Revelation 14:1-5

September 20, 2020

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

The sermon starts around 17:35 in the audio file.

Or, Let the Redeemed of the Lord Sing So

Our study through the Apocalypse, which, you’ll remember is a word that means “unveiling,” keeps giving us opportunities to be blessed. Those who read and hear and keep the words of the prophecy will be blessed, so says John at both bookends (Revelation 1:3; 22:7). Our pace, approximately a paragraph at a time, is like a brisk walk but not so fast that we’re skipping over things. This is pastoral strategery.

One principle of Bible reading, study, and preaching, that I don’t say out loud much these days is that for every text there is one interpretation with many possible applications. Some of you are blessed to own that principle as if it was a coating over every page of your Bible; you can’t read otherwise. Some of you perhaps have never heard it before.

The interpretation is what it means. There was an original author, moved by the Divine Author, writing to an original audience. The author intended a meaning for his readers to understand. We can acknowledge that none of us might know the correct meaning; being wrong takes barely any effort. We can also acknowledge that some meanings are debatable, as in, there’s evidence for a variety of meanings. Many of those debates can be had in Christian charity. But humility, toward the text and toward one another, does not mean we give up the conviction that the meaning is there, even if we’re ignorant about it.

A number of the 16th century Reformers gave their lives translating the Bible into the common language so that non-scholars could read the Bible for themselves. I was reminded this past week that even the New Testament was written in the common language, Koine Greek; wherever Paul preached he could be understood. The Greek NT isn’t a unique Holy Ghost mountain-top language that waits for academics to climb up to it. Now that we all have our own copies of God’s Word, what a privilege, and a privilege we’re to steward.

I’m moving us through the book of Revelation and asking everyone to consider the meaning. My “rules” are that I wouldn’t demean anyone by assuming what I’m trying to prove with a comment like “If you just read your Bible.” We’re reading it together, asking questions and making observations. My other rule is that I would hardly use the word “literal.” It’s tiresome, and typically patronizing. And, also, I don’t think that means that all the images mean symbols.

We just finished reading about the unholy trinity of the dragon, the sea-beast, and the earth-beast in chapters 12-13. This is satan, the embodied antichrist, and his false prophet. We had heard the sixth trumpet blow, but before the seventh trumpet blows and the seven judgment bowls are dumped over, John has seen these visions that portray why the sinfulness and depravity and spiritual conflict is so awful. It’s part of a long war, with grudges as petty as they are old.

Revelation 13 showed the final grasps for power by the ancient serpent and his successful, albeit temporary, dominion. He is praised for about as long as Trump has been president, three and a half years. The saints are outnumbered and outcast. But the saints still conquer with the Lamb.

Chapter 14 reminds us of the commitment of those who stand with the Lamb, who endure, who love not their lives to death (as in 12:11). We see some of them in this chapter, though there is application for all of us.

THE SEALED (verse 1)

Here is another vision, another “And I saw,” and this is much more encouraging than the previous.

**“Then I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads.” (verse 1)

Instead of the dragon standing on the sand (12:18), ant[...]