More Going On Than Meets The Eye Revelation 19:11-16 January 21, 2018 Rev. Dave Benedict

Transcription

1 More Going On Than Meets The Eye Revelation 19:11-16 January 21, 2018 Rev. Dave Benedict In Southwest Montana, on the highway that leads to the north entrance of Yellowstone Park, just an hour or so from my hometown, the canyon of the Yellowstone River opens out into a broad, beautiful little valley. The river slows down and stretches out into deep, lazy pools. The steep canyon walls give way to gentle foothills, dotted with aspen, wild chokecherry trees, and...bomb shelters. Dozens of concrete bunkers, sunk 15 feet deep into the hillside, visible only by their venting stacks, bunkers built in the early 1990's by the followers of Elizabeth Claire Prophet of the new age cult, St. Germaine: Night Angel. Claiming special insight into Biblical prophecy, she determined the Great Apocalypse would come in September of Hundreds of people sold their homes and come to wait out Armageddon in these bunkers. The bunkers are empty now; her disillusioned followers have long since drifted off. The valley looks like itself again. The only winner in the whole thing was the local redi-mix plant. They dumped thousands of tons of concrete into that hillside, paid for by Claire Prophet's followers; people who sold their homes and all their possessions before coming to Montana. We could make a list, couldn't we? Bizarre cults, religious splinter groups, extremists, street corner prophets. The End Is Near! But it's not just cults and wackos. Our culture is expressing its deep anxiety over the future in our movies and literature and art. There is a sense among us that the world is spinning out of control, that we're heading, inevitably, toward some kind of disaster; environmental, or technological, or economic, or military, or cosmic. Maybe not the end of the world, but something which will dramatically redirect the course we're on. This has been going on my entire life, and probably yours. I remember being about four years old so that would be in the mid-1950 s and being taken to a movie that my teen-aged babysitter wanted to see against my mother s wishes. The Fly. This is what happens when nuclear radiation gets loose in our world. Scared me to death. These kinds of movies started showing up as early as 1940, and they haven t gone away. Different threats over the years, but our angst about the future on this planet has been around for years, and it s increasing. In the 40 s there were four apocalyptic movies. This one reflects the fear of yet another war to end all wars.

2 In the 1950 s, 12 of these movies were made. In this classic, the threat is an invasion of body-snatching aliens. The number of apocalyptic films doubled in the 60 s. I saw this one in 7 th grade; science got too ambitious and caused the earth to split apart. In the 70 s, 80 s, and 90 s, our culture seemed satisfied with only 35 end-of-the-world type movies each decade, with our fears centering on natural disasters, nuclear wars, and asteroids smashing into us. But lately, our fears must be intensifying, because way more of these films are being made. Between 2000 and 2009, 64 apocalyptic films appeared, many of them centered on a new fear; the uncontrolled advance of computers and artificial intelligence. And, just in the first seven years of this decade, 73 apocalyptic movies have been made already. What does it say about us, though, that our fears about the end-of-the-world have taken a cynical turn toward dark comedy? I ve used the word apocalyptic to describe these films. That s because it is from the Bible that our culture has appropriated the word and its cataclysmic images to address our fears connected to all the threats that seem to dominate our lives these days. It is only natural that our culture would seize upon the apocalyptic language and imagery of the Bible. Images of cosmic battles, fiery blasts, chaos, death and destruction. Whatever anyone imagines is ahead for us, they can t find any better description of than from the apocalyptic passages of the Bible. But is that what the Bible intends? That s our goal in this series to understand what the Bible teaches us about the future; cosmic things, like where is human history heading and when will Christ return, and very personal things like what happens when I die, will I go through a judgment, and what will heaven be like? We want to sort out what we can know about the future with absolute certainty, what it seems ok to speculate about, and what are we not supposed to speculate about. But. before we can reach a place of clarity like this, we have to remember some basic things about reading our Bibles. Last week, we talked about prophets and the nature of Biblical prophecy. Biblical prophets aren t simply people who predict the future; they are people who speak for God. Everything God directs a prophet to say whether it be words of judgment or rebuke, words of encouragement and hope, or, predictions about the future all of it is considered prophecy by the Bible. And then, the basic message Biblical prophets deliver on behalf of God is Return to Me. Return to lives of faithfulness in our relationship. Even when

3 the Bible predicts future events, it is always in the context of this basic message, Come back to Me. In order to understand our futures through the Bible, we have to let go of our cultural understand of prophets and prophecy as simply predictors and predictions of future events. We have to let the Bible define its prophets and prophecies. That s the first part of the foundation we need to build as we try to understand the The Bible and The Future. Now it s time for the next piece of our foundation. How are we to understand the apocalyptic passage of the Bible that fascinate us so much. What are we to make of the strange, fiery language we find in parts of Scripture, like Daniel, Ezekiel, and of course, the Book of Revelation. In the weeks after becoming a Christian during my junior year of high school, I bought my first Bible. I started with the Book of Revelation, and why not? My Young Life leader talked a lot about the 2 nd Coming of Jesus, and I wanted to get the straight scoop for myself. So, without ever having read another book in the Bible, I opened Revelation and started reading. By the time I got to about chapter 10, with my head spinning, I closed my Bible and didn t open it again for years. Barely a word of it made sense to me, and if that was what reading the Bible was going to be like, forget it. Beasts with 12 heads. Plagues. Lakes of fire and blazing thrones. And language like that is not only in Revelation. Listen to this passage from Ezekiel. Their faces looked like this: Each of the four had the face of a human being, and on the right side each had the face of a lion, and on the left the face of an ox; each also had the face of an eagle. 11 Such were their faces. They each had two wings spreading out upward, each wing touching that of the creature on either side; and each had two other wings covering its body. Ezekiel. Daniel. Isaiah. Even the Gospels quote passages where...the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.. We call Biblical language like this apocalyptic language, and we need to understand it if we re going to have clarity about what the Bible tells regarding the future. Let's start with the word itself; apocalypse. You've heard that word. What does it mean? Doom? Chaos? Cataclysm? That's the idea you get from the way people use it these days. In book and movie titles; as an adjective describing catastrophic events to come. What does it mean?

4 Apocalypse comes from the Greek word apocalypto, meaning to uncover, or to unveil. In the New Testament, it always carries with it the idea of unveiling the things of God. That's probably why our English translations always translate apocalypto with the word revelation. Revelation. Unveiling the things of God. And so, when we open our Bibles to the last book of the New Testament, we are opening the Apocalypsus Ioannoi (e-ah-a-noy), the Apocalypse of John, or, as we would say, the Revelation of John, or just the book of Revelation. So, the word itself doesn't carry any connotation of doom or catastrophe. It just claims to unveil the things of God. In that sense, Jesus, Himself, is an apocalypse, a revelation of God. But the word apocalypse has taken on connotations of things cataclysmic. Probably because of the imagery contained in the book of Revelation. The style in which the Apostle John wrote that book relies heavily on vivid images of a cosmic battle between God and Satan. Vivid is one word. Scary is another. Here's a passage from Revelation 6: I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red, and the stars in the sky fell to earth. This kind of imagery is scattered throughout the Bible. Daniel is loaded with it, like this passage from chapter 7; in my vision at night I looked, and there before me were the four winds of heaven churning up the great sea. Four great beast came up out of the sea. The first was like a lion, and it had the wings of an eagle. I watched until its wings were torn off and it was lifted from the ground so that it stood on two feet like a man, and the heart of a man was given to it. Dreams and visions loaded with vivid metaphors and strange symbols. Apocalyptic language. How are we to understand this kind of writing in our Bibles? This morning, I want to make four observations about the God-breathed apocalyptic writings in the Bible. I hope these observations will help you to understand this style of writing better and to approach it in a healthy way when you read it in your Bibles. The first observation is this: We should approach the Bible's apocalyptic passages with caution. Apocalyptic writing gives us modern readers no end of difficulty. To us, it is a strange writing style, full of metaphors that we don't use in this day and

5 age. But it wasn't always that way. Apocalyptic was a hugely popular style of writing in the years preceding and following the life of Jesus. When passages like the ones we just heard were written, they didn't sound strange to the ears of their audience at all. They recognized the symbols; they knew what the writers intended to communicate. But we don't. Picture rap music. Rap music has its own way of expressing things, am I right? It uses street slang and urban images that most of us more rural people don't use very often or even understand. What is a hood? Or a homey? I'll bet most of us could listen to an entire rap album, even read the lyrics as we listen, and still not get much of it at all. It is a foreign language to us. But any 14-year-old in Philadelphia can translate it with ease. That helps us put the apocalyptic literature of the Bible into perspective. It abounds in images we no longer use, symbols that readers of the 1st century, however, understood quite well. If we want to understand the meaning God intended us to receive when He inspired these apocalyptic passages as scripture, our first task is to try to understand what they meant to their original audience. We can't just go to the Bible and start squeezing contemporary meanings out of each symbol. Gog is Russia and the Great Harlot is the United Nations". If we approach these passages like that, we'll join a long line of people, spanning church history, who have brought other people to hillsides to await Christ's return, only to do some major backpedaling when their particular scheme didn't work out. We shouldn t just jump into assigning contemporary meanings to these passages. We should approach apocalyptic passages with caution. The second observation I'd like to make is this: To its original audience, apocalyptic writing had a well understood objective. It was written to people experiencing hardship and oppression, encouraging them to lift their eyes from their difficulties and take a broader, more long term perspective; God is at work. The wild cosmic symbols and catastrophic events helped create a sense that there is more going on in the events of history than meets the eye. This should be our biggest take-away from the apocalyptic passages in our Bibles: There is more going on in this world than meets the eye. God is at work! For several hundred years on either side of Christ's lifetime, Jews were a terribly oppressed people. Persians. Greeks. Romans. Brutal occupation armies; vulgar civil policies which ran roughshod over their religious practices. And it was during this time that apocalyptic writing flourished.

6 "Hang on", it said to them. "Don't despair. Have hope. God has not abandoned you. He is at work in what seems to be the chaos of history. Yes, there is a struggle, but God is in control. Look! Here is a picture of the End; God wins." That is still the basic message of the apocalyptic passages in the Bible. God is in control! It has spoken that way to each generation, and it speaks to us that way now. We are experiencing extreme tension these days; terrorism, rouge nations, civil wars, refugees, global warming, future shock. What a list we could make. But here s what the God-breathed words of the apocalyptic passages in our Bible say to us: Hang on. Don't despair. God is still at work, even if we have lost sight of Him in our mountain of problems. He is the Lord of history; He's moving our history toward a climax that He, alone, has chosen. Live in hope! We mustn't lose the basic message of apocalyptic writing by looking to them only for dates and time tables or intricate interpretation schemes. The third observation is this: These passages are not just examples of a type of literature written long ago. They are the prophetic Word of God. These passages are prophecy. That means they speak for God. And it means they are far more than simply predictions, even if they do predict the future, however broadly. We shouldn't misuse them; but neither should we ignore them. We should struggle to live under their meaning just as we do with passages like the Sermon on the Mount. We are hard working people with our feet firmly on the ground. We're not prone to making wild speculations about the end of the world. But we are vulnerable to making the opposite mistake. We are likely to ignore the apocalyptic parts of the Bible rather than risk the possibility of getting carried away by them. They are hard to understand; they require some imagination; they make us look foolish to the world. So, we just don't pay much attention to them when we read our Bibles. But apocalyptic passages unveil the things of God. We need their message. We need to have our eyes lifted, too; lifted above the depressing headlines and very real concerns that dominate our lives. We need to remember that Jesus is the Lord of history, that even if the economy bottoms out, even if weather patterns change, even if nuclear sabers are rattling again, we need to remember that God is at work, moving history toward a great day of salvation, for us and for all people who put their hope in Him.

7 And the last observation I propose is this: Apocalyptic passages, like those in Daniel and Revelation, do unveil the future. They may not give us the kind of detail we re looking for, but they do give us an accurate picture of where history is headed. Jesus Christ will return, in glory, to human history. There will be a great judgment of all men and women. There will be a final battle between God and Satan, with Satan and all his forces utterly defeated and destroyed. There will be a new heaven and a new earth. God's people will spend eternity with Him in Paradise. These are Biblical certainties. No speculation is required. We don't know what it will look like. We don't know how it will all happen. We don't know when it will happen. We know it will happen. The whole witness of scripture tells us so. And Jesus will be Lord of all. We don't need a complicated interpretation scheme to understand what John was saying in our text from Revelation 19. I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. His eyes are like blazing crowns. He has a name written on him that on one but he himself knows. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood and his name is the Word of God. The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords. That is where history is headed. So, are the apocalyptic writings in the Bible about doom, chaos, catastrophe? No, they are about hope. Does the Bible predict that the world will come to a fiery end on this day or that? No. When the Great Apocalypse will come is not known to anyone but the Father; not even Jesus knew the date. And when the Great Apocalypse does come, it will not be a fiery or cataclysmic end to things; it will be the final revelation, the final unveiling of Jesus, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. If we have placed our hope in Him, we have nothing to fear, and everything to hope for.