Speaker 1: Welcome to the CommonsCast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: We are now in the home stretch of our series in the book in Revelation. We're halfway through, and we're really getting into some of the weird stuff now. Now, this series is based on my book, Upside Down Apocalypse, but what has been really fun is sharing this series with our teaching team here at Commons. Scott and Bobby have been lending their voices and their perspectives to the conversation. And last week, it was Bobby that walked us through the Riders of the Apocalypse.
And this is actually one of my favorite parts of Revelation. Not just because it's Halloween and I'm into scary horses, but also because this is just a really imaginative part of the story. And there's a rich history of artists depicting this scene. Bobby showed us one of her favorites last week, a really cool woodcut. Here's one of my favorites.
This is Vaznetsov's painting of the horsemen. There's one problem here with this. Up at the top, Avas Netsav has the lamb overlooking the scene as if these horsemen of the apocalypse are agents of Jesus carrying out his terrible will in the world. And as Bobby showed us last week, that is not the point of this section in Revelation. If you look closely at the depiction of each of these riders, you start to see that they actually represent the weakness of what empire promises us.
The first rider is a bohemian, and that's not a Roman image. That's not how Rome waged war. That's an image drawn from the tribes that warred with Rome and attacked their borders from the outside, in particular, the Parthians. The second rider is given a sword, but we're told it's not to wage war, it's to take peace. And one of the claims of the Pax Romana, the Roman Empire was that we brought peace to the world.
Except that the way that Rome did that was through the sword. You accept our peace or we kill you. Problem is, if that's the way you achieve peace, what happens when the sword is taken away? Have you really created any peace? The third rider has scales and we're told that cost of staples like bread and wheat and barley have gone through the roof and relative luxuries like oil and wine remain cheap and plentiful.
This is about boom and bust And the way that the wealthy can continue in luxury and opulence even while economic realities can crush those who are just scraping by. And then finally, we get this rider that represents sickness and death and wild animal attacks. And the idea here is that empire promises a lot. Rome makes grandiose claims. But at the end of the day, the emperor really can't save us from what scares us the most which is mortality.
The implication here is not that the lamb is sending these riders into the world to destroy the world. The implication is that we have put our trust in the wrong places. And so as the fifth and then the sixth seals are opened, we get more and more scared of what's coming. We realize that we have trusted our roams instead of God, and we cower in fear expecting the worst. But then there's a surprise.
John hears about a tiny remnant saved from retribution, 12,000 from each of the tribes of Israel, and maybe that's the best that he can hope for. Right? Maybe that's what you've been taught. Salvation is about squeaking through by the skin of your teeth. Except that when John turns that's not what he sees at all.
It's not 144,000. It's not just from the tribes of Israel. It's an uncountable number drawn from every tribe and every nation and every language and all of them are worshiping the lamb. And John has done this to us twice now. Remember, I heard about the lion of the tribe of Judah, a strong man leader, military warrior that can save us.
But then I turned and what I saw was a lamb looking as if it had been slain. Remember that? Well, that's not a coincidence, it's a motif or it's a meme if you will. John is saying, you've heard this, you've been taught these things, I know you've been led to accept a particular image of God, but it's not true. God is not a warrior, God is self giving love.
Salvation is not tiny, it is bigger than you can possibly imagine. In fact, everything you have heard about God pales in comparison to what you see in the grace of Jesus. John is building up one image and then subverting it with something different. And today, he's gonna do it all again. So, let's pray.
God of unexpected outcomes, who calls us not to despair, but to imaginative regeneration. Might we begin to see today all of the ways that you are calling us, guiding us, helping us toward new ways to see our world and our lives. Might we trust that where we are fearful, you are hopeful. That where we are pessimistic, you are divine optimism. And so where we are lacking courage or vision or compassion or clarity today, we ask that your spirit be present to each of us with calm, peace, and renewed possibility.
That presence in our lives then translate into the ways that we carry ourselves with grace and peace for everyone we encounter. May the apocalypse of your revealing make us kind and compassionate and ready to participate alongside you in the healing of this world. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen. Okay.
Today, we move from the seven seals to the seven trumpets. And we are going to make our way through beginning at the ending, parallels everywhere, the problem with the temple and seeing the big picture. But first, at this point, we already know how this is gonna end, don't we? Right? I have a two year old at home and I am pretty sure that her first word was again.
As in whatever we are playing, do it again, and again, and again, and again. The thing about two year olds is they never get tired of the same thing until they absolutely get tired of the same thing and want to move on to the next thing. But again, again, again, very common in our house. By the way, favorite word right now is funny. As in every time she does something, she turns around and asks funny.
And this is very cute, but she has also understand that this is a hack to the whole system in our house. So when she does something that she knows she's not supposed to be doing, she preemptively turns and asks, funny? And she has absolutely figured out that this will make me smile even as I respond not funny, and, everything goes up in smoke after that. So thing is, once you're past two, again, again, again, that gets a little tired. Am I right?
And we are probably all starting to catch on to John's tricks by now. We've seen John employ exactly the same trick for two weeks in a row. We've seen him do this in the throne room. We saw him do it in the seals. I heard about one thing, something that speaks to our expectation and religious upbringing.
I heard about God as a divine warrior. I heard about salvation as a tiny remnant, but then I turned and I saw what is revealed in Jesus. God as self giving love like a lamb slain, salvation as bigger than anyone expected, one that crosses boundaries obliterating our bias of who is in. So that's John's MO, his modus operandi. Build up our expectations, turn them upside down.
The problem is, for me, it's getting a little harder to surprise you with that at this point in the series. So let's try something a little different today. Let's start at the end. And let's see what happens at the end of the trumpets. This is Revelation chapter 11 starting in verse 15.
The seventh angel sounded his trumpet and there were loud voices in heaven which said, the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and His Messiah and He will reign forever and ever. And the 24 elders who were seated on their thrones fell on their faces and worshipped God, saying, we give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the one who is and who was, because you have taken your great power and begun to reign. Do you remember back at the start of Revelation, God was called the one who is and who was and who is to come. We don't need that last part anymore. God is now reigning the world.
That means we've reached the end of the story. That means next week we're gonna start all over again. Right? But the crowd keeps singing here saying, the nations were angry and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead and rewarding your servants.
Your prophets and your people who revere your name both great and small and for destroying those who destroy the earth. So that's how the trumpets end in Revelation 11 verses 15 to 18. We're gonna talk about how we get there today, but a couple things here to note. The nations were angry and your wrath has come. I mean that sounds scary, right?
And in a sense it is. But think about this, the whole exercise with the horsemen was about showing us how impotent our empires and our nations really are. Right? Our misplaced trust in government has been exposed and now we hear that God's wrath has come, but where is that wrath directed in Revelation? According to John, it is directed at that which destroys God's earth.
So salvation is the healing of the cosmos. We already knew that from the start when we looked at Isaiah, but the renewing of the world also means the end of destruction. So destruction is not what awaits you and I and creation in Revelation. Destruction is what awaits destruction in Revelation. And that is incredibly important for all of us to hold onto as we read through these images.
Still, that's for another week. First, we have to figure out how the trumpets can get us here to God's kingdom on the earth. And perhaps because we already know how this scene is going to end, the trumpets have become very fertile ground for what we call futurist readings of Revelation. And what I mean by futurist is attempts to map John's vision onto historical events. The idea being that John is writing down a vision of the future when he writes Revelation.
Now, we've already established that Revelation is illustrative and not predictive. That was one of our rules for reading Revelation. But, let's talk about that for a second. Why? Well, the first reason is when we've already seen a couple times now.
Images that on first glance seem wild and speculative and might immediately make us think of a vision to predict the future in context are actually quite rooted in a particular time and place. We saw that with the images related to the emperor Domitian in the throne room scene. And we saw it again with the riders of the apocalypse, images that confront the Roman Empire. Images that seem very strange actually made a lot of sense to an ancient audience. And think about it this way, if I came up to you after the service and I said, hey, the bears destroyed the eagles this week.
You would probably jump to football in your mind even if you're not a big sports fan. Because that's the context where that sentence makes the most sense in our world. Now the fact that the Bears are gonna beat the Eagles might seem like a stretch right now because let's be honest, the bears have not had a legitimate quarterback in a very long time. But I mean you get the point with the illustration. It's pretty unlikely that you're going to hear me say that and immediately be alarmed about an outbreak of violence at the Calgary Zoo.
We don't think that. At the same time, it's not the cold war anymore, but Russia is resurgent. And you're also still probably not going to immediately think of a conflict between The USA and Russia even though eagles and bears are used in that context as well. Right? So you recognize that I'm using those terms metaphorically.
You have several common interpretive options that are available to you From the context and the tone and the casual nature of my comment, you know what I'm talking about. There's not much confusion there. However, if someone was to come along a thousand years later and somehow get a hold of the manuscript for this sermon and hear me talking about bears fighting eagles, things might not actually be so clear to them. So this is our problem with a futurist reading without a lot of study. We just simply don't understand the context for these images well enough to make assumptions about them.
Which brings up a second problem, ego. Oh, I get it. All of us, we all like to believe that we live at the center of history, the hinge of history. Unfortunately, that is probably unlikely. The book of Revelation was written some two thousand years ago now.
I think we can all admit that it would be a pretty big coincidence that you and I just happened to live at the very moment that John was imagining all those years ago. So more than just bad exegesis, there's arrogance at play when we assume that we are the ones this book was written for. However, that has not stopped anyone for two thousand years now from placing the trumpets in history. Even Isaac Newton, yes, the guy who discovered gravity, tried his hand at interpreting revelation. He wrote a whole book about revelation in fact.
And just like today's prognosticators, Isaac Newton found a way to point to all of the trumpets in his lifetime just the same way that people do today. So just for a bit of fun here, let me give you an example of how a futurist reading of the trumpets might look, something like what you might find in the Left Behind series. Revelation eight seven. The first angel sounded his trumpet and there came hail and fire mixed with blood and it was hurled down on the earth. A third of the earth was burned up.
This is the first world war, one might say. Never before had humanity experienced the kind of global sustained terrible war, the kind of damage was wrought across huge swaths of the earth. The second angel sounded his trumpet and something like a huge mountain all ablaze was thrown into the sea. This time we've got the second world war. Now specifically, atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mushroom clouds looking like mountains thrown into the sea, unprecedented destruction.
A third angel sounded his trumpet and a great star blazing like a torch fell from the sky. A third of the waters turned bitter and many people died from the contaminated water. I mean, this must be Chernobyl. It's a nuclear meltdown. It's radiation poisoning seeping out into the water table making people sick.
Fourth angel sounded his trumpet and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon, a third of the stars went dark so that a third of the sky turned black. Remember the Iraq war? Remember all those oil wells that were set on fire and huge plumes of black smoke choked at the sky? We've never seen anything like that, but John did. When the fifth angel sounded his trumpet, I saw locusts that looked like horses prepared for battle.
On their heads, they wore something like crowns of gold and their faces resembled humans. They had tails with stingers like scorpions and the power to torment people. I mean this must have been what an attack helicopter looked like to an ancient reader. Crowns of gold are spinning rotors, human faces, those gotta be pilots. Tails with stingers, that's missiles.
This must be a vision of the war on terror. All of those small strikes on remote outposts throughout Afghanistan. Finally, the sixth angel sounded his trumpet and I saw in my vision horses and riders that looked like this. Their breastplates were fiery red, dark blue, and yellow as sulfur. The heads of the horses resembled the heads of lions and out of their mouths came fire, smoke, and sulfur.
Gotta be tanks. Red and yellow, maybe this is China reserting themselves in the world and he mentions blue, perhaps an alliance with Russia against the West. That must be what John is thinking about. But do you see how malleable these images are? I mean, I just found somewhat believable parallels for all of them just in my lifetime.
And remember, Isaac Newton did the same thing way back in the seventeenth century. And if that's the case, that these images can mean almost anything we want them to, maybe that's actually the point. That John is not predicting the future, John is pointing to seasons of instability, fear, and anxiety that always seem to be relevant regardless of our lives and where we live. And I would argue that actually gets made clear in the seventh trumpet. Because just before the final trumpet sounds, John says that two witnesses appear in the temple of God.
Now, what's the problem with placing that in history? Well, the problem is there hasn't been a temple since seventy AD when the Romans destroyed it. In fact, there can't be a temple because the site of the temple is currently occupied by the Dome Of The Rock which is a Muslim holy site. This is why in certain Christian circles, there will always be speculation about Israel and control of Palestine and the expulsion of Muslim worshipers because if you're looking for historical events, Trumpet 7 needs a clean site for the construction of a new temple. But is there another option available to us?
Well, you ask me, I think John has already given us the answer. Because the temple of God in John's mind is not the Jewish temple at all. That's already been destroyed by the time that John is writing in the eighties of the first century. The temple for John is us. In fact, way back at the start of Revelation, John wrote, the one who is victorious, I will make a pillar in the temple of my God.
Never again will they leave it. I will write on them the name of my God and the name of the city of my God, the new Jerusalem which is coming down out of heaven from God. So the end game for John is not a rebuilt temple on earth. It's not the control of a particular city, it is the kingdom of heaven. In fact, explicitly in Revelation 21, John says that in this new Jerusalem, there will be no temple because the temple is now the people of God.
That's exactly the same idea that Paul has in first Corinthians when he says, your body is the temple God resides in. So who then are the witnesses that appear in the temple? Well, John says that they are like the two olive trees from Zechariah. Fiery words come from their mouths like Jeremiah. They have the power to stop it raining and they prophecy for exactly three and a half years like Elijah did.
They turn water to blood like Moses. Eventually, they give their lives for the truth and they place their hope in resurrection like Jesus. And when they are indeed resurrected, John says that the breath of life from God enters in them just like Ezekiel's vision which draws us all the way back to the spirit of creation. In John's mind, the temple is not a building, it is the community of God. And the witnesses are not individuals, they represent the prophetic witness that has kept the people of God moving forward steadily toward what is eventually revealed about God in Jesus.
As the scholar Craig Coaster says, they are a collage of the witness, the faithful witness that has guided God's people throughout history. But, if we're not looking for historical moments anymore, if we understand these metaphorically, now maybe we can start to put the whole story together. So let's go back, all the way back to Revelation six nine. I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. And they called out in a loud voice, how long sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?
Now this is a fair question. Right? If I had been murdered for my faith, this is what I would be asking when I saw God. God, when are you gonna get the bad guys and make them pay? Right?
Well, in Revelation eight three, we find out. An angel who had a golden censor came and stood at the altar, And he was given much incense to offer and with the prayers of all God's people on the golden altar in front of the throne. The smoke of the incense together with the prayers of God's people went up from God from the angel's hand. And the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar and hurled it at the earth. There came peals of thunder, rumblings, flashings of lightning and an earthquake.
So, the martyrs call for vengeance, their prayers come up before God, and those prayers are then hurled at the earth just like they asked for. In fact, here we read about rumblings and peals of thunder, flashes of lightning, that is exactly the same language from the throne room scene where we expected God to look like the emperor Domitian except this time we get to see it. And so chapters eight and nine recount all of these trumpets, these tribulations, all of these terrible things we spent time speculating about just a couple minutes ago. Except, at the end of all those trumpets, this is what we read. That the rest of mankind, those who were not killed by the plagues, still did not repent of the works of their hands.
They did not stop worshiping demons and idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone, and wood, Idols that cannot see or hear or walk. Nor did they repent of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality, or their thefts. In other words, none of it worked. Six trumpets, terrible tribulations, we asked for vengeance, God did it our way and it's a bust. So next, this happens.
Then I saw another mighty angel coming down from heaven. He was robed in a cloud with a rainbow above his head. His face was like the sun and his legs were like the fiery pillars. He was holding a little scroll which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land.
He gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion. When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke. And this is it. Right? The final trumpet?
The end of the world? Here's the lion that we missed out on a few chapters before. When the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write when I heard a voice from heaven say, stop. Seal up what the seven thunders have said, do not write it down. In fact, is told to take the scroll from the hand of the angel to eat it, that it will taste sweet in honey and in his mouth and it will turn bitter in his stomach as if to say vengeance is delicious when we're the ones asking for it.
But it will eat you up from the inside once you give into it. So instead, John is told that with the seventh trumpet, it is now time for the mystery of God to be accomplished. This is where our faithful witnesses appear in the temple. They represent the people of God following the way of Jesus. They are attacked and killed like Jesus, and yet they remain nonviolent and faithful like Jesus.
They trust God, and they are resurrected and taken up into heaven just like Jesus. And at that moment, the final trumpet sounds, evil is judged and the kingdoms of the earth become the kingdom of heaven. But do you see what John is doing here? He's done it again. This whole section is not a snapshot of history, it's a choose your own adventure.
God is saying to the faithful, to the martyrs, to the church, to us, do you really understand the way of the lamb? Because yes, absolutely, sometimes it feels good to dream about revenge and to call for vengeance, to believe that righteous violence can right the world, but trust me, it won't work. I could do it your way. I could scorch the earth. I could blot out the sun.
I could toss mountains into seas and create terrible monsters, but that won't change anything. Because the mystery of the universe, the mystery of God's purpose is that it is only the faithful witness of the way, the nonviolent, self giving, demonstrable love of Jesus embodied in community then it can accomplish God's purpose in the world. God isn't interested in retribution. God is interested in transformation. God isn't interested in vengeance.
God is interested in healing things. And that requires something completely new. See, this is why you shouldn't be looking for the trumpets in history. They haven't happened and they won't ever happen. Not as long as God is in control.
Because the trumpets are an example of our malformed imagination for revenge. Now set against the mysterious transformative example of Jesus embodied in communities that do our best to live from an alternative story, one that is grounded in the peace of Jesus. And so just like John did in the throne room, just like he did in the ceilings, he's done it to us again. He builds up a scene based on our expectation and our desire for revenge only to say, stop. Don't write it down.
Don't go down that road. Don't forsake the way that is Jesus because it won't work anyway. See, for all of its wild imagery and its bizarre images to interpret, Revelation is actually practical theology reminding us that to be Christian is a lot more than just memorizing ideas about God. It is actually about allowing what is revealed in Jesus to fundamentally reshape our imagination of the world and to inform our actions in the world. To slowly come to truly trust that grace is always stronger than revenge.
And that there are always two paths open to us, but only one that leads us to Jesus. Let's pray. God of grace, for all of those times when we have become fascinated by revenge, thinking that vengeance is the way to right the world, that we can violently impose your imagination on others in an attempt to bring your kingdom to earth, might we slowly, steadily be changed by the lamb who shows us that there is an alternative way in the world. One that is not about domination, one that is not about manipulation or fear or coercion, one that doesn't try to pummel people into the path, but instead invites them with grace and peace that demonstrates the faithful witness over and over again as long as it needs to be faithfully living out your story in the world. And that when we can do that, actually live your way and embody your peace, We can actually contribute in some small way to your reign, your kingdom, your city of Jerusalem here on earth.
Full of grace and peace and welcome for anyone that might come. May our choices this week, this month, this year reflect this new imagination for how the world is saved and how you invite us to be part of that story. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray. Amen.