptised.  The waters of baptism hold his promise of forgiveness and new life and as we pass through them in faith, he washes us clean and fills us with his Spirit.  He makes us his own.  As St. Paul writes in Romans:

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”  (Romans 8:15)

Jesus’ Father becomes our Father and he loves us as he loves his own son.

But speaking of Paul…  How do the Gentiles find a place in this good news.  Jesus was Israel’s Messiah.  He came in fulfilment of the Lord’s promises to Israel.  Even in his death by crucifixion, he died the very death that the unbelieving Jewish rebels would suffer a generation later when God’s judgement fell on Jerusalem.  Jesus and the good news are integrally tied to Israel and to Israel’s story.  How is it good news for the rest of the world?  We see the struggle in Acts.  The Spirit all but summoned Peter and John to Samaria.  The good news had reached people there and they believed, but—a mystery to the apostles—they did not receive the Spirit.  The apostles had to go and lay hands on these new non-Jewish believers.  It was a not-so-subtle hint from the Spirit that the good news was for everyone.  An angel directed Philip to his meeting with a man from Ethiopia.  The Spirit had to convince Peter, against everything he thought he knew was right, to go to the home of Cornelius, a gentile centurion.  And what was to be done with these gentile converts?  Did they have to become Jews first?  Be circumcised, keep the law, and all of that.  And then along came Paul.  Or, more precisely, along came the risen Messiah to meet Paul on the road to Damascus.

Maybe more than anyone else, Paul realised just how much the resurrection of Jesus changes everything.  C. S. Lewis famously wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen.  Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”  The resurrection of Jesus was just like that for Paul.  And Paul realised that if the Lord’s promises to Israel were fulfilled in Jesus, in his resurrection, and in the outpouring of the Spirit to create this new people of God called the Church, then all of this was for the gentiles too.  Israel had always been called to be a light to the nations and so too must this new Israel.  Paul thought back to the Lord’s deliverance of Israel in the Exodus—something that shaped Israel’s identity and is there behind so much of Paul’s writing.  The Lord delivered his people from their bondage and in doing so, he made his might and his glory known to the nations—especially to Egypt.  Her king and her gods were exposed for the powerless frauds they were.  And yet there was no mass conversion of the Egyptians in the wake of the Exodus.  The whole thing was an embarrassment that they expunged from their records so that they could continue in the idolatry.

But Paul recognized that in Jesus and in this new exodus, there was a new element that had been missing in the old and that was the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  Paul knew that this good news about a crucified Messiah was, as he writes to the Corinthians “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23).  A crucified Messiah was blasphemy to the Jews.  And it was just stupid nonsense to the gentiles.  Paul knew this first hand.  The Jews stoned him for the things he said and the Gentiles threw him in jail.  “But,” he goes on in that same verse, “to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, the Messiah—the power of God and the wisdom of God.”  That was the key—those who are called, those in whom the Spirit of God is at work.

How does the Spirit work?  It seems like it’s different for everyone.  For Paul it was the realization that Jesus really had risen from the dead and that that truth changed everything he’d ever known.  He had to go off by himself for a few years to work it all through, but work it through he did.  For others it was simply the realization that in Jesus the God of Israel was truly at work.  This time the Gentiles saw the God of Israel in this mighty act of redemption that proved his faithfulness to his promises and instead of forgetting about it like the Egyptians had so long ago, they recognized the living God and they threw all their idols away.  For others it was the fact that in Jesus, God drew near.  By his Spirit they somehow knew him and experienced him—something that never happened with the pagan gods.  Paul recognized that this good news was for everyone.  As he wrote to the Galatians:

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Jesus the Messiah. (Galatians 3:28)

This time the gentiles saw the mighty and saving deeds of the God of Israel and they believed—because of the Spirit—and they were welcomed into this new people of God to share in the forgiveness and the new life and the future hope that Jesus had given them.

But, in closing, what’s the significance?  Where does the good news take us?  What are we supposed to do with it?  If we understand that the death and resurrection of Jesus give us a place in the renewed people of God and that Jesus is setting everything to rights, that itself should point us in the right direction.  The problem is that in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, liberal Protestants largely turned the gospel into a message of good works—and then, gradually, those good works became more and more like the values of secular culture and Leftist politics and Jesus became nothing more than an example.  In response, fundamentalists and evangelicals rightly re-emphasised the personal and spiritual nature of redemption and the forgiveness of sins, but often over-reacted when it came to the good works.  We’ve made the gospel a message very narrowly of forgiveness of sin and restored fellowship with God.  Salvation should result in a changed life and good works, but we’ve stressed—wrongly—that those good works are the fruit of the gospel, but not the gospel itself.  So on one side the gospel is proclaimed as a message of public welfare and on the other as a personal or private spirituality.  Then, throw into that mix the misconception that the end goal of all of this is someday to leave this world behind so that we can live a kind of disembodied spiritual existence in heaven, and we make a right mess of the gospel.

Brothers and Sisters, this is why we’ve got to preach the scriptures—so that we remember the big story.  This is what Peter did on Pentecost.  And when we do that we find that this faithful God we spoke about last Sunday has been working all along not to give us a plan to escape this fallen Creation, but rather a means to set this fallen creation to rights and us along with it.  We’re creation’s stewards—or at least that’s what we were created to be—but we rebelled and made a mess of everything.  And so the Lord has called a people through whom he will work, and he’s sent his Messiah to set us to rights, to fill us with his Spirit, and to get us back on task: to make him known, to do justice and mercy in this world, to bear the fruit of the Spirit, and to proclaim his King in the knowledge that the same Spirit who is in us, is also working in the hearts of men and women around the world, men and women just waiting to hear our proclamation of the good news about Jesus.  Men and women read to believe, to repent, to be baptised, to join in the life and work of the kingdom—they simply need to hear our proclamation of this good news.  It is a stumbling block and it is foolishness to many, but to those who are called, to those in whom the Spirit is at work, it is the power of God—for our salvation and for the salvation of the whole world.

As we’ve seen recently in Revelation, Jesus has prepared the way.  He has bound the devil and brought low the principalities and powers that once held this world captive.  This is the good news: that Jesus died for our sins and was raised by God, victorious over sin and death.  He is the Messiah—the Lord, the King—and he is making all things new.  This new creation, our hope is summed up in those words of the Lord’s prayer: on earth as in heaven.  Those words ought to shape us as gospel people.  Don’t just pray them.  Live them.  For the sake of the world, lift the veil and show the world a glimpse of God’s new creation.  And while you do it, remember that we are royal heralds of the King, commissioned to proclaim this good news to everyone around us.

Let’s pray: Merciful Father, we thank you this morning that you have made Jesus your King.  By his death you give a means of forgiveness and reconciliation and by his resurrection you’ve restored to us the life we had once rejected in our rebellion against you.  We thank you for those in whom you have worked by your word and Spirit who proclaimed this good news to us.  And we pray that your word and Spirit will now be at work in us to make us the gospel people you desire us to be.  Renew our hearts.  Turn them ever more towards you.  Strengthen our allegiance to Jesus and fill our heats with love for you.  Make us a people full of life and of hope, a people of mercy and love and grace, a holy people—an on-earth-as-in-heaven people eager to show the world your kingdom and to proclaim the good news that Jesus is Lord.  Through him we pray.  Amen.

Mark Two: A Biblical Understanding of God

by William Klock

Last week we looked at the subject of expositional preaching as the first mark of a healthy church.  It’s the central component of a word-centred ministry.  And, at least in theory, if we get biblical preaching right, everything else should follow naturally—although it will take some time.  But that doesn’t mean we’re done.  It’s not just how we should approach and preach God’s word, but we need to spend some time looking at what the content of biblical preaching is.  So today I want to begin with a look at how biblical preaching should be giving us a biblical understanding of God.  That’s the second mark of a healthy church: a biblical understanding of God.

Now that might seem like a no-brainer.  We’re Christians, so of course we’re going to be committed to a biblical understanding of God.  But if you start looking at what’s going on around us, it doesn’t take long to see that it ain’t necessarily so.  The song of that title written by the Gershwin brothers for Porgy and Bess, highlights the problem.  If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a litany sung by a drug dealer, casting doubt on the stories of the Bible.  He ends, “They tell all your children/The Devil he’s a villain/It ain’t necessarily so”.  That drug dealer thought that maybe it’s God who’s the villain.  He’s always spoiling everyone’s fun, after all—or at least that’s how it seems to a lot of people.  Maybe the devil’s actually the good guy.  Some people think that way, although it’s usually more subtle.  More often than not what it seems we’ve done is to swap their roles.  Ask someone on the street—or one of your non-Christians friends—who God is and they’ll describe a non-judgemental man in the sky who just wants you to be happy.  Ironically, this has more to do with the lies the devil routinely tells than it does the God we meet in the Bible.

It used to be “liberal” Protestants who rewrote the God of scripture.  Like the Jesus Seminar folks who wrote that all the warm and fuzzy stuff in the gospel is what Jesus really said, but all the stuff about sin and judgement—that was added later by men who had forgotten who Jesus really was.  But it’s not just liberals.  Many parts of Evangelicalism, particularly amongst younger people, have come to be dominated by a belief system that’s come to be called “Moralistic therapeutic deism”.  In short, it’s the belief that God wants people to be good—although the bar is pretty low; that God wants us to be happy and to feel good about ourselves; that he’s distant, but available when you’ve got a problem; and that if you’re good, you’ll go to heaven when you die.  Brothers and Sisters, this is not the God of the narrow way that leads to life; this is the devil of the wide gate that leads to destruction.

This is what you get when you stop preaching the word and, instead, preach pop-psychology, current events, and feel-good fluff.  It’s what you get when you preach human-centred sermons instead of God-centred sermons.  We’ve shifted the culture of the church.  John 3:16 used to be the best known and most oft quote verse of the Bible: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”.  These days that pride of place goes to Matthew 7:1, “Judge not, lest ye be judged,” quoted loudly by folks who have no idea about its context or what Jesus meant when he said it.  They just don’t want anyone telling them what to do and have embraced a false god who indulges their every desire.  Our culture, like the pagan cultures of old, and not a few within the Church, have recreated God in our image.  The antidote is the faithful preaching of God’s word.

And the culture will not be happy with it.  Post-modern culture hates meta-narratives.  Meta-narratives are those big stories that give meaning to life, the universe, and everything.  And today such things are said to be oppressive.  And being “oppressive” is the absolute worst thing anything can be in post-modern culture, where everything is about the individual and the individual being whatever he or she or they or them or ze or zir wants to be.  But if we believe the Bible is God’s word to us, then we can’t escape the Bible’s meta-narrative, its grand story running from Genesis to Revelation with Jesus at its centre, the story that does, in fact, give meaning to life, the universe, and everything.  And so it makes sense, then, that the God who has given this great narrative that runs from beginning to end describes himself as the Alpha and Omega.  Get the story right and you actually get to know the God behind it all from beginning to end.

So we can’t cover every aspect of a biblical understanding of God in a single sermon, but we can hit some high points—and especially the points that are often so challenged by our culture today.  So what does the biblical story tell us about the God behind it?

Well, let’s start at the beginning.  The story starts with Creation.  “In the beginning, God created…” is how Genesis begins.  St. John opens his gospel with those familiar words reminding us that it wasn’t just “God” in some generic sense that was there in the beginning, but the Triune God: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  Right at the beginning, the first thing the story teaches us about this Triune God is that he is a creator.  He is the great initiator.  There was nothing and it pleased him to make something of it.  And not just something, but a world.  And not just a world, but as Genesis 1 shows us, a word that is good because it is suitable for human life.  And God finishes his great creative act by creating human beings—and he does so for a purpose.  He created us to be his image bearers—to act as his regents, his stewards, his priests in this world he created.

But notice that God’s creative acts don’t end there.  As I said last week, his word gives life and so he continues to speak.  Humanity rebelled and sinned.  We gave up the vocation for which we were created and had to be removed from the garden-temple.  And things went from bad to worse.  It took only a single generation before the first murder happened and only a few generations later we have men boasting of slaughtering their enemies.  The Lord causes a flood to wipe sinful men from the earth and he speaks, calling forth Noah so that he can spare him, start over with him.  But again, human rebellion goes from bad to worse and so the Lord speaks again into the darkness and calls forth Abraham and from Abraham he makes a people for himself.  And as we read the story of that people, it’s full of ups and downs, of faithfulness and rebellion—mostly rebellion.  But the Lord repeatedly speaks his word and sustains the life of that people and at its lowest points he promises new life in the future.  And then we meet Jesus, the word incarnate, who fulfils those promises himself and creates a new Israel.  The god of the great biblical narrative is a creator.

That God is the creator also tells us that we can’t pick and choose the parts we like from this great story.  The first major heresy in church history was that of Marcion, who cut the Old Testament out of the Bible so as to dump all the things about God he didn’t like.  And this problem crops up repeatedly.  A couple years ago, popular pastor Andy Stanley preached that the Church must “unhitch” itself from the Old Testament.  Again, people want the warm-fuzzies, they want the welcoming message of forgiveness, but not the judgement or the wrath or the call to repentance.  But the grand biblical narrative shows us that it’s all connected.  The story doesn’t make any sense if you hack it up.  Forgiveness loses meaning when there’s nothing to be forgiven.  It’s all connected and biblical preaching reminds us of this truth.

But, too, there’s more to God’s creating than just speaking and creating.  In the story of his people we begin to see something we first saw a glimpse of with Noah.  For the Lord to create is also for the Lord to call and to choose or to elect.  He chose Abraham out of all the people on earth.  And, again, he chose Isaac over Ishmael and Jacob over Esau.  When it came time for a King, he would choose young David over his older brothers.  And Jesus chose twelve out of all his followers from which to build God’s new people.  And we look at that and we think, “Wait, that’s not fair!”  Brothers and Sisters, that’s when we need to go back to the story and remember that the Lord didn’t have to create anything at all.  He created in the first place to manifest his glory and to show his love.  And when we rebelled against him he didn’t have to begin this great act of new creation that would eventually cost his own Son.  But he did.  Because he is good.  Because he loves.  Because he is wise.  The big story reminds us repeatedly that he is all these things, and that reminds us that when things don’t make sense or when they seem unfair to us—with our limited perspective and knowledge—we can trust him.  This also reminds us—against the popular view of things today—that God does not exist to serve us, but we to serve him—and knowing his goodness assures us that this, too, is good.

Second point: The great narrative of the Bible reminds us again and again that God is holy.  Most people like to ignore this, because for something to be holy means that there really are things called “right” and “wrong”.  It means that if God is holy, then he also has expectations for us.  Post-modern culture is built around that idea that we’re each the centre of our own universe.  We make our own truth and we each define our own happiness.  You can do whatever you want and be whatever you want.  If you want to do drugs or have promiscuous sex, that’s your truth and your happiness.  If you’re a man, but you want to be a woman—or a cat—woe to anyone who says you can’t or that there are objective standards.  And this is why our culture has created a false god that just wants us to be happy and is never judgemental.

But there at the beginning of the story we’re reminded that Adam and Eve were forced to leave the Lord’s presence because they rebelled against him, they sinned.  And then we see throughout the story this theme of holiness.  Humans do what they want and everything goes from bad to worse.  We like to say that it’s okay to do what you want as long as you don’t hurt other people, and that may be our only political option in a pluralistic, modern society, but the big story shows us that this doesn’t work in the end.  And so when the Lord created a people for himself, he not only delivered them from a life of slavery, he also gave them a law—a way of life that not only included all the dos and don’ts, but a system of offerings and sacrifices, means of atonement for their sins, so that they could live in his presence and he in theirs.  The tabernacle in the midst of Israel was a reminder of the holiness of God and the need of sinners for redemption.  There it was, the Lord’s dwelling place in the centre of the camp.  The Lord lived in the midst of his people.  It was a powerful reminder of how things are supposed to be—as they were when Adam and Eve lived in the Lord’s presence in the garden-temple.  But it was also a powerful reminder that even in Israel, things were not as they should be.  The Lord dwelled in their midst, but he dwelled in a place they could not go.  The holy of holies, glorious and beautiful and filled with the cloud of his glory resting on the ark of the covenant, was off limits.  The relationship between God and human beings was still broken—and the brokenness was not on his part, but theirs.  Again, we see his love and his grace and his mercy.  Through the law and the sacrifices he gave the people a means of drawing near, of truly being his people, while at the same time reminding them of the seriousness of their problem, of the sinfulness of sin, and that something greater was needed to finally restore full fellowship with him.  The tabernacle (and later the temple) was an abattoir where continual animal sacrifices were offered to atone for sin.  Those weren’t the only offerings.  The people came to offer their thanks to the Lord as well.  But the blood sacrifices overshadowed everything else—a reminder that the problem of this broken fellowship is on our end, not God’s; that it is not his holiness that is the problem, but our sin.  They were a reminder for Israel of the mercy of the Lord—that he desires to be reconciled with sinners—but also that sinners must come to him on his terms and not our own, and that there is a great gulf between holiness and sinfulness.  And so the story of Israel and her covenant with the Lord prepared the people of God for Jesus.  Every Sunday you and I come to his Table and are reminded that the son of God gave his life as a once-for-all and perfect sacrifice for sin, his blood given in place of ours, to bring atonement, to restore us to the presence of the Lord—because of his great love for us.  And again, that reminder is there that we come to God on his terms and not our own, because he is holy and apart from him we are not.

And here the God of Scripture clashes with the false god we so often create for ourselves.  We’re like petulant children who get angry when our parents lay down rules.  “You don’t love me if you won’t let me do whatever I want,” we shout at them.  But they know better.  Our parents know things that we don’t, and so they give us rules when we are children, not because they’re mean, but because they love us.  As adults with hindsight we see our foolishness.  We knew other kids whose parents let them do whatever they wanted and we’d foolishly think that those kids’ parents loved them more.  Now we’re adults and know better.  Brothers and Sisters, we do the same thing with God.  He created us out of love in the beginning, he delivered Israel from her Egyptian bondage out of love, he lived in her midst out of love even when she was so often unfaithful.  He taught her how to be holy.  He gave her instructions for sacrifices as a means of atonement.  And like petulant and ungrateful teenagers Israel went after other gods instead.  But the petulant and rebellious teenager is a modern phenomenon, not the one used by the Lord when he spoke to his people.  When he spoke to them of their relationship with him, she was his beautiful and beloved bride who turned to adultery and unfaithfulness.  That’s a much darker and troubling image then the rebellious teen.  But as we read Israel’s story, we see that the Lord never abandons his bride.  The prophecy of Hosea may be one of the most profound witnesses of the Lord’s love for his people, despite their unfaithfulness.  Hosea wrote:

“In that day, declares the Lord, you will call me ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me ‘My Baal.’  For I will remove the names of the Baals from her mouth, and they shall be remembered by name no more.  And I will make for them a covenant on that day with the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the creeping things of the ground. And I will abolish the bow, the sword, and war from the land, and I will make you lie down in safety.  And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy.  I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the Lord.”  (Hosea 2:16-20)

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, as Jeremiah wrote, and his mercies never end (Lamentation 3:22).  And we see this as the great story eventually leads us to Jesus, who, as St. Paul writes:

…though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  (Philippians 2:6-8)

And St. John reminds us so poignantly:

In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins…We love because he first loved us. (1 John 4:9-10)

The great story reveals the faithlessness of human beings to the one who has loved us from the very beginning.  No matter how great our rebellion, our idolatry, our sin, our unfaithfulness to him, he has loved us from the beginning and he will love us to the end and has given his own life to restore us to his presence and fill our hearts with love for him.  Again, we love because he first loved us.  The God of the Bible is a God of love.

Now, there are lots of things we can say of the God of who reveals himself in the Bible.  He is patient, for example.  Or he’s sovereign.  The list is long and all of these things are interrelated.  He is patient, because he is loving.  The fact that he is a creating, calling, and electing God means that he is also a sovereign God.  We have confidence in prayer, because we know that he is sovereign and has the power to answer.  And we have confidence in his answers, because we know he is wise and good and loving and so on.  But I want to close on a different point and that is that the God of the Bible is a faithful God.  More than anything else, this is the aspect of God we need to grasp as we struggle to trust him.

The great story reminds us of God’s faithfulness from beginning to end.  We see his faithfulness in that he didn’t give up, wipe everything out, and start over when we rebelled.  Instead, he has lovingly, patiently, graciously, and mercifully stuck with us.  If it weren’t for his faithfulness he wouldn’t have called Abraham, he wouldn’t have rescued Israel from Egypt, he wouldn’t have given his law or a king, he wouldn’t have disciplined his people, he wouldn’t have spoken through the prophets.  He wouldn’t have made promises—or might have, but he wouldn’t have kept them.  If he were not faithful, he’d be like the gods of the pagans—fickle, unreliable, unknowable.  And, of course, we see the faithfulness of God fully revealed in Jesus.  In Jesus he shows his faithfulness to us, even when we are unfaithful.  In Jesus he fulfils his promises.  As St. Paul wrote to Timothy:

If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.  (2 Timothy 2:13)

It’s who he is.  God cannot be anything other than faithful and we know it because of the Scriptures.  In the Bible we have the record of his character—of his goodness and wisdom and righteousness and holiness and everything else that comes together and culminates in his faithfulness.  One of the things I like best about the Psalms is their repeated acclamation of the faithfulness of the Lord to his people, to his covenant, to his promises.  They sing out his mighty deeds for Israel and remind the people not only that they have every reason to trust in him, but that they would be fools not to.  And if that was the case for Israel in the Old Testament, how much more is it the case for us, his new Israel.  We have known Jesus and the Spirit as the fulfilment of all that he promised.  We have been plunged into this life in our baptism and we come, week after week, to his Table.  We bear in our baptism his mark—the gift of his own indwelling Spirit—and here at the Table we participate again and again in those events—the death and resurrection of Jesus—through which God has delivered us from our bondage to sin and death and made us his own.  Brothers and Sisters, this is the God whom healthy churches proclaim, this is the God whose mighty and saving deeds we sing, this is the God whom we make known to the world.  This the God in whom our future hopes rest.  As St. John wrote:

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.  (1 John 3:2)

As I say so often, in Jesus and the Spirit—at the cross and in the upper room at Pentecost—our God did the hard part.  His word tells us and our baptism and the Lord’s Supper serve as perpetual reminders of his faithfulness.  He is the Alpha and Omega, the one whose faithfulness knows no bounds and is as long as eternity itself.  It is in him we trust and it is him we preach.

Let’s pray: Holy, loving, sovereign, patient, faithful Father, we give you thanks for revealing yourself to us in your word—for who you are, for what you have done, for showing us that you are worthy of our love and worthy of our trust.  By your word and through your Spirit you give us the gift of faith.  We ask that as we continue in your word and as we share in your sacraments, as our knowledge and experience of you grows, that our faith will deepen.  Purge our hearts of fickleness we pray, that we might set aside every idol and every false idea we might have of you.  Give us your great grace, that we might ever more each day trust in you and love you more as we steep ourselves in your word and each Sunday as we come to your Table to be reminded of the great love you have shown to us in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the gift of your Spirit.  Amen.

Marks of a Healthy Church

Mark One: Expositional Preaching

by William Klock

We just confessed in the Creed that the Church is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.  These are historically known as the “marks” of the Church.  Despite our various differences and schisms, the Church is one.  Whether Anglican or Mennonite or Coptic or Baptist, we’re all part of the one Church.  It’s holy.  Jesus has called us, set us apart, washed us clean, and filled us with the Spirit.  It’s catholic.  It is universal and it is complete in and of itself.  And it’s apostolic in that it continues in the teaching, in the gospel, that was given to us by the apostles.  These identifying marks of the Church have served us well since the Fourth Century—and it’s not like they were new ideas when they were written into the Nicene Creed back then.  But they are fairly abstract—in the sense that these things describe the Church in the broadest sense.  So how do we identify the church at the local level?  When you look at a local congregation, what sorts of things should define it?  Or we could ask what makes a local church a church as opposed to a social club or a group of do-gooders or even a cult?  Or we might ask what makes for a healthy church?  These issues became of paramount importance at the time of the Protestant Reformation.  If the Church is “broken”—as the Reformers observed—what needs to happen to set it right?  For the Reformers, whether German or Swiss, French or English or Scottish, the identify marks of a true local church, of a church faithful to Jesus and the teaching of the apostles, distilled down to two things: the preaching of God’s word and the administration of God’s sacraments.  This principle was written, in one way or another, into all of the Protestant confessions of faith, but here’s how it comes to us in ours, in Article XIX of our Articles of Religion:

The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

Anglican and Lutherans, Baptists and Presbyterians, we have our differences, but we are united in these two core marks of a church: we preach the word and we administer the sacraments.  Faithfulness to these two things—and whether or not we do these things with deliberate faithfulness to Scripture—is what determines the health of a church.  Not attendance and numbers, not programs, not activities, not vibrant fellowship, but faithfulness to preaching God’s word and administering his sacraments.  All those other things can be good—and sometimes they come out of faithfulness to word and sacrament, but it’s the word and the sacraments that create this community called the church.  We can build community around all sorts of other things—and churches often do.  We build community around programmes.  We build communities around styles of worship, whether a grand pipe organ and a choir or a rock band and fog machine.  We even build community around celebrity preachers.  But those things should not and do not define a church—let alone a healthy church.  Faithfulness to word and sacrament do.  We visited this topic almost thirteen years ago and it’s my plan to revisit it again between now and Advent.  My own views have evolved and refined a bit in the last decade, but I think the key principles I preached back then are still basically the same.  So I want to start these first several weeks with that first mark, faithful preaching of the word.  The first four principles derive from our preaching.  From there we’ll move onto the principles that are connected to or derived from our administration of the sacraments.

So a faithful church, a healthy church is a word-centred church.  Such church should be characterised by people who take God’s word seriously and who understand that it speaks with authority.  We should expect such a church’s members to be committed to reading and studying the Bible for themselves.  We should expect that they will probably gather in groups to read and study the Bible together.  But at the centre of all of this should be a pulpit ministry devoted to and centred on the Bible.  Virtually every church includes some kind of sermon in its worship, but not every sermon is Bible-centred.  So we need to be very explicit about this.  The first mark of a faithful and healthy church is not just preaching, but what’s usually called expositional or expository preaching.  Now, what is expositional preaching?  Expositional preaching is what I do virtually every Sunday.  Expositional preaching takes a text from the Bible—maybe given by the lectionary or maybe as we work through a book of the Bible verse by verse or chapter by chapter—expositional preaching takes that text, explains what it means, and applies it to the congregation—it tells you what to do about it.  In contrast there’s topical preaching.  That’s what I almost never do—but I am doing it right now.  In a topical sermon, the preacher preaches not about a Biblical text, but about subject—and hopefully what the Bible has to say about that subject, whether it's prayer or justice or holiness or expositional preaching.  There can be some crossover.  A topical sermon can be expositional as it explains what a certain text has to say about a certain topic.  But a steady diet of topic preaching isn’t healthy for a church, because it’s not driven by the word.  Topical preaching is driven by the preacher.  And if a congregation only ever hear what their preacher wants to preach about, they’ll never grow beyond where their preacher is at.  And he won’t grow either, because he’s always digging into the Bible to find support for his ideas.  In contrast, expositional preaching is driven by the word.  The Bible’s agenda becomes the preacher’s agenda—and he’s therefore always learning and often surprised by what he finds—and the congregation grows by hearing God’s word.  Brother and Sisters, my ideas—no preacher’s ideas or pet topics—will not transform you into the people God intends you to be.  Only his word will do that.

Expositional preaching also requires and builds a commitment to God’s word.  Many of us came from the Anglican Church of Canada.  How did a church go so badly awry, how did it stray so far from orthodoxy, and how did so many people just sit and let it happen?  It happened because the church lost her commitment to the word.  Her pulpit ministry failed.  The great expositional sermons preached in Anglicn pulpits from the Reformation through the 19th Century were replaced by ten or fifteen minute homilies—often topical, but typically paying only lip-service to God’s word.  And that created a people with no passion for the word and that, in turn, created a people with little knowledge of the word—people ready to be carried about by every wind of doctrine.

Brothers and Sisters, God’s word creates God’s people.  Many of us have seen what happens when you take it away or water it down.  God’s people become lax in faith and lax in discipline.  Instead of conforming to the word, they conform to the culture around them.  And eventually they simply stop being God’s people altogether—they apostatise.  And it’s not just “liberal” churches.  Evangelicals at large are facing their own crisis, because so many of our churches are failing to preach the word.  Our preachers are preaching pop-psychology or they’re preaching topically and preaching their own ideas—and even as they affirm the authority or inerrancy of Scripture, their churches are often looking less and less like the people of God and more like the culture around us.  Dear Friends, our churches must, first and foremost, by centred on God’s word and that begins with our pulpit ministry.  If we look at the history of the Church we see a lot of ebb and flow, high points and low points, and one thing we see consistently is that the high points in Church history always align with those times and places where her people and especially her preachers were committed to preaching God’s word.  People like to say that the great revivals of history were brought about by prayer.  That’s only half the story.  Those periods of great prayer were brought about by periods of great biblical preaching.  Again, God’s word creates God’s people.  It won’t happen any other way.

Let’s go back to the very beginning of the story.  Genesis 1.  What was God’s agent of creation?  “God said…”  He spoke and the cosmos and everything in it came into being.  When Adam and Eve sinned, they were cast from his presence, but the word of the Lord remained.  He spoke, cursing the serpent and giving them hope in a promise of restoration.  When all humanity had lost the knowledge of God, he spoke again, this time calling Abraham out of Ur and leading him to the promised land.  And when the Israelites were slaves in Egypt, the word of the Lord came again to Moses, and through him to the whole people—even to Pharaoh.  By his word he brought down a pagan king and created a people for himself.  At Sinai he spoke again, establishing a covenant with his people and giving his life—the means of life in his presence.  God’s word creates and gives life.

Over and over the Lord spoke to his people.  That phrase “the word of the Lord came” or something similar occurs more than 3,800 times.  By his word he created a people and by his word he sustained them.  By his word he made himself known.  By his word he created faith amongst them.  I was reading an article this week about literacy in ancient Israel.  Hardly anyone in the ancient world knew how to read and write—just a tiny handful of scribes.  But in ancient Israel and Judah the literacy rate may have been as high as fifteen or twenty per cent.[1]  Why?  Because they were a people of the word, particularly as the ancient oral traditions were recorded and became scripture.  They knew that God’s word is life.

Think of Ezekiel’s vivid vision of the valley of dry bones.  This is one of my favourite passages in all of Scripture because it so often gives me hope as a preacher.  The Lord took Ezekiel to a valley full of dead, dry bones.  The Lord asked him how those bones could live again.  Ezekiel had no idea.  It looked hopeless.  Here’s Ezekiel 37:4-6:

Then [the Lord] said to me, “Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.  Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.   And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

 

And look at what happened when Ezekiel began preaching God’s Word to those bones:

So I prophesied as I was commanded. And as I prophesied, there was a sound, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone.  And I looked, and behold, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them. But there was no breath in them.  Then he said to me,  “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on these slain, that they may live.”  So I prophesied as he commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived and stood on their feet, an exceedingly great army. (Ezekiel 37:7-10)

The Lord explains to Ezekiel that the bones are Israel—her hope is gone.  But he will not leave his people dry and hopeless.  He promised in verse 14, “I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live.”  What’s the Lord’s means of giving life—of imparting his Spirit—to his people?  As in the beginning, his word, this time spoken through the prophet.  It’s an amazing thing.  As a preacher it gives me hope.  Israel was dead.  Lots of people had lots of ideas about how to bring her back to life.  The nation certainly wasn’t interested in listening to Ezekiel.  But preaching was the Lord’s solution.  If he could speak into the pre-creation chaos and bring life, he can certainly speak to a lost, sinful, rebellious, and hopeless people and bring them back to life—giving them faith anew.  Brothers and Sisters, that’s why the Church exists: a people created by the word and called to preach that word to the world.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Back to Ezekiel.  The Lord promised to speak to Israel and to give her his Spirit.  Through the prophet he promised, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you.  And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 36:26)

And the Lord did just that.  Think of the opening verses of John’s Gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.  In him was life, and the life was the light of men. (John 1:1-4)

 

The word incarnate.  God’s creative power, there in the beginning, now incarnate, one of his own people, that he might bring the dry bones to life.  And what did the word incarnate do?  He preached, of course..  His was the ministry of a prophet, the word of the Lord proclaiming the word of the Lord—announcing judgement, but also calling Israel to repentance so that when he died for the sins of his people and rose from the grave, they would understand this fresh and mighty work of God and believe.  And when it was accomplished, what did he do?  He ordained apostles to proclaim this word to Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, and to the whole world.  We cannot know this God, we cannot know this Saviour, we cannot know this gospel apart from the word and without its proclamation.  It was like this for Israel and it is like this for the Church.  There’s a reason, again, why Christianity and Christian missions have promoted high literacy rates—why missionaries spend years learning the languages of pre-literate peoples, developing alphabets and grammars for them, so that they can then translate the Bible—the written word—so that those peoples can have it in their own languages.  There are folks today who think that preaching—a monologue by a single man at the front—is passé, but it has been the norm for both Jews and Christians from the beginning, because we are a people committed to the word of God, knowing that it is the only source of true life.

We cannot know God apart from his self-revelation of himself.  We see this in Genesis as things go from bad to worse in those first chapters, as fallen humanity loses all knowledge of God.  They grasped for heaven at Babel, but did so in an act of unbelief.  Humanity was utterly lost.  But then, in his grace, the Lord spoke and called Abraham and faith sparked to life in the darkness of the world—because God spoke, because a man heard the word of the Lord, believed, and obeyed.  As St. Paul writes in Romans 10:17, “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word”—and specifically he adds—“the word of Christ.”

There are all sorts of philosophies of church growth today.  People argue for building churches around programmes.  People argue that you’ve got to find your niche and build it around that.  When I was visiting my parents I saw that someone had started the “Cowboy Church” not far from where they live.  When I was first ordained in the REC a friend gave me a manual for traditional Anglican church planting.  It was all about building contacts with anglophiles by getting involved in clubs and societies centred on all things English.  Other people build churches around a worship experience or a youth programme.  It’s not that God can’t or won’t use some of those things, but Brothers and Sisters, a healthy church will always be built around the proclamation of the word of God, modelled in the pulpit and lived by the people.  Nothing else will last.  Someone once asked Martin Luther about his accomplishments.  He answered saying, “I simply taught, preached, wrote God’s Word: otherwise I did nothing….The Word did it all.”[2]  That’s the mindset the Church needs.

But the word does more than create.  The word also sustains and sanctifies.  It is the water that causes us to grow and we will not grow without it.  When he was tempted by the devil Jesus quoted Deuteronomy 8:3, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”  Or think of the Words of the Psalmist, who wrote, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105).  Without the word we will lose our way and starve.  We only have to look at Israel to see this.  Go back to King Josiah’s day in 2 Chronicles 34.  After years of neglect, Josiah ordered a renovation of the temple and during that renovation the book of the law was found.  The word of the Lord had been lost—buried in a pile somewhere in the temple and forgotten for generations.  Josiah recognised the significance of that find.  He tore his clothes in grief and repentance and then gathered the priests and the elders of the people.  In their presence, he the King, read out the Lord’s word and led the people in a covenant renewal ceremony.  God’s word sanctifies his people.

Jesus prayed this for us in his high priestly prayer in John 17: “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.”  And St. Paul wrote to the Christians in Ephesus, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word” (Ephesians 5:25b-26).  Brothers and Sisters, without immersing ourselves in God’s word we will not hear him.  There are no shortcuts.  Only his word gives life and only his word sanctifies.  This is why topical preaching—where the preacher drives the agenda—cannot be our main diet.  Occasionally a topical sermon it’s necessary, but it cannot be our staple food.  This is why regular personal reading and study of the Bible is necessary.  We must be confronted by word to know God and to grow into the people he has called us to be.  And, of course, it goes without saying that we don’t hear merely to hear or merely to read, but we immerse ourselves in God’s word, we hear him speak, so that we can submit to his will and his ways.  And there’s the Spirit at work, renewing our hearts and making fertile soil for the word to take root.  A healthy church not only proclaims God’s word, but listens and is daily remade and sanctified by it.

Timothy was St. Paul’s young protégé.  When Paul wrote to him to give him advice as to how to shepherd the flock, it’s worth noting that he gave him none of the advice that is common today.  He didn’t advise Timothy to start a new program, to buy a fog machine, to hire a paid choir, to take a poll to find out what people want to hear.  He didn’t do any of that.  He wrote to Timothy and said emphatically, “Preach the Word!” (2 Timothy 4:2).  Or think of the early Jerusalem Church.  When the apostles were struggling to keep up with the day-to-day tasks of the church, they ordained deacons to carry on that ministry and declared, “We will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word” (Acts 6:4).  They knew that God’s word is life.

One day we will see God face to face and know him perfectly, but until that day we live, not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from his mouth.  As a church named “Living Word” my prayer is that we will be a people known in our community for our commitment to the life-giving and sanctifying word of God.  That we will be a people who value and love God’s word, who put it at the centre of our ministry and of our lives, and who not only recognise its authority, but who are also seeking to submit to it and to be transformed.  I pray that we will be a people so full of God’s word—this water of life—that as in John’s vision of the New Jerusalem, it will overflow from us to carry God’s life—the good news about Jesus—to the world around us.

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, you have sent your word, incarnate in Jesus, to deliver us from our bondage to sin and death, and you have given your word written through the inspiration of your Spirit.  Remind us always that without your word there is no life.  As we go about the work of your kingdom, let us keep your word at the centre, that we might be always shaped by it and declaring it’s life-giving power to the world.  We ask this in the name of Jesus our Lord, the word incarnate.  Amen.

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/78416/more-people-were-literate-ancient-judah-we-knew

[2] Luther’s Works (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1959), 51:77.

Come, Lord Jesus!

Revelation 22:6-21

by William Klock

So here we finally are at John’s epilogue to Revelation.  You can’t stay on the mountain overlooking the New Jerusalem forever.  At some point the vision of God’s glorious future has to end so that we can get back to the business of getting there—being the “on earth as in heaven” God has called to make his kingdom known in the present.  God has a wonderful future in store for his people, but he’s given us Jesus and the Spirit so that we can be his people in the present, so that we can fulfil his mission that will eventually bring about his new creation.  And so in these final verses John finds himself back on Patmos, still in exile for the sake of Jesus.  But it’s not over.  His angel guide is still with him.  And the angel speaks.  Look at Revelation 22:6.

“These words are trustworthy and true. And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place.”

 

John knew that all of this was trustworthy and true, but this is for the benefit of those seven churches to whom Revelation is addressed—and to all the other churches that would read his letter down through the ages.  These words are faithful and true, because they proceed from the one who is faith and true.  Remember back to John’s vision of Jesus, riding out on a white horse to conquer, the sword of gospel truth proceeding from his mouth.  John wrote there that he is faithful and true and if he is faithful and true, so is his word.

The angel takes us back to the very beginning.  It’s not just John in exile.  The whole purpose of this vision was to show the churches in his care what was to come and, in doing that, to exhort them to stand firm in faith and to hold tightly to Jesus as the storm came.  Tribulation.  Perseverance.  Kingdom.  Those are the key themes of Revelation.  The angel reminds John that the very God who spoke to his people through the prophets of the old covenant, now speaks to him—to show them what must soon take place.  In verse 7 the angels speaks the words of Jesus himself:

“And behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”

What does that mean?  “I am coming soon.”  What does he mean when he says that these are the things that “must soon take place”?  We discredit the one who is faithful and true when we twist his words to say that he was talking about events that would take place thousands of years in the future.  Such a prophecy would do little to encourage the beleaguered saints of the first century.  What John has seen here is what was barrelling down on them as he wrote: persecution and tribulation, but also judgment on their persecutors—on apostate Jerusalem and pagan Rome.  They would know the storm, but they would also know God’s vindication.  This is what it looks like for Jesus’ people to take up their crosses and to follow him.  They would know their own calvary, but because their Lord was with them, they would also know their own Easter.

And, through the angel, Jesus repeats the blessing with which the whole vision started:

Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.  (Revelation 1:3)

What does that mean?  How do you keep the words of this prophecy?  I think we struggle with how to keep the words of John’s prophecy, because we so often forget what a biblical prophet is.  We too often think of a prophet as being one who foretells, when the fact is that a biblical prophet is really one who forthtells.  In other words, the biblical prophets proclaim the counsels of the Lord.  Sometimes that includes future events.  But whether it does or not, the real concern is always faithfulness and obedience to the Lord here and now.  So John’s vision of the future isn’t meant to give Christians merely a future hope, as if today doesn’t matter.  You know, just circle the wagons and wait for Jesus to come.  That’s not keeping the prophecy of this book.  Jesus point in coming to John was to reveal the true nature of the battle between the beast and the lamb, between Babylon and the New Jerusalem.  It's to remind us that as God has vindicated his son, so he will also vindicate those who are in his son.  And it’s to remind us that what God has done in Jesus and the Spirit, he will bring to completion through Jesus and the Spirit.  To keep the words of this prophecy is to stand firmly for Jesus in the face of opposition—even martyrdom.  It’s to be a people characterized by the fruit of the Spirit and by the Beatitudes.  Ultimately, it’s to be a people who not only pray “on earth in heaven,” but to be a people who live out the values and life of heaven here on earth—a people who are new creation in the midst of the old and give witness to their—to our—faith and hope in Jesus, what he has done, what he is doing, and what he will one day complete.  It’s to be those people charging out into the world to conquer the nations with the gospel, the good news about Jesus.

And then something that might seem odd at this point.  Look at verses 8 and 9:

I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me, but he said to me, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship God.”

 

This is the second time John falls down to worship his angel guide.  Why would he do that?  How would he not know better?  John knew that only God is worthy of our worship.  The angel speaks the words of Jesus, but after just having seen a glorious vision of the lamb, there’s no way John could mistake this angel for Jesus.  What’s going on?  I think the problem is in our translation.  The Greek word translated “worship” sometimes does mean just that, but specifically it means to prostrate oneself before another.  You can do that as an act of worship, but throughout Scripture we also see it done as an act of reverence or submission.  When the angels came to visit Lot in Sodom, this is the word used to describe his falling down before them.  It’s the word used when Joseph’s brothers fall down before him, as well.  And back in Chapter 3, Jesus promised the Christians in Philadelphia that the Jews would do the same before them.  So John isn’t necessarily falling down to worship the angel.  He knew better than that.  The angel pronounces a blessing and in response John falls before him in reverence—not in worship, but acknowledging a superior.  And it’s at this point that the angel rebukes him.  Giving such reverence to an angel may have been appropriate in the old covenant, but Jesus has changed everything.  The angel reminds John, “You and I are fellow servants”.  The angel isn’t worried that John is taking away from the glory of God, but that John is giving his own honour as a son of God to an angel.  Jesus has elevated the status of fallen humanity.  He has made us his brothers and sisters and, in his ascension, has raised our humanity to God’s right hand.  The angel is sort of reminding John of those wonderful words in the book of Hebrews: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace.”  Brothers and Sisters, there is no longer anyone between us and the throne of grace if we are by faith in Jesus the Messiah.

In verse 10 Jesus, through the angel, exhorts John:

And he said to me, “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near.

 

The angel contrasts John’s vision with Daniel’s.  Repeatedly the prophet Daniel was told to seal up his vision, because his vision was “for days yet to come”.  The events that Daniel saw were not soon to take place, as the events that John saw were.  Daniel was seeing things that would not happen for several hundred years.  This highlights again that what John saw was not a vision of events thousands of years in his future.  He certainly wasn’t seeing events that still haven’t happened yet in our time.  Consider that what Daniel saw was a few hundred years off.  He wasn’t told, “these things are soon to pass”.  He was told that they were for days yet to come, so he should “seal them up”.  Why would the angel tell John that the events he saw were soon to come and that he shouldn’t seal them if they were to happen thousands of years in the future.  That doesn’t make any sense.  No, what John was seeing was—except for these last couple of chapters—the events that were shortly to unfold as the Lord’s judgement fell on Jerusalem and then on Rome in order to vindicate his people and prepare the world for the spread of the good news about Jesus.  “Don’t seal it up.  Send it to the churches, because this is the encouragement they’re going to need in the days soon to come.”

We get a sense of urgency in verse 11, too:

Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy.”

 

Jesus is saying, “The time is so short, there’s hardly time for repentance!”  Of course, there is always time for the sinner to repent, but Jesus’ point here is the imminence of his coming in judgment.  It’s a last call to the unrepentant in Jerusalem and Rome: I’m coming so soon, the evildoer might as well keep doing evil and the filthy might as well remain in his filth, because there’s hardly any time to repent.”  Again, of course there is, but (first) reminding them just how urgent things are might finally move them to repentance and (second) we need to remember that John wasn’t writing to the unrepentant, to the unbelieving Jew or the pagan Greek, but to the Christians suffering under their unrighteousness.  It wouldn’t be forever.  They would be vindicated.  The short time has implications for them: let the righteous still do right and the holy still be holy.  Remember, many of John’s fellow Christians were facing a crisis.  Some would be tempted to think that maybe they’d made a mistake in choosing to follow Jesus.  Maybe the mainstream Jews had it right all along.  Or maybe Caesar and his gods were really where the power was.  They’d be asking, “If Jesus really is Lord, why is he letting these awful things happen to us?”  And so Jesus is saying, “Don’t give up!  I will vindicate your faithfulness.  This is what it looks like to take up your cross and to follow me.  And as he vindicated me in my resurrection, so God will vindicate you.”  And he says it yet again in verses 12 and 13:

“Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done.  I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”

 

Jesus says it so many times—not only here, but throughout the Gospels—that I’ve just never understood how so many folks try to push what he says into the far future.  Brothers and Sisters, if we believe Jesus and if we trust that the Spirit has given us his words faithfully through the Evangelists, we discredit our Lord when we try to make his words mean what they so clearly do not.  “I am coming soon,” he says yet again.  Remember the audience: those little churches of Asia Minor being harassed by unbelieving Jews and pagan Greeks and Romans—and behind them the great dragon, the old serpent, the devil.  Jesus exhorts them to stand firm in the midst of the storm, because he is coming soon.  He will judge the enemies of his people and he will vindicate them for their faith.  The devil’s days were numbered.  Those little churches will be that multitude that no one could count, from every tribe and nation, standing before the throne and before the lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, crying out, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10)  They are not us.  They are the saints of the apostolic Church, martyred for their faith in Jesus and resurrected.  John calls it the first resurrection.  When John saw them and asked who they were, he was told, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb” (Revelation 7:14).  They live before the throne as a witness to you and me of the faithfulness of God and the lamb, that we might, ourselves, wash our robes in the blood of the lamb and carry on the faith they witnessed so profoundly.

And Jesus follows this with the statement in verse 13:

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”

 

Jesus reminds his people of who he is.  When he introduced himself in the first chapter of the book he ended that introduction with similar words:

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”  (Revelation 1:8)

The title is applied both to God and to Jesus, highlighting their unity, but it’s spoken there and then again twice here in Chapter 22 as an announcement of his authority.  The Lord was there in the beginning and everything that exists, exists by his grace and is sustained by him; he shares his power with no one; and as the end of all things, his sovereignty over all will never end.  John had the witness of the Scriptures, the long story of the Lord and his people, as evidence of the sovereignty, the power, the authority, and the faithfulness of the Lord.  That itself was reason to believe and trust his promises even as the storm was about to break over him, but here Jesus appeals to his very being: “I am the beginning and the end.  I am responsible for it all, I sustain it all.  Couple that with my record of faithfulness and you have every reason to trust me.”

And so Jesus issues his last and final benediction here in verses 14 and 15:

 

Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates.  Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.

 

John reminds his readers of that earlier vision, back in Chapter 7, of the martyrs gathered before the heavenly throne.  They had washed their robes in the blood of the lamb.  They may die in the storm to come, but they bear the name of Jesus on their foreheads, they are marked as his own by baptism and by the Spirit, and they have the right to pass through the gates of the New Jerusalem.  Even as they face death, they do so in hope.  In contrast are those on the outside—those without hope: dogs and sorcerers, the sexually immoral and murders, idolaters and liars.

Aside from “dogs”, that’s all pretty straightforward.  In John’s day dogs weren’t cute pets, they were feral beasts that roamed the city after dark looking for garbage to eat.  They were disgusting and unclean and the rabbis compared gentile idolaters to them.  That might be the sense here.  But “dog” is used specifically in Deuteronomy to refer to homosexual prostitutes.  The profit from their work was not permitted to be brought into the temple and, given that John is talking about a similar context, it makes sense that this is what he means by “dog”.  John echoes the words of St. Paul written to the Church in Corinth:

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.  And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. (1 Corinthians 6:9-11)

Brothers and Sisters, this is a call to repentance and faith—again, to stand firm in the face of opposition.  Through John, Jesus is urging these Christians not to give up and not to give in to the forced around them.  They have been washed by Jesus and he will care for them, even as they are martyred for their faith.  They will be tempted to turn back, but they have every reason to stand firm, to remain holy, to witness Jesus and his death and resurrection knowing that one day it really will be on earth as in heaven.

Continuing, look at verses 16 and 17:

 

“I, Jesus, have sent my angel to testify to you about these things for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.”

  The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price.

 

Again, these are the words of Jesus and again he gives his credentials—he gives reason to trust in him.  He is the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy that a root shall grow out of the stump of Jesse.  He is the bright morning star.  In other words, as Paul would say, “The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (Romans 13:12).  And then Jesus gives a final invitation.  The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come”.  Here is the water of life for the thirsty—water given without price, the water of life by the grace of God.  I like the way Tom Wright explains this:

“It is the spirit that enables the bride to be the bride.  It is the spirit that enables the martyrs to keep up their courage and bear true witness.  It is the spirit that inspires the great shouts and songs of praise.  The spirit goes out from God’s throne and, breathing into and then through the hearts, minds and lives of people of every nation, tribe and tongue, returns in praise to the father and the lamb.  This is as trinitarian as it gets, and the bride is caught up in that inner-divine life, so that when she says, ‘Come!’ to her beloved we can’t tell whether this is the spirit speaking or the bride, because the answer is both.  The spirit of the Messiah enables his bride to be who she is, lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his.”[1]

Brothers and Sisters, this is the longing of faith, full of hope because the bride knows the faithfulness of the groom.

And then the end.  First John gives a warning:

I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.

 

To modern sensibilities, it’s kind of an odd way to end things—and not a little harsh.  But John knew these were the words of Jesus and he was sending this letter to the churches expecting it to be read as scripture.  John may have been looking back to Deuteronomy.  When Moses gave the law he also stressed that it was to be preserved without addition or subtractions—and he holds out the slaughter at Baal-Peor as a warning or curse against anyone would would tamper with God’s words.  So John is on firm footing in giving his warning.  This is a message of hope given by Jesus himself and it needs to stand as it is.  It’s power and authority do not rest with us or with any translator or copyist who might think it'll go down easier or serve its purpose better with this or that changed.  It’s power and authority rest with Jesus who spoke these words and with the Spirit who uses them to create and to build faith in us.

That’s the end, but John can't leave us on that note.  He reminds his readers again of Jesus’ promise:

He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

  The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all. Amen.  (Revelation 22:20-21)

John reminds them of Jesus’ promise: “I am coming soon.” And he adds his own “amen”.  “Truly,” he writes.  He trusts Jesus’ promise and he calls out himself, “Come, Lord Jesus”.  And there’s no sense in John’s last prayerful summons that he is doubtful or fearful.  He knows the days ahead will be difficult, but he knows that Jesus will fulfil his promise.  And, Brothers and Sisters, he did.  As we’ve made our way through this book, we’ve seen the faithfulness of Jesus to his promises in the historical record.  He came in judgement first on Jerusalem and then on Rome.  He vindicated the martyrs.  He prepared the nations to hear the gospel.  And ever since, his people have been riding out in the world to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection and wherever it goes it conquers.  We have seen his faithfulness at work.  We have seen with our own eyes the power of his word and of his Spirit. And so we carry on the mission he has given, knowing that the promises of his new creation, his promises of that day when the gospel will finally conquer all, when all will be set to rights, when every tear will be wiped away, we carry on in faith knowing that those promises will be fulfilled just as surely as the promises he made to the Chrisitians of Ephesus and Smyrna, Pergamum and Thyatira, Sardis and Philadelphia and Laodicea were fulfilled.  And with them we offer our own “Amen” and we offer our own prayer, “Come, Lord Jesus”, knowing that he will surely finish what he has begun.

But in the meantime, Brothers and Sisters, we gather together and he comes to us today in both word and sacrament.  He speaks to us as we read his word, to teach and to exhort and to encourage us to stand firm in the face of the world’s storms.  And we meet him at his Table as we eat the bread and drink the wine.  Here he reminds us that he is with us as we recall and participate in the events of that great exodus from sin and death accomplished by his death on the cross and his rising from the tomb.  Here he reminds us that we are his covenant people, his lovely bride, his New Jerusalem.  Here he exhorts us to stand firm in faith as the “on earth as in heaven” people—a people full of hope, a people full of new creation, and awaiting the day when that new creation will be fulfilled—when the knowledge of the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.  Until then, knowing that Christ has died and that Christ is risen, we look forward to the day when Christ will come again.

Let’s pray: Almighty and everlasting God, you have given your Son, who died on the cross and rose from the grave to deliver us from sin and death, and you have given us your Spirit as a down payment on the life of the age to come.  You have made us your temple and you dwell in our midst.  As we recall your mighty and saving deeds, as we recall not only your faithfulness, but the faithfulness of the martyrs, may we too be faithful.  Fill us with your grace, strengthen our faith, and teach us to live in hope so that we can be the kingdom people you call us to be as we await the fulness of your new creation. Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

[1] Revelation for Everyone (London:SPCK, 2011), 206.

Its Lamp is the Lamb

Revelation 21:22-22:7

by William Klock

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.

  And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.  And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (Genesis 1:1-5)

So begins the great story.  And it goes on.  The Lord speaks and the land appears and brings forth every kind of plant.  The Lord speaks and creates the heavens, then fills them with the sun, the moon, the stars.  He fills the sea with fish and brings forth animals to roam the earth.  And finally he creates human beings, male and female, to bear his image—to be the priests of his temple and to have dominion, to steward, this good cosmos that he made.  They were to be fruitful, to multiply, to fill the earth, and by implication to expand the Lord’s temple until it encompassed all of Creation.  And it was good.

The Lord planted a garden and in it he placed the man, and later his wife, to share in his fellowship.  In the middle of the garden was the tree of life and from that garden-temple we’re told flowed streams of water to nourish the earth.  How long it lasted, we’re not told.  If we’re meant to take it literally—which we really don’t know—it wasn’t very long, seeing as Eve’s first child was born outside the garden.  The two bought the lie of the serpent and rebelled against the Lord.  They broke the one rule they’d been given and, in doing so, grasped for divinity themselves.  In that state, having access to the tree of life and the immortality it gave, would have been cruel and disastrous, so they were cast out and as the story unfolds in the chapters that follow, things went from bad to worse.

But the Lord did not abandon that which he created out of love and grace.  Creation itself and the human beings that corrupted it were created good and the Lord would not only make them good once again—he would forgive and restore and renew these rebellious creatures and bring them back into his presence, to live at the headwaters of the river and under the leaves of the tree of life.  Abraham.  Isaac.  Jacob.  Joseph.  Moses.  Joshua.  David.  Israel.  All signposts in the great story, reminding us that not even the worst of human sin and rebellion can ultimately derail the Lord’s plan for his cosmos.  In the midst of this broken world the Lord created a people for himself.  He claimed a land for himself, he delivered them from Egypt and placed them in that land, and he dwelt in their midst in the tabernacle and later the temple—the greatest of the Old Testament signposts, pointing to a future in which he will set everything to rights and restore humanity to his presence.  Creation cries out to be delivered from corruption and to have its stewards set right and restored to their rightful place.

The Old Testament prophets, living in the midst of Israel’s troubles, looked forward to that day.  The very existence of Israel as the people of God was a reminder that he’s working to set things to rights, but Israel herself became emblematic of humanity’s problem.  Sin.  Idolatry.  Compromise.  Worldliness.  Unfaithfulness.  The very people whom the Lord had redeemed and claimed as his own needed, themselves, to be set right.  And so the prophets rebuked Israel, but they did so in hope.  We’ll get to our text from John’s Revelation in a bit, but first those prophets.  We’ve seen how John draws constantly on their imagery and here, at the end, in Revelation 21 and 22 John riffs on Isaiah 60 and Ezekiel 47 and uses their imagery to show us the faithfulness of God revealed in the end as the great project begun in Genesis 1 and 2 is finally fulfilled.

Isaiah saw a day in which the glory of God would outshine the sun in a renewed Zion:

The sun shall be no more

         your light by day,

nor for brightness shall the moon

         give you light;

but the Lord will be your everlasting light,

         and your God will be your glory. (Isaiah 60:19)

Isaiah also writes of the Lord’s city:

And nations shall come to your light,

         and kings to the brightness of your rising…

Your gates shall be open continually;

         day and night they shall not be shut,

that people may bring to you the wealth of the nations,

         with their kings led in procession. (Isaiah 60:3, 11)

It would be worth reading the whole of Isaiah 60, but that would take longer than we have this morning.  Needless to say, it’s a vision of both creation and God’s own people set to rights and in that renewal God’s glory is powerfully manifest.  It was a vision that inspired hope in Israel.  It was a vision that shaped the ministry of Jesus.  And in Revelation 21 John reinterprets that vision in light of the risen Jesus.  Look at Revelation 21:22-27.

And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.  And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.  By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.  They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.  But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.

 

At this point we shouldn’t be surprised that the whole city is the Lord’s temple.  We saw last week saw that it’s filled with his glory.  And John described the city symbolically as an enormous cube—it’s so large that it fills the earth, or at least sort of the known world of John’s day—and it’s a cube, a giant holy of holies.  That was the part of the tabernacle and later the temple that held the ark of the covenant and the Lord’s presence, the glory cloud, rested on the ark.  All along, this is where the temple and the ark and the cloud of glory were pointing: to a future day when, even despite human sin, the project into which the Lord had called Adam and Eve is completed and his glory fills the earth as the waters cover the sea, as Habakkuk put it.  It should have happened through the faithfulness of Adam and the faithfulness of his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but instead it has come through the faithfulness of a second Adam, through Jesus, and through the proclamation of the gospel by his Spirit-empowered new Israel.

And it’s not just the temple that is no longer needed, but even the sun and the moon become redundant.  Does that mean there will literally be no sun and moon in God’s new creation?  I think, like John’s statement that there was no sea, this is symbolic language.  That’s the nature of his revelation.  I could be wrong.  Maybe in this new creation the laws of physics and biology and the very structure of the cosmos itself will be transformed.  I don’t think so, but it’s possible.  But the point is that this new creation, this restored temple, is full of the glory of the Lord and his brightness outshines the sun.  As John recorded these words he would have had the end of Exodus in mind—that awe-inspiring scene of the Lord’s glory descending to fill the newly-completed tabernacle, his brightness in the midst of Israel’s wilderness camp.  It’s the conclusion of a story of human blood and tears, but there at the end the love and the grace and the mercy of God triumph as his people gather around to worship.  And yet, if we’re paying attention to the bigger story, Exodus can’t be the end.  As glorious as it is, Israel’s camp and even the tabernacle were a little thing, a tiny spot of brightness, in the midst of a vast world of darkness.  Israel’s camp still included sinners and uncleanness, despite the law.  And the nations hardly took notice of any of it.  Something more, something bigger had to happen.  Exodus, like Moses and Israel and the tabernacle were signs pointing to something greater.  And now John sees it.  Finally, here’s the fulfilment of the story.  The great thing so amazing that John can only describe it by piling up symbols and metaphors.  It’s like this and it’s like this and it’s like that, too—oh, and also like that and that and that!

The city is full of the glory of God and the lamp—the centre and the source of that glory is the lamb—the one who was slain, whose blood and tears bought humanity’s redemption from our own blood and tears.  Isaiah had seen something similar, and yet I have to think that Isaiah was left in wonder as to how it all would ever happen.  All he could say was that the Lord would do something so amazing that the nations would finally take notice and recognise him, coming to him in submission and to give him glory.  And John sees it now.  The amazing thing the Lord has done is Jesus himself, the Lamb.  It is his light that outshines the sun.  St. Paul, in Romans, writes of grace abounding because of sin and here we see that as nowhere else.  Adam new the light of God in perfection, and yet he didn’t know it like this.  The amazing thing, the Lamb who humbled himself to become incarnate and to die for the sake of his sinful people, reveals the glory of the Lord in a way Adam could never have dreamed of.

Are you familiar with the Japanese art of kitsugi?  Broken pottery and ceramics are glued back together with lacquer and then the lacquer repairs are covered with gold.  A bowl or a teapot can be a thing of beauty, they don’t usually attract much attention.  But break it and repair it with gold, and it becomes a thing of even greater beauty that everyone suddenly notices.  That’s the best thing I can think of to illustrate what John’s getting at.  Creation was glorious, but God’s repairing of his Creation through the sacrifice of the Lamb is infinitely more glorious, just as Jesus is more beautiful for the nail scars in his hands and feet.  He reveals the love and the mercy and the grace of God like costly gold highlighting the repairs of a piece of broken pottery.  And, key here, no one can help but be caught by this vision of glory, of what God and the Lamb have done.  They’re captured by it.  The only response anyone can give—you, me, all the nations of the earth—is to bow down and to offer ourselves in return, giving him the glory he is so clearly due.  By the incarnation and by the death and resurrection of Jesus, that scene of glory, of the Lord descending to be present with Israel in the wilderness as the people gather around to worship and to live in his presence, that scene is multiplied a hundred thousand times over.  Because of Jesus, the entire world now takes notice and gathers to worship in the light of his glory and to live and work in his presence.

So the darkness of human sin and rebellion, prompted a response from the Lord that is indescribably glorious.  It shines so brightly that there is no night.  And its light has gone out to the nations through the proclamation of the gospel and Isaiah’s vision is fulfilled.  This is a vision to inspire those little beleaguered and persecuted churches—and the church today—to stand firm and to continue to proclaim the good news about Jesus even in the face of martyrdom.  By the light of the Lamb and his gospel the nations walk and come to the city to bring their glory and honour.  This is what Israel was meant to be—a light to the nations—only more so and greater than any king or prophets could ever have imagined.  Solomon’s glory is but a shadow of King Jesus.  The tribute of the Queen of Sheba is but a shadow of what the nations will bring to the Lamb.  And, finally, the people of God is set fully to rights.  Sin, evil, rebellion have been wiped from creation.  Nothing unclean or false is present.  There are no lying, stealing, greedy Achans to bring judgement on the people of God.

John sees Genesis 1 fulfilled through Isaiah’s imagery and then he sees Genesis 2 fulfilled in the imagery of Ezekiel’s prophecy.  Ezekiel was writing during the Exile.  The temple had been destroyed, but in his vision he saw it restored, and more importantly, he saw the glory of the Lord return to it.  When Israel returned from her exile, she did rebuild the temple, but Ezekiel’s vision of the return of the Lord’s glory was never fulfilled—not until Jesus created a new Israel, a new temple, and filled it—us—with his Spirit.  And yet even that is a shadow of what is to come.  But what John draws on here is Ezekiel’s vision of the temple as a new Eden.  In Ezekiel 47 the prophet sees a river flowing from the temple—from the garden—and the further it flows the deeper it gets until it’s so enormous it couldn’t be crossed and at that point it flows down into the Judean wilderness and down into the Dead Sea.  The Dead Sea is dead.  It so full of salt and minerals nothing can live in it.  Its water is useless for irrigation.  But Ezekiel saw the life-giving water of the temple make even the Dead Sea come to life.  In his vision it swarms with fish and trees grow on the banks, bearing fresh fruit.  Ezekiel writes:

Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing. (Ezekiel 47:12)

John now sees the fulfilment of Ezekiel’s vision.  Look at Revelation 22:1-5.

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.  No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.  They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.  And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

 

Ezekiel saw a restoration or a rebirth of Creation’s state as we see it in Genesis 2, but John sees that renewal even more explicitly.  Ezekiel saw a river bringing life to the dead.  John sees that river irrigating the tree of life—the very tree that stood in the middle of the garden, the very tree that imparted the life of God to Adam and Eve, the very tree from which they were barred because of their sin.  John sees it restored.  He sees twelve kinds of fruit, deliberately calling back to what Ezekiel saw, but also showing us a multiplication of the tree.  As the river flows down the main street of the city, so the tree grows and flourish all down both banks of the river—not just a single tree of life, but tree after tree after tree.  And it’s not just to give life to Adam and Eve.  The tree is there for the healing of—to give life to—the nations.  What does that look like?  I think the specifics are beyond the scope of John’s vision.  His point is just that the nations whose armies we’ve seen warring with each other throughout the book, the nations who were once enticed by the beast, his prophet, and the great prostitute, the nations that had once given themselves over to idolatry and every kind of wickedness, John now sees those nations transformed by the power of the gospel and faith in Jesus the Messiah.  They’ve been brought into this new world, and the abundant fruit of the tree of life—this tree symbolic of the life of God—heals them.  Like divine kintsugi, God’s life heals the hurts, the griefs, the hatred, the tears.

From the holy of holies the river flows—the water of life—bringing healing and life to the nations.  But John also sees that in response, the nations bring their worship to the city.  What other response can we have to the love and mercy and grace so freely poured out to forgive, to redeem, to restore, to make new?  But there’s a difference between this temple and the temple of the Old Testament.  In the old temple no one saw the face of God.  In Exodus and again when Solomon built his temple, the people saw the cloud of glory descending into the holy of holies, but apart from that, the vision of divine glory was off-limits.  The unholy cannot enter the presence of the holy to look upon it.  Everyone in the Bible who ever had a glimpse fell on his face in fear.  But here the redeemed nations of God’s new creation worship in his presence.  John says they see his face.  Why?  Because the name of the Lamb is written on their—on our—foreheads.  Because Jesus has marked us out as his own.  Brother and Sisters, when we come to him in faith, submitting to him, and giving him our allegiance in baptism, by that water he marks us as his own.  The minister may mark you with a cross on your forehead, but what Jesus does in that act is far more profound: he fills you with his Spirit and in doing that he’s given each of us an earnest, a down payment on the life of God’s new world—a life in which we, his people, become his very temple, a life where he lives in our midst, and we see him face to face, finally able to give him the fullness of worship of which our worship today is only a dim shadow.

But John doesn’t stop there.  We’re not just set right; we’re set right to fulfil the purpose for which we were created.  John really does see Genesis fulfilled.  “They will reign for ever and ever,” he writes.  The Lord said to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion over it.”  We see every day what a mess we’ve made of that vocation.  St. Paul writes in Romans about Creation groaning in eager longing as it awaits our renewal and restoration and here, finally, John sees it.  What exactly that will look like, he doesn’t say.  In this new world things have evolved beyond their original state in Eden.  The Lord doesn’t simply reboot the programme.  Somehow he redeems what is good in human history and human development.  The garden has become a great city, but the garden is still there.  And, I think, our vocation will have grown and evolved in the same way.  But at its core it remains the same: serving the Lord as the priests of his temple and working as stewards of his Creation.

Brothers and Sisters, it’s not just pie in the sky when we die.  John brings everything back to the present.  Again, he was writing to those little churches full of persecuted and often fearful Christians bracing for a tidal wave of opposition.  He writes to them of perseverance in the midst of tribulation and reminds them that Jesus and his kingdom are real.  Real today and giving hope for the future.  He writes in verses 6 and 7:

  And [the angel] said to me, “These words are trustworthy and true. And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to show his servants what must soon take place.”

  “And behold, I am coming soon. Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”

 

Stand firm.  This is not all there is.  Jesus would vindicate his faithful people.  Judgement would fall, first on Jerusalem and then on Rome.  And John saw that glorious vision of Jesus riding out on a white horse to conquer by the power of the gospel—and his church riding with him.  It’s a battle, but the outcome is already certain.  And here at the end we see the fruit.  We see the victory celebration that await.  And the angel says, “Blessed is the one who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book.”  Blessed is the one who stands firm in faith.  Blessed is the one who gives his allegiance to Jesus.  Blessed is the one proclaims to the world the death and resurrection and ascension of the Lord Jesus.  And blessed is the one who, filled the Spirit of God, lives out his or her priestly stewardship today—living today in light of the new creation to come.  For Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.

Let’s pray: Lord God, you declare your almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity: mercifully grant to us such a measure of your grace, that we, running the way of your commandments, may receive your gracious promises, and be made partakers of your heavenly treasure; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen.

Having the Glory of God

Revelation 21:6-21

by William Klock

Have you ever considered that Revelation has at least as much to tell us about who we are as the Church—right now!—as it has to tell us about where we’re headed as the Church?  In other words, that it’s got more to say about identity than it does our future—and that what it does have to say about our future is integrally tied to our identity.  We read the description of the New Jerusalem found in these final chapters of Revelation and our focus seems almost always to be on it as a description of heaven, of the afterlife, or something like that, when the truth of it is that what John sees here is a picture of the Church.  It’s future, yes, in the sense that what he sees is the Church perfected, but the important thing we too often miss is that that means it’s a picture of what God has called us to be and what he is making us even today through the work of Jesus and the Spirit.

In the first part of Chapter 21, we read last week John’s description of the city descending like a bride adorned for her husband and I said that all of Church history is like the bride walking down the aisle.  With each step she becomes more beautiful, her dress brightening, her face more radiant, until she reaches her bridegroom, Jesus, perfected.

And last week we look at that passage about the city descending and asked, “If the city is the Church and the Church is here, how is it that it also descends?”  And I said that this is John’s way of showing us the fulfilment of what Paul wrote in Colossians 3: “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”  Since his ascension, Jesus has been preparing this great day, the consummation of his new creation, the great wedding—there are so many different ways to view it and so many analogies to describe it.  In many ways, the preparation goes back all the way to Genesis 3.  Before the word ever became incarnate in Jesus, God was preparing for this day.  The history of the Lord and his people in the Bible is like an Advent calendar.  Each day we open a door and find another little bit of the story leading us to the last great day when all the Christmas decorations and all the presents come out of the closet or from under the bed and we celebrate.  But along the way we learn who we are in Jesus as a people.  And along the way he prepares us.

Too often we’re like the couple who calls the minister a few weeks before their planned wedding, just expecting everything to be ready and available so that they can show up and get married.  It doesn’t work like that.  And neither does the wedding John shows us in Revelation.  And so, in verses 6 and 7, as we read last week, God speaks from his throne and declares:

To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment.  The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son.

 

Can you remember when Jesus said something like this?  Think back to the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel.  “Blessed are those who thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied…Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”  In verse 4 the Lord says that he will wipe away every tear, echoing Jesus’ promise, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”  And, of course, remember the context.  John was writing to those churches in Asia Minor about to be caught up in a whirlwind of opposition and persecution and tribulation, all on account of their commitment to Jesus.  Think back to Matthew 5:

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

  “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven… (Matthew 5:10-12a)

And here at the end we see that Jesus has, indeed, blessed those who have committed themselves to him and to his kingdom.  Repeatedly Jesus urged the believers in those churches to “conquer”—to stand firm in faith—and here we see them, along with the whole church throughout history, receiving their reward.  They’ve not only stood firm in faith, confessing Jesus as Lord even as they faced persecution and sometimes martyrdom, but they’ve actively pursued the agenda of the kingdom.  These are the people who in faith and hope prayed “on earth as in heaven” and now they see those prayers fulfilled.  In their prayers and in their lives they have commit themselves to God’s new world and, having done so, they’ve finally arrived.

In contrast, the Lord warns from his throne:

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”

 

It might strike us as odd that at the head of this list of sins that exemplify human rebellion and rejection of Jesus and that exclude people from his kingdom is cowardliness.  But, again, remember the context.  Think of the martyrs and of Jesus’ exhortation to conquer, to overcome, to stand firm.  That takes courage—and not any courage, but a courage built on faith and hope in Jesus.  Not everyone conquered in the face of persecution.  There were some who took the easy way out and betrayed their Lord—who offered a pinch of incense to Caesar, who took part in the pagan temple rites lest people think them disloyal or irreligious, who compromised with the Jews on things like circumcision out of fear of being kicked out of the synagogue.  As Jesus said to the Christians in Sardis, “The one who conquers…I will never blot his name out of the book of life.  I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels” (Revelation 3:5).  A faith-inspired courage is required of kingdom people.  Again, think back to Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:

Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.  For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.  (Matthew 7:13-14)

Following the cowards are those who have, each in their own way, bought into the devil’s lie and who have been enticed by the great prostitute and her chalice of filthiness.  Murderers.  Liars.  Both chief characteristics of the devil.  And sandwiched between those two: sexual immorality, sorcery, and idolatry—all things associated the worship of false gods.  In contrast to the blessed who gave their allegiance to Jesus in faith and then lived out the values of his kingdom on earth as in heaven, these are they who have committed themselves to the dragon, to the beast, and to the prostitute, to their lies, to their kingdom, to everything that has corrupted God’s good creation.  Jesus has come to make all things new, to renew and to restore.  The first group—the courageous who looked forward to his new world in faith and hope—they’ve joined him.  The latter have actively opposed Jesus and, as John has seen, have been wiped from creation and cast into the lake of fire to be destroyed, their corrupting influence gone forever.

Brothers and Sisters, there’s no neutral ground.  There’s no fence sitting.  And there’s no getting baptised or saying a prayer and then just expecting to be invited to the wedding.  Those with whom the Lord makes his dwelling are those who have invested their lives in the pursuit of God and have lived the life that Jesus and the Spirit have given.  They’ve been committed—even to the point of death—to seeing his kingdom come: proclaiming the good news about Jesus and pursuing the values of the kingdom: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.  They have shown mercy and they have worked for justice as Jesus has exemplified them.  At the core of it all is that they have scene and known for themselves the love of God made known in Jesus and especially at the cross, and they have loved him in return and committed their whole being to him.

Now look at verses 9-10:

Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues and spoke to me, saying, “Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.”  And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God…

 

It's telling that one of the same angels responsible for pouring out God’s wrath on the earthy city now shows John the heavenly city.  Brothers and Sisters, never forget that God’s wrath and his mercy are inseparably twined together—to side of the same coin.  He is just in punishing sin and in finally and ultimately removing it from his creation and he is equally just in showing mercy to those who have committed themselves to him in Jesus the Messiah.  And the structure of the vision is meant to contrast with what we’ve seen earlier.  Both times one of these angels says to John, “Come, I will show you…” it’s to show him a woman.  Both are beautiful and richly dressed, but one is an illusion, the other is real.  The whore’s beauty and riches, on closer inspection, are nothing but filth and corruption.  She embodies the great lie that has enslaved the human race.  Over against the whore is the bride.  The lamb has brought her with his blood, he has washed her clean, and clothed her in white.  The bride is as pure as the prostitute is filthy.

But, again, the glory of what John sees here is so difficult to describe that he shifts his imagery.  It’s a bit like looking through a kaleidoscope, ever-changing, but still there’s a consistent theme that links the images together.  John sees the New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God”.  This is the second time he's seen it come down, which leads some commentators to think that some later editor jumbled up John’s visions, but I don’t think that’s the case.  This is all symbolic and when we consider the nature of the city—and remember the city is the Church—there’s a sense in which every time you close your eyes and reopen them or every time you turn away to look at something else and then turn back to see the city, it’s going to be “coming down out of heaven from God”.  That’s the nature of the church—especially once she’s been perfected.  Brothers and Sisters, there is nothing in this world, there is nothing in any of us that could ever possibly bring us together into this body and to do what we do—and not just our little local church, but the church throughout the world.  The Church is unique.  It’s called by God.  It’s established on his word as it was communicated by the prophets of the Old Testament and the apostles of the New, it is unified not by anything it has done, but instead by its union to Jesus, and it does what it does in the power of the Spirit.  We are of earth, but everything we are and do comes from God and by his grace, which is again why we are the people who pray “on earth as in heaven”.

So the city descends.  I don’t think the point of John’s statement about being on a great high mountain is that he’s on one mountain and the city descends to another.  It’s one mountain.  Ezekiel has the same sort of vision, but John’s also calls back to Psalm 48:2, “Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great King.”  Now, John goes on in verse 11, describing the city as:

having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.

 

The city—the Church—has the glory of God.  The word John uses is one that describes God’s presence in the Old Testament and, specifically, his presence in the midst of Israel.  It was associated with the tabernacle and with the ark of the covenant.  And so here the city shines like a rare gemstone, clearly and brightly, because God is in her midst.  John again points us to the source of the Church’s beauty.  We don’t make ourselves beautiful.  We were sinners clothed in filthy rags, but by his grace Jesus has washed us clean, clothed us in white, and filled us with the Spirit to make us holy.  And that leads us into John’s description of the city.  The imagery he uses doesn’t come out of nowhere.  This whole scene echoes Ezekiel’s vision of the restored temple in chapters 40 to 48 of his prophecy.  And that’s key, because remember that the temple was the place of the Lord’s presence in Israel.  John goes on in verses 12-14:

It had a great, high wall, with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates the names of the twelve tribes of the sons of Israel were inscribed—on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates.  And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

 

So the city has bounds—we’ve seen already, it is only for those who belong to Jesus.  It has twelve gates, which bear the names of the tribes of Israel, and it has twelve foundation stones bearing the names of the apostles of the Lamb.  Those gates and those foundation stones identify the city with the people of God—not just the New Testament Church, but, too, the Old Testament Church.  God has only one people and they are all those who are in Jesus the Messiah, whether that’s by looking forward to him in hopeful longing or looking back to him through history.  He is the culmination of Israel’s story and the cornerstone on which this temple is built.

Look now at verses 15-21:

And the one who spoke with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls.  The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width. And he measured the city with his rod, 12,000 stadia. Its length and width and height are equal.  He also measured its wall, 144 cubits by human measurement, which is also an angel’s measurement.  The wall was built of jasper, while the city was pure gold, like clear glass.  The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst.  And the twelve gates were twelve pearls, each of the gates made of a single pearl, and the street of the city was pure gold, like transparent glass.

 

Like Ezekiel, John measures the city—or he watches as the angel measures it.  What might be the most remarkable thing here is the size.  12,000 stadia just sounds like a big number if you have no idea what a stadia is, but it translates to about 1,500 miles or 2,400 kilometres.  That means that if the centre of the city was at Vancouver, Thunder Bay would be just outside the bounds of the eastern wall.  Fairbanks and Tuktoyaktuk would be well inside the walls to the northwest and New Orleans the southeasterly-most neighbourhood.  But more specifically, it’s big enough to descend and obliterate the Roman Empire.  The bride will replace the prostitute.  The heavenly city will leave no place for the earthly.  There’s a reason why the ESV doesn’t translate the measurement into something modern, because the “1,200” is itself symbolic.  Over and over we see the number twelve in this vision—referring to the patriarchs of the old Israel and the apostles of the new, and here it’s multiplied by one thousand.  It’s a symbol of the church, the people of God, perfected.  It’s also a symbol of the Church’s conquest of the earthly city.  And, too, it’s not just the length and breadth, but the height.  John says the city lies “foursquare”, meaning it’s a cube.  So it’s 1,500 miles high, too.  And if we haven’t clued in yet, this should make it clear he’s seeing all this in symbols, not blueprints.  The point of the imagery is to highlight the city as the dwelling place of God.  It’s an enormous holy of holies—that cubical in the tabernacle where the ark rested and that was filled with the cloud of God’s glory.  One day when the Church has accomplished the mission Jesus gave her, when she is herself perfected, the Lord will fulfil his promise through her—his glory will fill the whole earth as the waters cover the sea.  That’s the point of this imagery that shows the Church as a giant holy of holies.

The symbolism continues: The thickness or height of the wall—it’s not quite clear which John means—is symbolic as well: twelve times twelve for 144 cubits.  And the wall is like jasper—which he compared earlier to the glory of God manifest in the city.  We might wonder why, with God’s enemies all finally defeated, the city even needs a wall.  Remember that in the ancient world walls defined cities.  But this one’s not so much for protection from enemies as it is simply the radiance of God’s glory surrounding his city.  Too, the city is built of gold, and yet a gold clear as glass.  And the foundations are adorned with gemstones.  There are a variety of theories as to the significance of each and I won’t bore you with that this morning.  The key point is that the imagery is drawn from the priest’s vestments in Exodus, the stones representing the tribes of Israel.  I think the key takeaway is, again, that the Church as the bride of the lamb is everything of which the prostitute was a parody.  Both were adored with jewels and finery, but one was a lie who enticed the nations of the world to drink from her chalice of filth to their own destruction, and the other is adorned with the truth of the gospel and the chalice she drinks from is Jesus himself.  One woman brings destruction and death to humanity; the other proclaims life—and she is us.

That’s as far as we’ll go today in Revelation 21.  The important takeaway here is to remember that this isn’t just about the future.  John is certainly showing us a kaleidoscopic and symbolic vision of the future of the people of God.  But John’s point in writing all of this—or I should really say, Jesus’ point in revealing all of this to John—was to encourage and exhort the churches under his care as tribulation was about to hit them like a tidal wave.  Remember that Revelation is about three things: tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom.  John shows us the kingdom consummated and in all its future fulness, but he does so, so that we can see it present today as God indwells his Church in Jesus and the Spirit—so that we can see him today leading us by the hand into that future.  John shows us the Church, perfect and glorified, but the same characteristics that mark her out in her future perfection mark her out even today—because past, present, or future it is God himself who graciously makes the Church what she is—because at the centre of it all is Jesus.  And Jesus is not just a future hope.  He lived and died and he ascended and now reigns.  Even if the kingdom hasn’t come in all its fulness, even if the Church is not yet perfect and ready for her marriage, Jesus reigns and holds those seven stars—his people, his Church, his bride—in his hands.  He always has, he does today, and he always will.  The same Jesus we see standing as bridegroom at the end of the aisle, waiting to receive his bride is the Jesus who died for his bride and gave her the Spirit.  He is the Church’s centre and foundation in the future, because he is our centre and our foundation in the past and in the present.  He is our Lord and what we do in worshiping him and in witnessing him today is drawn up by God in his mercy to build his kingdom bit by bit as she walks in faithful perseverance through tribulation, through opposition, and even through martyrdom.  The gospel spreads one person at a time and as it does we also see the bride walking the aisle and growing more beautiful and perfect with each step.  I often say that the duty of the Church in proclaiming Jesus is to lift the veil on God’s new creation to give the world a glimpse of what is to come, but here in his vision, John lifts the bride’s veil so that we today, as we face the challenges of the earthly city, can see a glimpse of what God has in store for us as his people and persevere in hope, for Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.

 

Let’s pray: Father, in the Collect we asked you to teach us to ask for those things that please you.  Having seen John’s vision of your Church perfected—the embodiment of all that pleases you—we ask for your gracious help to be in the present the people you would have us to be: a people who pursue holiness and live the fruit given by your Spirit, emboldened to live and to proclaim the good news of Jesus, crucified, risen, and Lord, to all the world, a people who commit our all to you in love, because you have given yourself for us.  Through Jesus we pray. Amen.

A New Heaven and a New Earth

Revelation 21:1-8

by William Klock

Brothers and Sisters, think back to Moses.  Think of Moses in the wilderness, leading that ragtag column of refugees from Egypt.  Moses, a Hebrew—and he knew it—but raised a prince in Pharaoh’s court.  He knew the finest luxuries the world of that day could offer.  His mother must have told him about the God of Israel, but Moses grew up worshiping the gods of Egypt.  If there is anyone in the Bible who knew the enticements of the present age, it was Moses.  In St. John’s day the great whore, symbolically called “Babylon”, was Rome with her gods, her caesars, her power, her wealth, and her luxuries, but Moses knew the whore when she was called “Egypt”.  Dressed in her finery, her cup full of wine, she announced that the present age is not only fine—it’s what the world is supposed to be—if only you’ll invest yourself in it.  Her gods and kings will pour out their power and riches on you.  I expect Moses believe it all.  And then he killed that Egyptian slavemaster and was forced to flee into the wilderness.  And there he met—really met—the Lord, the God of Israel, and learned that there was someone greater and something better.  In faith—and sometimes doubting—he went back to Egypt to confront Pharaoh—to confront the whore and the beast and his false prophets—and to lead his people out of their bondage.  And he saw the might and the wonders of the Lord, as the Lord up-ended the whore’s chalice and revealed the wine inside to be filth and corruption.

You would think the plagues, the chariots at the bottom of the sea, the pillar of fire, the lightening on Mount Sinai, water from the rock, and manna and quails would be enough to sustain the faith of Israel.  But forty years in the wilderness is a very long time.  Hungry bellies, a monotonous diet, not having a real home, living in the scrub in tents, regularly being raided by enemies—those things can wear down a people’s faith, even as they experienced the Lord’s daily provision and presence in their midst.  The concerns of the present have a tendency to overshadow the memory of the great things the Lord has done in the past.  Brothers and Sisters, we think that if only the Lord would give a great sign, well, that would put an end to our struggles to be faithful.  But consider all Israel had seen—and even as the people grumbled, they lived with the indescribable glory cloud in their midst, in the tabernacle.  And Israel wondered—and I suspect Moses wondered along with them—is this wilderness all we’ll ever know?  And so, as Israel camped on the plains of Moab, the Lord took Moses to the top of Mount Pisgah, and there he could see the promised land spread out below him.  And he knew.  The wilderness was not forever.  The Lord’s promises are real and true.  The promised land awaited—even though he would never set foot in it himself.  And that put the wilderness and all its troubles in perspective.  Moses would later ascend that mountain again to die, but he died knowing that the life he and his people had lived in the wilderness was not in vain.

In verse 10 of Revelation 21 John writes that angel carried him away to a great high mountain to show him the New Jerusalem.  It’s a Moses-on-Mount-Pisgah moment.  And as Moses reported what he’d seen from the mountaintop to Joshua and the Israelites, so John sends a report of his vision to those beleaguered Christians of Asia Minor.  They already knew rejection and opposition, some were facing persecution—John, himself, was currently in exile—but soon the real test of their faith was coming and many of them would die.  Again, the concerns of the present often overshadow the memory of the Lord’s mighty deeds in the past.  It’s easy to forget the sacrifice of the cross, it’s easy to forget the significance of the empty tomb, it’s easy to forget that Jesus is Lord when your own livelihood or even your own life is on the line.  It’s easy to compromise with the gods and kings of the present age when they hold out promises of riches and luxuries and power—or even just a simple life of being left alone.  The Israelites were hungry and found themselves longing for the fleshpots of Egypt more than the milk and honey of the promised land.  They knew the fleshpots.  The milk and honey were only a promise.  And so, like Moses, John sees the promised land and he writes to the churches to remind them that faithfulness to Jesus, even though it means life in the wilderness today, is absolutely worth it.  Once you’ve seen the New Jerusalem, you will never be seduced by the cheap imitation of glory offered by the whore.

Look at Revelation 21:1.

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.

 

How do you even describe such a thing?  The Israelites knew the beauty and fertility and plenty of Egypt.  Even after a lifetime in the desert, they could visualize another land of plenty the other side of the Jordan.  But a new heaven and a new earth?  We haven’t even seen the present heaven!  How are we supposed to visualize a new one?  A new earth might be easier since we’ve known the present one, but even that’s hard.  We can think back to the garden, before our sin corrupted and made a mess of everything.  Or we can think of Jesus resurrected from the dead.  His body brought back to life, still bearing its scars, and yet even with those scars, it was made perfect.  He was unrecognizable, yet familiar to the disciple all at the same time.  And even they, when they told the story, seem to have given up trying to explain it—it was just Jesus, the same, but new, the old, but better.  It was Jesus truly alive in a way they’d never seen anyone alive before.  And so John uses a bunch of familiar images of change and transformation to convey what a new heaven and new earth mean.  In verse 2 it’s like a wedding.  Life is never the same after you get married.  In verse 3 it’s like God moving into your house.  Life’s never the same after something like that either.  In verse 4 it’s like being healed from a terrible hurt or a devastating illness.  And in verse 7 it’s like being adopted into a new family or, maybe, being born again.  “I will be his God and he will be my son.”  Again, a drastic and life-changing transformation.  John didn’t have the vocabulary to describe this new heaven and earth so he points to all these experiences that change our lives and says, “It’s kind of like that, but only more so—more than you can imagine, but trust me, because I’ve seen it.”

The first thing he noticed was that, as he puts it, there was no more sea.  Don’t worry.  I know, we live on an Island, and apart from the expensive ferry trips, we love the sea.  The new heaven and earth would hardly be an improvement if the sea were literally gone.  Remember, John writes in symbols and in Hebrew thinking the Lord created by bringing order to chaos and the sea was the last remaining bit of that original chaos.  It was the home of monsters like leviathan.  The Lord was sovereign over it, but if God’s ordered creation is good, the sea was the root and source of the bad.  Chaos came from the sea to disrupt the order that makes Creation good.  The first thing about this new creation is that it has been purified.  The satan and his angels and everyone who had not given allegiance to Jesus has been wiped from the face of creation and cast into the lake of fire and now the Lord’s creation project is finally completed.  The last bit of chaos is tamed.  There is no longer a source of corruption, of evil, of rebellion.

John goes on now in verses 2-7:

And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

  And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.”  Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”  And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment.  The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son.

There’s that first image of the bride and the wedding.  Remember I said last week that John had already seen the city as the satan and his hordes laid siege to it.  The city is the Church.  It is already but it’s also not yet.  Like everything else, it’s already here, but imperfect, and one day she will be made perfect by being made new.  So there’s a sense in which the present age is the age in which the bride processes down the aisle to meet her Lord.  There are so many images John uses in Revelation.  We see the church, riding out to battle with Jesus, conquering the world by the proclamation of the gospel until the whole world is brought into submission to him.  And at the same time we see the bride making her way down the aisle to meet Jesus—and with each step she becomes more beautiful, her dress whiter and purer.  But John’s holding a kaleidoscope to our eyes, because the bride is also a city and that city descends from heaven and, at the same time, both the city and the people are revealed to be God’s temple.

One of the reasons we struggle with John’s imagery is that the idea of “going to heaven when we die” is so deeply ingrained in our minds as the end goal of everything.  We think of heaven as the perfect world and the earth—and our physical bodies—as shabby shadows of something greater that we’ll be glad to leave behind.  That idea came from Plato, the Greek philosopher, not the Bible.  But because of it, the very ideas of resurrection and new creation have been scrambled for a lot of people.  For many “resurrection” means leaving the body behind to live a spiritual existence in heaven, and “new creation” has been forgotten altogether.  But remember the story.  Remember the beginning.  God created this world and he called it good.  He created human beings from the dust—we are mortal—and yet he declared us to be not only good, but very good.  Adam and Eve’s vocation was to steward that creation—specifically the garden, where the Lord dwelled with them.  And think about what that means.  The garden was the Lord’s temple.  Adam and Eve were his priests.  And they were given a mandate: be fruitful and multiply.  They were to care for the temple and the natural implication of their fruitfulness would have been the expansion of that garden-temple into the whole earth.  In some way humanity was called to join with the Lord in the completion of his creation.  But we rebelled and we made a mess of everything.  We were cast out of the Lord’s presence.  But the great story of the Bible, from beginning to end, show us that God has not given up.  Not on us and not on this world.  He will complete his great project.  He will bring the story to the wonderful ending he had planned all along.  No devil, no forbidden fruit, no human rebellion will get in the way.

But sometimes, as we plod through the wilderness it feels as though the wilderness is all there is and that it will be forever.  So John takes us to the mountain top and shows us the promised land.  He shows us Creation set to rights—and he shows us the Church—because how often is it this very body of the redeemed that’s a mess, ugly, hurtful, unfaithful—he shows us the Church finally perfected and set to rights too: the beautiful bride, the golden city.  God’s good, but corrupted creation is somehow made new—both earth and heaven.  Why does heaven have to be made knew, too?  Because even it has seen corruption.  As John saw back in Chapter 12: there was war in heaven.  The problem began there, with the satan.  Even heaven must be set to rights.  And human sin having been dealt with by Jesus, God’s realm and ours will once again be reunited as they were in the beginning.  As the voice from the throne—God himself—announces: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”  The word John uses when he writes about “dwelling” is the word associated with the tabernacle—that one place in Israel where heaven and earth overlapped, where human beings could go to meet the Lord.  It’s the same word John uses in the first chapter of his Gospel when he says that the word became flesh and “dwelt” among us.  In Jesus, God “pitched his tent”, he “tabernacled” in the midst of his people.  And remember what John said about that?  He says that we beheld his glory.  And what John sees now at the end—which isn’t really the end, but the beginning—is what God did in Jesus on a cosmic scale.  His creation set to rights, his temple restored, the people he created restored to his presence, and that project he gave to Adam and Eve to join with him in the completing of his creation, if not itself completed, at least once again back on track.  It’s what Paul wrote about in Ephesians: that God has “a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:10).

And speaking of Paul, I think we can better understand why John sees the city descending from heaven if we think about what Paul has written in Colossians 3.    He writes, “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.  When Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.”  If we are in Christ, there is a new life that awaits us, a life now hidden with him in heaven.  Tom Wright has a wonderful illustration of this.  Think of Christmas.  All year your decorations are stored away in a closet or in the attic.  You buy presents for your kids and hide them away, again in that closet or the attic or under the bed.  But when Christmas comes, we don’t bring our families together and cram ourselves into the closet or squeeze under the bed to enjoy Christmas.  No.  The celebration is gradually prepared and waits for us in the closet, but when the day comes, out it all comes and the whole house is transformed.  And just so with God’s new creation and the life that Jesus has waiting for us.  On that day every tear will be wiped away.  There will be no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain, and no more death.  It will be a celebration of which Christmas is a shabby shadow.  Everything God has in store for us, everything Jesus has been preparing since his ascension to heaven, all of it will be brought out.  Heaven and earth will be rejoined—which is a dramatic way of saying that God will restore us to his presence—and we will know new creation by the power of his Spirit.  We will know God as the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, and we will know that life-giving water that Jesus’ promised in John’s gospel—the life that Adam and Eve knew in the garden, the life that flowed in rivers from God’s presence to nourish the world.  The angel placed at the entrance of the garden to guard it with his sword will be no more.  In the end the Lord welcomes us back, but now the garden has become a great city—somehow new creation, while it’s purged of all corruption, will benefit and reflect the good that has come through even fallen human life.  But the garden is still there, at the heart—there’s the tree of life and the river of living water.

And, finally, John reminds us why he’s written all of this.  As Moses was told to tell Joshua what he’d seen on the mountain so that he and the Israelites would not lose heart, so John writes to the Christians of what we might call his diocese.  Tribulation was coming, but they needed to persevere.  The kingdom is real.  “The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son,” God says.  The one who conquers.  The one who stands firm in faith, on the truth of the good news about Jesus: crucified, risen, and Lord of all.  The one who does not compromise with Caesar or his gods.  And he also warns in verse 8:

 

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”

 

We’ve already seen that as he makes all things new, the Lord will wipe from creation every bit that doesn’t belong: every bit of evil, every bit of rebellion, every bit of sin—and every last person who has not given their allegiance in faith to Jesus and to this kingdom.  Brothers and Sisters, this is what it means to live in faith: to give our allegiance to Jesus and to live for him, to live according to the values of his new world, even as the kings and gods of the old world offer their cheap imitations and rage at us in anger when we refuse them, because we trust there really is a promised land and that Jesus and the Spirit will get us there in the end.  The people who have shown their commitment to Jesus by remaining faithful to the end will be welcomed as God’s sons and daughters, the brothers and sisters of Jesus his son, and they will know once again the tree of life and the river of living water.  Having lived in faith and hope, looking forward and committed to God’s new world, they will know life in his presence and he will himself, tenderly wipe away all our tears.

In a sermon preached in 1941 at St. Mary’s, Oxford, C. S. Lewis gave us that famous illustration of the distractions of the present age:

“If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak.  We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea.  We are far too easily pleased.”

Dear Friends, we have no excuse.  John has shown us Jesus and all his glory—glory as of the only son of the Father.  He has stood on the mountain and seen the glories that lie in wait for those who are in Jesus the Messiah.  And, like Moses, who reported what he saw to encourage and strengthen Joshua and the Israelites through the wilderness and the conquest to come, John has shown us—something even greater than a holiday at the sea.  But as we go out to conquer, we have more than John’s report.  We each have known the power of the cross for ourselves.  We have known the life of the Spirit into whom we were plunged in our baptism.  We have come every week to the Lord’s Table to share in the bread and the wine and to participate for ourselves in that great exodus from sin and death in which Jesus leads us.  Set aside the mud pies.  Forsake the old kings and the old gods.  Do not fear the wilderness.  On the other side lies the promised land and the life of the age to come.  As Joshua declared, knowing the Lord’s promises and his faithfulness, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”  Brothers and Sisters, stand firm in faith knowing that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again.

Let’s pray: Gracious Father, we thank you for the new life you have given us in Jesus and the Spirit, but we also acknowledge our struggles as we make our way through the wilderness.  Too often we are enticed by the lures of the old and distracted from the promises of the new.  Strengthen our faith we pray.  Remind us that the life of the Spirit you have given us in our baptism is but a down payment on the life of the age to come.  As we come to your Table, remind us that Jesus has delivered us from the bondage of sin and death and that you not only feed us in the wilderness, but that the purpose of the cross is to make all things news—that there is a promised land to come.  Strengthen us with your grace that we might give our allegiance to you and commit ourselves to the establishment of your kingdom on earth as in heaven.  Through Jesus we pray.  Amen.

Before the Throne

Revelation 20:7-15

by William Klock

Last year we planted some daylilies that someone down the street was kind enough to be giving away.  I’ve spent the last two months trying to destroy these deceptively beautiful, but noxious weeds.  I’m beginning to suspect they’ve sunk roots all the way to the abyss.  The devil may be bound there, but he’s keeping himself occupied fertilizing my daylilies!  We planted one little clump and it promptly took over the entire flowerbed, choking out everything else.  Then it put out shoots and daylilies started popping up in the lawn.  Then some of them went to seed and more daylilies started appearing in the lawn forty and fifty feet away.  At first the outliers were easy enough to snap off at the ground, but that didn’t stop them at all.  I tried mowing them down with the lawnmower blade set right to ground level.  I think I actually heard them laughing at me even as I scalped them.  They came back and taunted me, so I dug down a bit, yanked them out, and buried them.  Surely smothering them would do the trick.  I could hear their cackles rising through the earth until they broke through again.  It finally came to digging up the whole flowerbed.  I dug and dug and dug—half a metre down—to get those wicked roots.  They even entwined around my perimeter drain pipe.  As I was packing them into my yard waste bin someone walked by on the path behind our house.  “You aren’t putting daylilies in your yard waste?” he asked in horror.  “Of course I am,” I said.  But, no, apparently you can’t do that.  The seeds survive the composting process and my problem will become who knows how many other people’s problem.  “Burn ‘em,” he said.  “Don’t let the seeds get anywhere.  Sift the soil.  Gather up every last scrap of root and tuber.  And burn them with fire!”  Well, in the City of Courtenay, burning my yard waste isn’t an option, but point taken.  It’s been about three weeks.  I keep checking.  Yesterday I went out to water and found half a dozen little shoots just breaking through the ground.

I’ve been thinking about those daylilies as I’ve been studying Revelation 20.  There was that little blurb in verse 6 at the end of our passage two weeks ago where John wrote that at the end of the millennium, the satan must be released for a little while.  What’s with that?  Why?  It goes right along with all those other questions we ask about how God deals with evil.  “If God is good, why does he permit evil.”  “Why me?” we ask when bad things happen to us.  God could spare us from evil, he could spare us from so much pain and suffering—he’s God, he can do anything.  So why doesn’t he?  Why, when John has shown us Jesus chaining up the devil and confining him to the abyss, when he's shown us the church riding out triumphantly into the world, conquering the nations by the proclamation of the gospel, when we know that our mission will be successful, because it’s backed by the power and authority of both God’s word and God’s Spirit, why in the world would he let the satan go just when it seems the victory has been won?

Because, like the daylilies, to be dealt with once and for all, evil has to expose itself.  If it were up to us, evil would be like those daylilies.  I plucked them off and they grew back.  I mowed them down and they grew back.  I even dug them up—but not deep enough—and they grew back.  I was careless with the seeds, and they spread.  God’s got a better strategy—one that not only ends evil forever, but sees the redemptive work of Jesus making all things new in the process.  Let’s look at the rest of Revelation 20, beginning with verse 7.

And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from his prison…

The first decisive blow the Lord delivered to the devil was that first Easter morning when Jesus rose victorious over death.  And it only worked, because God had permitted evil to rise to its full height, to be concentrated all in one place, and to do its absolute worst at the cross.  And it’s like we see ripples of that victory again: first as we saw God’s judgement on rebellious Jerusalem.  Forty years he gave the Jews to repent and to turn to Jesus the Messiah—and, at the same time, forty years for them to make their rebellion clear and obvious, so that when the Lord’s judgement fell on them, there would be no question about the justness of it.  Then again, another ripple, as we saw judgement fall on the pagan world of the Greeks and Romans.  And now, here at the end, another ripple of God’s justice against evil—the last.  This time it’ll be the end of evil, once and for all.

So for a thousand years the Church will proclaim the good news about Jesus to the nations.  It’s not literally a thousand years—it’s already been almost two thousand already.  As I said before, it’s a symbolic number.  It’s a long time and it’s just long enough for Jesus, the word, and for the Spirit to do their work through the Church.  The satan is bound—Jesus bound him in his ministry and the proclamation of the gospel keeps him bound wherever it goes.  It doesn’t mean he has no power.  It means he cannot and will not prevail.  Jesus and the gospel will win because they already have, and the whole world will increasingly know what new creation is like, even if it hasn’t fully happened.  But as much as the gospel will bring the nations to Jesus and will transform the world, not everyone will believe.  How many will refuse the gospel we don’t know.  But there will be some.  Sin and death will still be present.  I trust that by the time this happens, whether that’s a thousand years from now or a hundred thousand years from now, the Church will be much refined, but still not perfect.  Sin and death are the last enemies to be put under Jesus’ feet.  And so, when the time is right, evil incarnate will be released from his chains.  Continuing with verse 8:

[He] will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea.  And they marched up over the broad plain of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city, but fire came down from heaven and consumed them, and the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.  (Revelation 20:8-10)

John is looking back here to Ezekiel as he so often does in Revelation.  You’ll remember that famous vision of Ezekiel about the valley of dry bones—the knee bone connected to the leg bone and all of that as the song goes.  Ezekiel saw dry bones—Israel, dead in her sins—restored to life by the proclamation of God’s word.  Israel cleansed from her sins and brought home from her exile.  You’d think everything would be fine from there on out, but it’s not.  Because Ezekiel then sees Gog, the king of the land of Magog, descending on the newly restored Israel.  Magog was a semi-mythical land to the north—somewhere almost off the map.  By the First Century, Gog and Magog had become two nations in Jewish thought.  They represented the nations of which the Psalmist asks in Psalm 2, “Why do the nations rage?”  And yet, in Ezekiel, this raging nation descend on Israel not as punishment or judgement for her sins, but after peace and justice have been restored.  And the point for John, as I think it was for Ezekiel, is that Gog and Magog remind us of the problem of evil.  No matter what humans may accomplish, no matter how far the gospel reaches, until Jesus finally and fully consummates his work of new creation, evil will be present.  Like my daylilies, evil has deep roots.  Its seeds spread.  Stamp it out here and it pops up over there.  Gog and Magog remind us that even as the gospel transforms the world, we still await the day when Jesus will really and truly make all things new—when we and all of creation will know for ourselves the power of resurrection.

So, when the time is right the satan will be released.  He will marshal his forces.  I can’t say how literally John intends for us to take this.  He gives us a picture of forces literally staged for an actual war.  On the opposing side is the “camp of the saints” and “the beloved city”.  It’s a two-fold image of the Church.  We are a camp—an image drawn from Exodus.  No matter how far the gospel progresses, no matter how it transforms this world, the Church remains a people on a pilgrimage through the wilderness.  But, too, John compares us to the beloved city.  This is really interesting, because the only city Jewish believers would think of as “beloved” is Jerusalem.  And in the next chapter—to get ahead of ourselves—we see the New Jerusalem—an amazing city that is, at the same time, not just a city, but a temple, and John says, also the bride.  It’s both a city and a people.  And while it doesn’t descend in all its glory until the next chapter, it’s already present here and now in the present age.  This was the inspiration for St. Augustine’s famous book, The City of God.  The Church is God’s city, the New Jerusalem, but not just some day in the future when that amazing city of gold and jewels descends from heaven.  Brothers and Sisters, the Church—you and I and all the other saints—are that city here and now.  In Augustine’s language, we are, even now, the heavenly city confronting the earthly city of Caesar and the satan with the good news that Jesus is Lord.  We are the people who pray, “On earth as in heaven,” and who live in such a way as to witness and to manifest God’s kingdom here and now.

So John sees the Church—both the city of God and a pilgrim people in the wilderness—surrounded finally by evil.  Once again, evil gathers itself together all in one place to rise to its full height.  It looks bad.  And yet the last battle took place in Chapter 19.  Jesus rode out on his white horse, the sword of the gospel coming from his mouth, and his bride rode out with him to conquer the nations.  The devil will, finally muster his forces, but there will be no battle, because the battle was already won.  In a vision that reminds us of Elijah, fire falls from heaven and consumes the enemies of Jesus’ people.  Finally, the satan himself is cast into the lake of fire—that place of final destruction—never to return, never again to exert his influence.  The daylilies have been rooted up and every last bit of root and seed burned with fire.  Gone forever.

With the forces that corrupted his creation gone forever, the Lord can now deal with Creation itself.  Look at verse 11:

  Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it.  From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them.

 

I think we need to be careful not to over-interpret the details here.  John sees “earth and heaven” flee away.  The ESV, I think reading in too much and trying to avoid a difficult reading, translates it “sky” instead of the more natural reading, “heaven”.  Earth and heaven flee away.  Is this the destruction of the old order of creation?  Maybe, but I don’t think so.  If Jesus’ resurrection is the model for our own and for the renewal of creation itself, then there’s continuity between the old and the new.  Jesus’ wasn’t given a completely new body while his old body lay in the tomb forever.  His old body was raised and made new.  We expect the same for our own bodies.  And I think that model fits what will happen with heaven and earth.  The old creation, corrupted by sin, will be made new.  John’s purpose here is to show us literally everything fading into the background so that our attention is put on the one thing—and the one person left: God seated on his throne.  The heavenly court, the angels, the elders, the four living creatures, even the martyrs who were already resurrected to reign beside Jesus for the thousand years—they and everything else fades out of view as the supreme judge now takes his throne.  In the full light of his glory, everything else become irrelevant.  He commands our full attention.  John goes on in verses 12 and 13:

And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened.  Then another book was opened, which is the book of life.  And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done.  And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done.

 

And now John sees the dead assembled before the judge.  Again, I think we have to be careful how literally we take this, lest we turn this scene into a heavenly DMV with a line billions of people long, waiting an eternity to stand before a sort of heavenly bureaucratic magistrate to be assigned our final destination.  John’s attention is on the judge—and on his glory—as he deals with evil and sets his corrupted creation to rights.  The ultimate source of evil has been cast from creation for good, but each of us, every human that has ever lived, has taken part in some way in that evil.  Every one of us has had a hand—great or small—in creation’s corruption and human misery.  And so the books are opened and, the judge prepared, death and hades and the sea give up their dead.  Where are the living?  They’re not the focus of this scene.  The enemies of the people of God in the satan’s last putsch were consumed by fire—so they’re presumably amongst this crowd.  The rest were the saints, alive at the end—maybe they’ll be judged here too, but they may be passed over, because their faithfulness to Jesus has already been vindicated.

So, again, the Lord casts no man or woman into oblivion without it being clear that his judgement is just.  Death and hades give up their dead.  Greek-speaking Jews borrowed hades, the Greek’s mythical abode of the dead, to translate the Hebrew word sheol—the grave.  The graves of history are turned out and their occupants stand before the Judge.  The sea, too, gives up all those lost to it.  And by the books we each condemn ourselves.  If God is to set his creation to rights, not a single one of us deserves to be a part of it.  The satan—the root of the problem of evil—may be gone, but each of us would carry that evil into the new creation and make a mess of it all over again.  Praise God that the book containing our sins is not the only one that will be opened on that day.  The second book is the book of life—an image that goes all the way back to Moses—the book containing the names of the Lord’s covenant people.

John first wrote of this book of life in his exhortation to the Church in Sardis: “Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy.  The one who conquers will be clothed in white garments, and I will never blot his name out of the book of life.  I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels” (Revelation 3:4-6).  Repeatedly, throughout Revelation, John writes of those who stand firm for Jesus, those who refuse to submit to the beast, those who overcome—their names are written in this book of life that belongs to the lamb.  These are the names of those who are in Jesus.  They are the ones who have recognized that in his resurrection he has begun the work of new creation—of restoring this broken world and setting it to rights.  They are the ones who have not only acknowledge him as Lord, but who have given their allegiance to him and to his kingdom.  They’re the ones who, despite continuing sometimes to sin and to fall short of the mark, are nevertheless committed to him.  They have forsaken Caesar.  And they have forsaken the false gods of this world: Aphrodite, Mars, Mammon, and all the rest.  They’re the people who have pulled up their stakes in the systems of the old kings and gods and have planted them firmly in the kingdom of Jesus.  These are the “on earth as in heaven” people.  And that means that, because of their faith and their union with Jesus, these are the people in whom God’s work of recreation has already begun.  These are the people who have been filled with his own Spirit and have their hearts and their hopes set on the age to come.  These are the ones ready to follow their king into his kingdom—ready to be renewed as he was—to finally be an Easter people in all the fullness of what that means.  They—we—just like everyone else—stand condemned by the other books, the record of our sins, the record of our wrongs against God and against each other.  But by his merciful grace, Jesus has also written our names in his book, he claims us as his own, he covers our sins by the sacrifice of his own blood, and when our deeds condemn us, he confesses us before his Father: “These belong to me.  These are the ones I’ve made new.  These are they whom I’ve prepared to take up Adam’s vocation: to my priests, the stewards of my temple.”

The rest have no share in God’s new creation.  John goes on in verses 14 and 15:

Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire.  And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

 

Finally, the end of sin and death.  Death and the grave are cast into the lake of fire—that place of ultimate destruction.  Jesus has conquered it and those written in his book have been delivered from it forever.  And those not written in the book of life, those whose sins and lack of allegiance to Jesus—in contrast to the redeemed, these are the “my will on earth” people—those who would only carry the curse of sin into the new creation.  Like Adam and Eve, they cannot live in the presence of God or share in the life he gives, and so having been condemned by the record of their own deeds against God, they too are cast into the lake of fire.  I think it’s worth noting that whereas John writes that the lake of fire is a place of eternal torment for the satan and his angels, he does not say the same of these men and women.  The same goes for the beast and his prophet.  And I think the reason for that is that the satan and his angels are eternal beings.  Humans are not.  In Genesis we read that we were created from dust.  Whether that’s meant literally or not, the point is that we are, by our nature, mortal.  Adam and Eve could have lived forever had they remained in the presence of God.  The tree of life there and as we’ll see in the next chapter of Revelation is symbolic of that life of God.  But away from his presence we die and eventually return to the dust.  As St. Paul writes in Romans 6, “The wages of sin is death.”  Because apart from the presence of God we are simply dust graciously animated by his breath until we die and his breath returns to him and we return to the dust of which we were made.  I know that’s a minority opinion in Evangelical theology, but the more I study and try to read Scripture in context and apart from the tendency we’ve had for many centuries to read it through the lens of pagan Greek philosophy, that’s the conclusion I keep coming to.  That said, John doesn’t seem overly concerned with whether the unredeemed are consigned to oblivion or eternal torment.  The real point here is that God is about to consummate the work of new creation begun in the resurrection of Jesus.  The world will be set to rights, tears will be wiped away, all things will be made new and the only people for whom there is a place in this new world are those who have already committed themselves to Jesus and to this new world and in whom he and the Spirit have already begun this work of new creation.  God’s majesty and glory are revealed at the throne as every last bit of evil is exposed, rooted out, gathered up, and cast into the fire never to trouble his creation again.  And his glory shines forth in Jesus, the lamb who was slain, who stands before him with his own books, calling out the names of those who have known his amazing grace by faith.

Brothers and Sisters, the end follows naturally from the rest of the story of God and his people.  Even if Jesus hadn’t revealed these visions to John, we know that the God who reveals himself in the Scriptures—whose holy fire burns against sin, but who is also patient and loving, full of grace and mercy—he will not let evil go unchecked forever.  He will restore that which he so lovingly made.  He so loved the world that he gave his son so that all those who believe—who trust in him, who acknowledge his lordship over all, who give their allegiance to him and to his kingdom—might know the life of the age to come.  In light of all that—even without John—we could be sure that what God has begun in Jesus he will surely finish.  He will deal with sin and death and he will consummate his project of new creation.  But, again, we see his graciousness towards us here.  Like Paul did, we could figure this all out for ourselves, but Jesus knew that his people, beleaguered by the forces of unbelieving Jerusalem and pagan Rome, with persecution and martyrdom around the corner, needed and exhortation to persevere in the face of tribulation.  And so in his grace, he loving gave them this vision of the kingdom—and with it assurance.  God is king.  Jesus is lord.  The gospel will win.  The church will be vindicated and reunited with her lord.  All things will be made new.  Every tear will be wiped away.

Those persecuted Christians rejoiced at the words of Jesus and we know they did, indeed, persevere.  Those who survived—and even the pagan historians—wrote of their faithful courage.  May we, too, be exhorted to faithful courage by John’s vision—giving our allegiance to Jesus and to his kingdom—sure and certain of his faithfulness to us.  Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.

Let’s pray: Heavenly Father, strengthen us we pray that we might always be faithful to you and to your kingdom.  As we struggle with evil in this world, hold the cross before us that we might always remember that you are dealing with it.  As we face opposition, hold the cross before us that we might always remember you will finish what you have begun.  And as we see the cross before us, may we be faithful in proclaiming the gospel that the nations might have a share in your kingdom.  Through Jesus we pray. Amen.

A Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Trinity

Romans 6:19-23 & St. Mark 8:1-9

by William Klock

The Old Testament prophet Hosea called Israel back to the Lord.  The people had turned their backs on him, they were worshipping idols, and even offering their children as sacrifices on the altars of pagan gods.  Instead of trusting the Lord to take care of them as he had promised, they had thrown themselves into the game of geopolitics and had put their trust in horses and chariots and made alliances with their pagan neighbours—all things that the Lord had forbidden.  Through Hosea, the Lord call his covenant people back to himself.  He did it by turning Hosea’s life into a series of living object lessons, the best known of which took place when the Lord told Hosea to take a prostitute named Gomer for his wife.  Repeatedly Gomer left him, going back to her life of prostitution, and repeatedly and lovingly, Hosea sought her out, bought her out of her slavery, and brought her back to his home to be his wife.

People thought Hosea was crazy.  What kind of idiot would take a prostitute for his wife and keep buying her back out of that life as she was continually unfaithful to him?  But through the prophet the Lord eventually says to them, “I’m that ‘idiot’ and you’re the prostitute!  I brought you out of Egypt, I loved you and fed you in the wilderness, I conquered the Canaanites for you and gave you homes that you didn’t build and an abundant harvest that you didn’t plant, and yet you continually turn your back on me and play the harlot with false gods and with the nations of the world.”  And having given them that dramatic object lessons, Hosea calls the people back to their God:

Return, O Israel, to the Lord your God, for you have stumbled because of your iniquity. Take with you words and return to the Lord; say to him, “Take away all iniquity; accept that which is good and we will pay with bulls the fruit of our lips. Assyria shall not save us, we will not ride on horses; and we will say no more, ‘Our God,’ to the work of our hands.  (Hosea 14:1-3)

Israel continued to struggle to be faithful to the Lord.  That’s why Jesus came.  Israel’s God, himself, taking on human flesh and being born of Mary.  He humbled himself, becoming one of his own people.  And as if that wasn’t enough, he was despised, rejected, and killed.  But in that, as the perfect Israelite, Jesus took on himself the death that Israel deserved.  He brought a means of forgiveness, a means of restoration, and in his resurrection he brought a means and a promise of life to people who were dead.  And each of us, though Gentiles, have been called into the redeemed life of Israel through Jesus.  Our God is a god who gives his life out of love for his people—the very people who reject and despise and rebel against him.

And yet even as Jesus’ people, given his life and his Spirit, how often are we like Hosea’s wife Gomer?  How often do we turn our backs on the Lord?  Consider our priorities in life.  All too often we put everything else first, and feel good about ourselves if we’re willing to give him an hour or two on Sunday morning and maybe a few minutes of prayer during the week.  Instead of devoting our time, our talents, and our treasures to the one who gave them to us, we squander them on the things of the world.  We profess with our mouths that Jesus is our Saviour and Lord, but we fail to put our trust in him and instead trust in the ways and systems of the world for our security.  Through the prophets the Lord condemned his people for their false view of worship.  They thought that they could live their lives however they wanted as long as they came to the temple to offer the Lord the sacrifices he required—even thinking they could worship other gods on the side.  Jesus paraphrased God’s response to that when he told the people, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.”  True worship involves our whole selves given over to God for his use all of the time.

Think about the vow we took or that our parents took for us when we were baptized.  The priest asked: “Do you renounce the devil and all his works, the empty display and false values of the world, and the sinful desires of the flesh, so that you will not follow them and be led by them?”  In our Baptism we renounce the powers of the present evil age and we take hold of Jesus and the new age he has ushered in.  In our Baptism we are consecrated to the Lord.   But what does it mean to be consecrated to something or someone?  Notice that in our baptismal vows we don’t promise to renounce the world the flesh and the devil when it’s convenient or when it doesn’t cut into our own plans or our own enjoyment or sense of security.  In our vows we give ourselves over to the Lord entirely.  We put ourselves firmly in his kingdom and renounce everything that stands opposed to it.  Like the Israelites, we’ve been called by the Lord to a new life.  They were slaves to the Egyptians and he brought them to a new life of freedom.  We were slaves to sin and he does the same for us spiritually.  Look at Romans 6:19-22.  St. Paul says:

I am speaking in human terms, because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness leading to more lawlessness, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness leading to sanctification.

   For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.   But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed?  For the end of those things is death.  But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.

 

When it came to conveying the depth of our total devotion, first to sin and then as redeemed men and women to Jesus, Paul chose to compare it to slavery. A slave is literally owned by his master and is expected to be totally devoted to him in body and soul.  For Paul, to serve Jesus was everything—it was his life.  Remember that a slave’s life belonged to his master, and so while the analogy isn’t perfect—the negative side of slavery isn’t what Paul has in view here—it illustrates the level of devotion that the Christian has to God.  He has bought us out of slavery with the blood of his Son, and we serve him; not out of fear or slavish obligation, but out of gratitude for what he has done for us.  Think again of Israel, delivered from her Egyptian slavery to be the Lord’s people.  There’s no way we can pay him back for his sacrifice, but we do the best we can and he gives us the Holy Spirit to enable us to do more than we can ever do on our own.

At one time each of us was a slave to sin.  That’s a point where all the negative connotations of slavery are appropriate.  Oddly enough, though, when we were slaves to sin most of us didn’t really see the negative side of it.  Read some 19th Century American history and you’ll read about slaves that ran away from their masters.  They didn’t want to live that miserable life.  But before Jesus found us, how many of us tried to run away from the master of sin?  We were slaves to sin and we enjoyed it.  Like the drug addict who is a slave to his drugs that get him high, all the time ignoring the harm the drugs do to his body and mind and the life of crime those drugs often lead him to, the sinner is slave to the momentary pleasures of sin, oblivious to or ignoring the deathly consequences of that sin.  In our natural and fallen state each of us is a slave to sin.  We have absolutely no desire to get away from it and no way to master its temptations if we did want to get away, and so we serve it body and soul.

By contrast, as redeemed men and women we are called to serve the Lord with the same level of commitment we used to have to sin.  We used to seek sin out.  We left no stone unturned in a search for pleasure and gratification.  Brothers and Sisters, we need to put at least the same amount of effort into serving Jesus that we used to put into serving sin.  Where our wills were once submitted to unrighteousness, we are now to submit them totally to righteousness.  That’s the total consecration that has its beginning in our baptismal vows.

And note that there’s no middle state and there’s no compromising. You can’t say you’re no longer a slave to sin and at the same time not be a slave to righteousness.  Just like a real slave, God bought us from our old master, sin, with the blood of Jesus, who has become our new master.  In a very real sense we’ve gone from one form of slavery to another.  It’s not uncommon to hear people refer to someone as a “carnal Christian”—someone who professes to have made Jesus his Saviour and Lord, but doesn’t really live out that faith.  St. Paul doesn’t leave any room for someone like that.  Either you’re a slave to sin and serve the world, the flesh, and the devil, or you’re a slave to Jesus, serving him with body and soul.  St. James reminds us that faith without works is a dead faith.  You can’t be a Christian, you can’t have experienced the amazing grace of God in your life, and at the same time not be wholly driven to serve Jesus with everything you’ve got!

Do you ever notice how non-Christians usually don’t want to have anything to do with Jesus?  I know a lot of people who take a big interest in God, but they don’t want to talk about Jesus unless it’s their own distorted version of him.  A distant and non-interfering God is okay, but a Saviour who comes into our lives and calls us to account makes people uncomfortable.  This is why churches that teach pop-psychology and self-help, that affirm people in their sin or in their spiritual immaturity, and that don’t hold their members accountable are often so popular.  Nobody likes to be convicted of sin.  We’d rather have a religion that makes us feel warm and fuzzy and comfortable.  St. Paul makes the point that the problem isn’t that man doesn’t want God—what we don’t want, he says, is Jesus.  We want God and the good things he has to offer, but on our own terms.  Jesus, however, reminds us that we are sinners and can only come to God on his terms—that we have to give up our sin and acknowledge his lordship.  Paul tells us that when we were ruled by sin, we didn’t want to have anything to do with Jesus—he only convicted us of our sin.  Our redemption flips things: now that Jesus rules us, he must be our master and we should have no desire for sin.

St. Paul’s slavery analogy drives home the absoluteness of our duty under Jesus.  Some translations render the word as “servant.”  That misses the point of the absoluteness of what St. Paul is saying.  We are to have a total devotion.  Our love for our master changes our desire.  How much of a chore is it to sin?  In our natural state we love to sin.  Our desire to serve Jesus should be like that.  Serving him isn’t a chore, it’s a pleasure because we love him.

If we go on and look at verses 22 to 23, Paul shows us the contrast made between the wages of sin and the wages of Christ:

But now that you have been set free from sin and have become slaves of God, the fruit you get leads to sanctification and its end, eternal life.  For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:22-23)

Sin may give us pleasure today, but it only has one end.  The only place it ultimately takes anyone is death.  Genesis tells us about Adam and Eve living in the presence of the Lord, their Creator, and under the branches of the tree of life.  They were made of dust, the point being that they were mortal creatures.  But he brought those two mortal creatures into his presence and in the presence of the Lord is life.  In choosing to sin, in choosing to rebel against their creator, Adam and Eve chose to be outside his presence.  They chose mortality, they chose death over life.  Brother and Sisters, God is the source of life and each and every sin we commit widens the gulf that stands between him and us.  Each sin takes us further away from the life found only in God’s presence.

In contrast, in return for serving Jesus we are daily brought closer and closer to God’s life.  I think a lot of Christians sit around and passively wait for the life of eternity.  A lot of Christians look at the problems of the world around us and take an escapist attitude.  We want out.  “Come, Lord Jesus!”  And yet too often in just looking for escape, we miss out on the life that God gives us right now.  When we’re grafted into his vine we start bearing fruit—that’s his life manifested in us right now.  Sin has its own fruit, but it’s like a cancer that gradually kills the vine.  God, on the other hand, nourishes us and makes us grow.  That’s the sanctification that St. Paul writes about—it’s the journey we take as we travel the road to eternal life, each day getting closer and closer to God.

Paul also notes that God’s gift of eternal life is free.  It’s free because the life of the Christian isn’t the result of his own goodness—it’s in spite of his sinfulness.  Every one of us has earned the deathly wages of sin—it only takes one time, one sin.  Each of us deserves death, but life in God can never be deserved or earned.  It’s God’s gift.  And as we follow our new master we will find his sustaining grace will grow; our yoke will become easier, our burden will become lighter, our peace will become deeper, and our hope will become more and more assured.

Our Gospel lesson gives us the assurance we need as we put on Jesus’ yoke and carry the burden he’s given us.  In our lesson today we read St. Mark’s account of Jesus’ multiplication of the loaves and fishes for the crowd that had gathered to hear him preach.

Jesus expects us to follow him just like those people followed him into the country where there was nothing to eat.  He didn’t cut his sermon short thinking, “Hmm, some of these people came a long way and I’d better let them go early so they can go home to dinner.”  He preached for three days.  But all the time he understood what they’d given up to be there.  He said,

I have compassion on the crowd, because they have been with me now three days and have nothing to eat. And if I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way. And some of them have come from far away. (Mark 8:2-3)

Jesus demands our all, but in return he gives us all the grace we need to follow him.  When he calls us to seek him first, he knows what we’ve left behind to follow him.  He knows how far we’ve travelled to be with him and to sit at his feet.  As he cared for the Israelites in the wilderness, he will take care of us too.  The Gospels tell this story more than once, and each time they tell us how everyone ate until he was satisfied and that there were still plenty of leftovers.  God isn’t stingy with his blessings.  These accounts of his generosity ought to confirm our faith in him.

Brothers and sisters, God has promised this all along.  Go back to our Old Testament lesson from Hosea.  This is what he promises in verses 4-8:

I will heal their apostasy; I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them. I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily; he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon; his shoots shall spread out; his beauty shall be like the olive, and his fragrance like Lebanon.  They shall return and dwell beneath my shadow; they shall flourish like the grain; they shall blossom like the vine; their fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon. O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols? It is I who answer and look after you. I am like an evergreen cypress; from me comes your fruit. (Hosea 14:4-8)

It’s easy to be wholly devoted to Jesus and to stay away from sin when we’re surrounded by our brothers and sisters as we worship the Lord on Sunday morning.  But when we step out of the church door and into the world it’s not always easy to take that little pocket of the Kingdom of God with us.  God’s promise to us is that he will give us the grace necessary to follow him—and we know from what he’s done in the past that he’s never stingy with his grace.  Too often we foolishly go off into the world and try to “be good” on our own.  It doesn’t work that way, because without the Lord’s life sustaining us we have no life of our own.  We make the mistake of focusing on eternal life as a reward we’ll get after we die.  Our hope lies in the life of the age to come, but Brothers and Sisters, life is also God’s reward to the faithful every day, right here and right now in the power of the Holy Spirit.  Jesus has pulled the life of the age to come into the present and he pours it into us in our Baptism.  All we have to do is take our collect for today and make it our daily prayer and our daily commitment:

“Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things, graft in our hearts the love of your Name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and so by your mercy keep us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.”

A Thousand Years

Revelation 20:1-6

by William Klock

As we get into the final chapters of the book of Revelation it becomes increasingly important that we keep our attention on the broad strokes of John’s painting.  It’s easy to get bogged down in the details and speculations, while losing sight of what’s really important.  And it’s important to keep the big story, the one that begins all the way back in Genesis, to keep it in mind and to read Revelation in light of it.  It’s important to remember the context—the situation in which John was writing and the people to whom he wrote.  Revelation isn’t an easy book, but that historical context and that big biblical narrative make it a lot easier to understand and steer us clear of a lot of interpretive pitfalls.  As I’ve been saying, the book is about tribulation, perseverance, and kingdom.  It was written to little churches, small groups of early Christians, living at the turn of the ages.  Persecution was coming—and had already hit some of them.  It was going to get worse.  Many would question whether they’d made the right choice in following Jesus.  They’d wonder whether he truly was Lord.  Jewish believers might be wondering: Were the Pharisees or the Zealots right all along?  And others had believed that Caesar was a cheap imitation of Jesus, but when persecution came, when Nero was feeding Christians to the lions, they’d be wondering whether or not they’d got it wrong.  Maybe Caesar really was Lord.  Maybe Caesar’s gods were, in fact, greater than the God of Israel.

And so, through John, Jesus urges these believers to stand firm.  Judgement will come.  First on unbelieving Jerusalem and then on the whole Greco-Roman world.  As we saw last week in our look at Revelation 19, Jesus assured them that he would triumph.  The decisive victory was won at the cross, and now his Spirit-empowered Church—which looked so small and weak in John’s day—would go out and conquer the nation for Jesus by proclaiming the gospel—the word of truth, the sword proceeding out of the mouth of Jesus, the word of God.

When we remember that context—and when we look back on history and see that Jerusalem really did fall and that Rome really was conquered by the gospel—most of Revelation is actually pretty straightforward and you don’t need a bunch of complicated charts to make sense of it.  But now with Chapters 19 and 20 we start to move beyond the events that were about to take place.  John and the people to whom he wrote were living at the turn of the ages.  With Chapters 19 and 20 we move beyond their immediate horizon and into what was for them still the age to come.  This is, I will argue, where we stand today and with the last couple chapters of Revelation still ahead of us.  One of my favourite commentators explains this with a parable, saying that Israel was like a great ship.  On that ship, everything was a mess.  The crew and passengers were fighting with each other.  The captain and officers were corrupt.  And while everyone squabbled she sailed into a storm.  A few prophets tried to snap the people out of it, pointing to the storm ahead and urging the crew to do their jobs, but few would listen to them.  The last of those prophets they angrily killed.  But a few heeded his warning and as the storm was about to break, they got into a lifeboat and lowered it into the stormy waters.  They rode out the storm.  They watched as the great ship sank.  Those in the lifeboat barely survived.  Some starved.  Some were injured.  Some fell overboard and drowned.  Along the way they picked up survivors of other ships—Gentile believers—who struggled through the storm with them.  But eventually they made it.  The storm passed.  And their little boat washed up on a new shore.  Now it was time to make a new life for themselves.  This was the beginning of a new age.[1]  Brothers and Sisters, we’re the descendants of those people, living in that new age and carrying on their mission.  That, I think, gives us a sense of the broad brush strokes of John’s painting.  I think the smaller details all made sense to John and to most of his reader, but with our distance from the original context, some of them can be a struggle for us.  Christians disagree on many of them.  But that’s okay.  As long as we’ve got the bigger picture in our minds, I think we can be reasonably sure that we’ve got the important things right.  So let’s look at the first part of Revelation 20.  We’ll look at verses 1-6 today and I’ll just read them all at once here.

  Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain.  And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.

  Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.

 

In the last two chapters we’ve seen the fall of Babylon—John’s symbolic name for Rome, tying her to that evil empire that had for so long persecuted Israel and that was traced all the way back to the tower of Babel and humanities opposition to God.  The prostitute—Rome herself—has fallen, the beast and his false prophet—the Emperor and his cult—have been cast into the lake of fire.  The demonic power behind the great pagan empire has been defeated and Jesus and his Church now stand poised to ride out to conquer with the gospel.  But what about the enemy behind all of this?  The victory will be short-lived if the one who inspired it all from the beginning is still out of control, as St. Peter wrote, prowling around like a roaring lion.  So now John sees an angel descend from heaven.  This is Jesus himself, just as in Chapters 10 and 18.  He brings with him a chain and the keys to the abyss.  Back in Chapter 9, those keys were given to the devil so that he might open the abyss, release the forces there, and do his worst.  And now John stresses that the devil’s worst wasn’t good enough.  Jesus has defeated him and taken back the keys that rightly belong only to him.  He binds the satan—John uses all those words—dragon, serpent, the devil, the satan—he’s used before to describe this embodiment of evil.  Jesus binds him up, casts him into the abyss, and locks its gate.

What is the abyss?  It’s different from the lake of fire.  The lake of fire is a place of final destruction—a place that removes whatever is cast into it from Creation for good.  If by his act of creation, the Lord brought order to chaos—which is what the ancient Hebrews saw as the heart of the creative act—then the abyss is sort of that one part of the original chaos that remains, from which evil and opposition to God and his good order can still emerge.  It’s not a major theme in the Bible, but here and there it pops up—in Job for example.  But when it does, we always find that even the abyss and its denizens are in the Lord’s sovereign control.  And so he casts the satan, bound in chains, into that prison and locks its door.  For a thousand years, John writes.  Then, he says, the satan must be “let out for a little while”.

Now what about this “thousand years”?  This is where the idea of the millennium comes from—millennium is Latin for one thousand.  And it’s an interesting thing that when we talk about the different schemes for interpreting biblical eschatology, most of them are named based on how they view this millennium—and specifically how it relates to the return of Jesus.  Pre-millennialists believe Jesus will return before the millennium.  Post-millennialists believe he will return after.  Amillennialists, well that’s a little more complicated, although many would line themselves up with the Post-millennialists—sort of.  And, of course, is John envisioning a literal thousand years or just a really long time?  The millennium is one of those things that’s only mentioned once in the whole Bible, but ends up commanding a disproportionate amount of our attention.  Modern pre-millennialists often make holding a pre-millennial view a test of orthodoxy—which itself is odd, considering the modern pre-millennial view has been around less than two-hundred years—and has had wide-spread acceptance for only about half that time.  Many of the new denominations that arose from the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversies of the early 20th Century wrote pre-millennialism into their confessional statements.  Bp. Nicholson, one of the early bishops of the REC, pushed for this when he re-wrote the Articles of Religion for the REC in 1874.  It’s a reminder that we need to keep our focus on the big picture, rather than getting dogmatic about speculations over the details that are often much less clear.  There’s a reason why the Creed requires our belief in Jesus’ return to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom, that will have no end.  Those are the essentials, the non-negotiables of eschatology.  How exactly the millennium relates to that is not something to which anyone should be binding the consciences of other Christians or using to drive a wedge between believers and churches that differ.  We can faithful to the Scriptures and disagree on these points.  That’s okay.

As far as the duration of the millennium goes, in a book full of symbols and symbolic numbers, I simply can’t see any reason to insist that suddenly here John means for us to take this number absolutely literally.  The point is that this period of time will be long, but also just as long as it needs to be.  This is the age of the gospel—of the people of Jesus riding out on our white horses into the world with his word of truth, conquering by the gospel.  Pre-millennialism tends to produce the sort of ideas I talked about last Sunday—the idea that Jesus can’t return until some bare minimum has been redeemed from every tribe and tongue.  It’s a pessimistic view of things.  In that way of thinking, the ages have not yet turned.  The satan still claims the world as his, the Church fights an uphill battle with the gospel, we will win some, but ultimately things will get worse and worse and worse and finally Jesus will return, bind the satan, and usher in the millennium—a perfect age for a thousand years.

I have trouble with that.  It just doesn’t square with the larger narrative of Scripture.  It doesn’t square with what Jesus has established in the Church.  In us, he has established a new Israel.  Our mission is the same as the old, to bring the nations to the Lord.  But he has given us his gospel and empowered us with his Spirit.  He has commissioned us to go out to the nations and Jesus told Peter that the gates of hell will not prevail.  When the people were amazed at Jesus’ power over demons, Jesus told them it was because he had broken into the strong man’s house and bound him.  The binding of Satan isn’t something future.  It’s something Jesus did even before died and rose again.  Jesus has won the battle and he calls his church to join him in it—and as surely as he has conquered the satan, so have and so will we.

The problem may be that we expect perfection.  If the satan is bound, we think, how does he still have power in the world?  How, if he is bound, does he prowl around like a roaring lion?  This millennial kingdom thing must, then, be something future.  But, again, we miss John’s use of symbolism.  At no point in his ministry did Jesus ever physically grab the devil and bind him in literal chains, and lock him in a literal prison.  There’s no literal abyss somewhere out there with a gate to which Jesus—or the Church—hold literal keys.  But Jesus bound the devil nevertheless—by his very presence.  If we believe Jesus and take him at his word, we have to believe that he bound the satan in the time of his earthly ministry.  The Church now bears Jesus’ authority into the world, meaning the devil has no power over the Church.  We are filled with God’s own Spirit and when we go out to proclaim the good news of his death and resurrection, it is not we who make that preaching effective, but God himself.

So is the devil still out there?  Is he still opposing?  Sure.  But his rule over the nations has been broken and the nations have been handed over to Jesus.  Something happened that the people alive in the first century recognized—something I don’t think a lot of modern Christians are even aware.  We don’t pay enough attention to history.  The Greek philosopher Plutarch noticed it and wrote a treatise, trying to explain why the gods of the Greeks suddenly went silent in the First Century—their oracles ceased to speak anymore.  Athanasius wrote about the same phenomenon in his treatise On the Incarnation of the Word of God—but, of course, he knew the answer.  It was Jesus.  The power of the devil to deceive the nations was broken.  The satan is still at work, but his kingdom has been taken from him and given to Jesus and the progress of the gospel means for him an ever-shrinking circle of influence.

I think this expectation of perfection cuts the other way too.  We often think that in this age, either the Church itself should be perfected or that our mission should be one of unimpeded advance, always onward and upward.  The reality is that the Church is not perfect—often far from it—and the advance of the gospel is not always linear.  There was time in the early centuries of the Church that Eastern Christendom extended from the Middle East across central Asia and all the way to the frontiers of China.  Now, apart from small pockets here and there, Christians are almost unheard of in those lands.  The same goes for North Africa.  And, of course, Europe was the seat of Christendom for fifteen-hundred years, but is now almost entirely secular.  And here in North America we don’t seem far behind that same curve.  The gospel advances in some parts of the world, but contracts in others.  Why?  Well, the Church functions much as Israel did.  Even though we manifest the kingdom of God in the world, we are not perfect.  The difference between the old Israel and the new is that we are united to Jesus and empowered by the Spirit.  But, like Israel, the Lord will accomplish his work through us, perfect or not, and in the process he will not only accomplish the mission of gospel spread, but of the purification of his Church.  Think, for example, of Christian conquistadors violently invading Meso-America in search of gold.  It’s hardly the Church at her best hour, and yet the Lord used their actions to bring judgement on the Aztecs and an end to their evil regime of idolatry and human sacrifice—not unlike the pagan nations bring down Rome in Revelation 18 and 19.  The gospel, however imperfectly, advanced and transformed a new part of the world and its people.  Eventually the Lord’s rebuke fell on those who had murdered and plundered in his name.  The Lord disciplines and prunes his church and continues to use her to accomplish his purposes, even in her ugliest hours—just as he did Israel.  He takes us into periods of exile, just as he did Israel, because his goal is to make us ever purer.  Brothers and Sisters, consider that if Jesus’ gospel mission required a perfect Church, it would have been doomed to failure from the start.  We accomplish our mission even as the Lord accomplishes his mission in us.

But, then, why does John say that at the end of this millennial age the satan must be released for a little while?  I think it fits with the way God works when he comes in judgement.  He allows those who oppose him to condemn themselves.  And, too, as at the cross and in the first century setting into which John was writing, God allows evil to rise to its full height, in order to strike it down in defeat.  When the Lord’s judgement comes to a person or to a people—or even the devil himself—it comes in such a way that there is never any doubt of its justness and it is always complete.

Meanwhile, John writes in verse 4, the martyrs rule with Jesus in the heavenly court.  John sees those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus.  We know he’s talking specifically about those brothers and sisters to whom he wrote, those who were about to face a time of tribulation and to die for their faith, because he writes that these are they that refused the mark of the beast—who refused to bow to the emperor or to participate in his cult.  John says that they were raised—resurrected—to reign with Jesus throughout the thousand years.  We might be tempted to pass over this quickly, but it’s the heart of what John’s been getting at all along and it’s why he wrote this book to those churches.  Think back to those seven letters he wrote to them.  He exhorted them to stand firm and to conquer because a time of persecution was coming.  To the Christians in Smyrna he wrote, “The one who conquers will not be hurt by the second death” (2:11).  It’s the same thing he promises here: “Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power”.  Now he sees them vindicated.  These are the martyrs who “conquered the beast and its image and the number of its name”.  And we see them fulfilling the role of redeemed humanity—back to the vocation that Adam rejected: they’ve been made priests of God and of Christ, seated on thrones to reign with him.

This, John says, is the “first resurrection”.  There will be another, but this first resurrection is for the martyrs who shared in the sufferings of Jesus at the turning of the ages.  They stand in a unique position amongst the saints.  John writes that the rest of the dead will have to wait until the thousands years are complete—until Jesus and his Church have completed their mission.  What does that mean for the rest of us?  Scripture says very little about the state we are in between death and our eventual resurrection.  That hasn’t stopped us from latching onto passages that have little or nothing to do with this subject and forcing them to say things they don’t—and then becoming very dogmatic about our conclusions.  Scripture says little about this intermediate state simply because it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things.  What we can know for certain—and we’ll see this in the coming chapters of Revelation—is that when the time is right—when Jesus has put every last enemy under his feet—the Lord will raise us just as he has Jesus and the martyrs, and he will restore to us what we lost when Adam sinned.  If we are in Jesus, then we share in his life and in his inheritance.  What belongs to him belongs to us!  In the meantime we know that the Lord does not forget us.  Those martyrs John saw in his vision, restored to their role of priesthood, are our assurance of that.  What he has done for them he will just as surely do for us.

Now, what should you take home from all of this today?  Brothers and Sisters, remember where we’ve come from and look forward to where we’re going.  John’s vision gives us needed and encouraging perspective.  I’ve said before, I think at present the Lord is taking the Church in the West into a time of exile.  Christendom went wrong.  Consider those conquistadors slaughtering under the banner of the cross or the carnage Christians nations wrought on each other in the First World War.  Even as the North American church has engaged in gospel mission as in no other time in history, our churches have become absorbed by the anti-gospel philosophies of our day—by consumerism, by materialism, by individualism.  We are imperfect vessels.  The Lord graciously uses us, but like Israel of old, we need reformation—and if we do not reform willingly, the Lord will discipline us.  He will either remove our lampstand or he will purify us that our lamp will one day shine brightly.  These times are discouraging for many.  At the very least we are culturally out of favour.  Opposition is growing.  We may face actual persecution in our lifetimes.  Brothers and Sisters, stand firm.  Jesus and his kingdom are worth it.  Our first parents in the faith stood firm until death and now sit with Jesus in the heavenlies, coheirs and sovereigns over this kingdom.  And for all its imperfections, what has been built by their heirs here on earth, this kingdom pushing the devil ever away, building churches in corners of the earth where once he reigned supreme, robbing him of his territory, ought to fill us with hope and faith for the future.  Dear Friends, the future belongs to Jesus and he has given us the privilege to have a part in making it so.  He has chosen us, he has called us, he has washed us clean with his own blood and filled us with his Spirit and he has not done so in vain.  So go out in peace to love and to serve the Lord.  To proclaim his good news.  To spread his kingdom until it fills the earth.  For Christ has died.  Christ is risen.  Christ will come again.

Let’s pray: O God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as surpass our understanding: Pour into our hearts such love towards you, that we, loving you above all things, may obtain your promises, which exceed all that we can desire; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

[1] See Andrew Perriman, The Coming of the Son of Man (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2005), 224ff.