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A literary approach to Revelation Chapters 8-11
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
This evening, we have hit the halfway point, and we are now on the home stretch of Revelation. And I will mention here that if you have missed any of the weeks so far, then you can find our podcast in iTunes, or you can jump on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/commonschurch, because we are building each week as we go. And so if you have time and you missed a week, then by all means go back and avail yourself of that. But if you remember all the way back to the opening of this series, one of the things that I talked about was the concentric circles of Hebrew prophecy. This is how revelation unfolds for us in cycles and repetitions.
Speaker 1:It's not a linear progression. And probably you're already seeing that as we walk our way through the text here. John builds up an image bit by bit, but then just as we get to the climax of the scene, he pulls the rug out from under us. That's the nature of the genre of apocalipsis. The revealing only comes once the writer has prepared us to see things in a new way.
Speaker 1:And so then the revealing comes. And so last week, we talked about not getting bogged down in the middle. So when you read, don't stop. Don't let despair get the better of you as you read. Because if that happens and you're starting to get worried, and you start to lose hope when you read the letter of our letter of Revelation, then I promise you, you are exactly where John wants you to be.
Speaker 1:So that on the very next page, he can show you just how good and gracious and loving and self sacrificing our God really is. That's what revelation is all about. It's building you up, taking you to these places you don't expect to go, and then pulling the rug out from you to reveal God's grace in a new way. And it happens over and over again in these different cycles. And so by now, we should be getting used to John's formula.
Speaker 1:Last week, he set us up with six seals. And for six seals, things get worse and worse. Our world falls apart, and we are implicated in the injustice of it all. But then, just when we expect the seventh seal to be opened and the wrath and retribution of God to be poured out, the movement is interrupted by an image of grace and salvation so great it defies description. So there's a multitude so great it count be counted, and they are saved.
Speaker 1:Their robes are washed white in the blood of the lamb. That's an image that's not supposed to make sense. You don't get white robes by dipping them in blood. It's as if John is saying grace is too big for your imagination. And so then when the final seventh seal is opened, this is what we read.
Speaker 1:That there was silence in heaven for about half an hour. And so this is how the scene of the four horsemen of the apocalypse ends. Not destruction, not pain, but grace, goodness, and a chance to breathe for a moment. It's almost like John is saying, okay. We've got to the end of a cycle.
Speaker 1:Now pause here. Breathe. Reflect on what you've learned. Don't stop in the middle. Don't stop at seal one or two or three or four or five or six.
Speaker 1:You've gotta get through to the end. But now that you're here, stop, reflect, catch your breath for a moment. Because there's safety and there's security and there's contemplation here. Now when we get to the end of each scene though, and and we cycle through, we know that John is about to send us back into the mire. And so last week, we finished with our pause.
Speaker 1:We all caught our breath for seven days, and now we realize that John is about to throw us back into the mix. And so this week, we begin with the seven trumpets. And this is the final scene in the larger second cycle that we talked about at the start of the series. First cycle is the level of the church and individual Christians. The second cycle is the level of nations, politics, and economies.
Speaker 1:That's what we're ending today. Third cycle that starts next week is the level of the nature of evil itself, and how does God redeem and fix that. So here's where we are. The end of the second cycle, seven trumpets. So let's pray, and then we'll dive into this section here.
Speaker 1:God, today, we wrestle with a world that is caught in the midst of so much confusion and anger and often violence that we sometimes begin to think this is reality. That this is what we were made for, and that this is our natural state. Now, we hear stories of our Christian brothers and sisters abducted, beheaded, and murdered. Now, we see nations at war with each other. We see politicians at each other's throats.
Speaker 1:And we feel ourselves at times pulled into this climate of anger. And at times, we have fallen so low as to look for you in the midst of that darkness. To believe that pain and destruction could be part of your plan. That vengeance and wrath somehow define your love for us and not the other way around. And yet even in our weakest moments, we find ourselves drawn back to your word, where we search, and we wrestle, and we study so that we can ask your spirit to help us understand.
Speaker 1:We long to not only see grace and peace in our hearts, but in our attitudes and our approaches and in our fundamental posture towards the world. Because we trust that as we read, we see that this is your posture. And this is your heart, and this is your world that you would give everything to redeem and fix and heal. And so tonight, as we look out onto our world and as we gather to look into your word, we ask that you would help us to see the grace and peace of Jesus staring back at us. Inviting us to be transformed into witnesses who would tell your story well.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay. Once again, unsurprisingly, we have a lot of ground to cover today. We are gonna try to cover chapters eight, nine, ten, and eleven of the book of Revelation.
Speaker 1:So let's get going. And rather than try to surprise you with where John ends one more time, because I feel like that trick is gonna get old if I do it every week, I wanna begin tonight by actually starting at the ending. And so I'm gonna read from Revelation chapter 11 starting in verse 15, and this is where the scene of the seven trumpets ends. When the seventh angel sounded his trumpet and remember, if you start a scene that says there are seven trumpets, do not stop until you get to the seventh one. So 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.
Speaker 1:And when the 24 elders who were seated on their thrones before God fell on their faces, they worshiped God saying, we give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the one who is and who was. And I wanna pause here for just a second because, do you remember back in chapter one? John calls God the one who is and who was and who is to come. So why is God here only the one who is and or the one who is and who was? It's because this is an image of God come.
Speaker 1:This is the end of the story right here. See, this is the end of Revelation right here in chapter 11. It's the end of a cycle. Now chapter 12, we're gonna start at the beginning all over again, and we are gonna work our way through to the end of the story in chapter 22 again. But chapter 11 is the end of a cycle, and so we are seeing God's kingdom come to the earth right here.
Speaker 1:K? So this is why you can't map out Revelation as a linear chronology of events. It doesn't work that way. It is cycles and repetitions. And so we're halfway through the book, but we've hit the ending already.
Speaker 1:And the elders cry out, we give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the one who is and who was. Why? Because you have taken your great power, and you have begun to reign. So God's kingdom has come. The nations raged and your wrath came.
Speaker 1:But the time has come now for judging the dead and for rewarding your servants, the prophets, and your people who revere your name both great and small. And for the destruction of that which destroys the earth. Revelation 11 verses 15 to 18. So that's the end. The question is, how did we get here?
Speaker 1:And the seven trumpets have been probably more than any other section of the book of Revelation, the central fuel for what we would call a futurist reading of the book. And this is because this section is the one that is most readily attached to historical moments. And this is not actually a new phenomenon. It was not invented by left behind. People have been doing this for years.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you know this. But sir Isaac Newton, he of such discoveries as gravity and calculus and the publication of Principia Mathematica. I would be remiss if I did not credit Godfrey Leibniz with the co creation of calculus, but that's beside the point. Sir Isaac Newton was also an avid amateur reader of revelation. So six years after his death, his book, Observations on Daniel and the Apocalypse of Saint John, was published in 1733.
Speaker 1:This is a full length commentary on the book of Revelation written by Isaac Newton. Let me read you just one sentence from Newton's work. The whole world natural, consisting of heavens and earth, signifies the whole world politic, consisting of thrones and people, or so much of it as is considered in the prophecy. And the things in that world signify the analogous things in this. For the heavens and the things therein signify thrones and dignitaries and those who enjoy them and on the earth.
Speaker 1:While the things thereon, the inferior people and the lowest parts of the earth called Hades or hell, the lowest or most miserable part of them. I did not say it was an enjoyable read. You can find it online. Just trust me. It's there.
Speaker 1:Don't bother with it. Point though, is that this is one sentence from the introduction of his book. And as obtuse as the language is, it lays out his approach to Revelation, which is essentially this. That everything you read in Revelation or the world politic, as he calls it, must have an analog in history or the world natural, as he calls it. Point is, everything in prophecy must have a historical meaning.
Speaker 1:Now it doesn't mean he takes everything in Revelation literally. When he reads about a beast coming up out of the sea or a dragon coming upon the land, news Isaac Newton does not expect to see beasts and dragons duking it out. But he believes that these images represent actual historical events. Now for a guy who cocreated calculus, and for a guy who spent a lot of his time crafting the first reflecting telescope that let him chart the elliptical orbits of the planets, this kind of makes sense. He saw revelation.
Speaker 1:He saw history unfolding with a sort of mathematical precision. So if he could watch and predict the movement of a planet, he figured he should be able to watch and predict the movement of history by reading Revelation. And so in Newton, saw in the trumpets that we're looking at today, the fall of pagan Rome, the Christianization of the empire under Constantine, the adoption of Trinitarian thought, which by the way he thought was a bad idea. The division of the Eastern and Western Empires during the Byzantine era, and the rise of the papacy and the power of the papacy in the eighth century, Isaac was also not a fan of the pope. Newton even goes as far as to suggest in his observations that the end of the age will come to pass in the year 2060.
Speaker 1:So of all the end times prophecies that have come and gone, Newton's guess is still out there. Who knows? Point is, a lot of people from a lot of different backgrounds, not just theology, have tried to attach the seven trumpets we're looking at today to historical events. And so what I want to do this evening is walk you through a more modern version of this futurist approach, something you may be familiar with if you have been in certain circles within the evangelical world left behind. And then I wanna take you back and imagine these trumpets one more time with a more literary context relating to the larger scope of what John is doing in the book of Revelation.
Speaker 1:And my hope is that by the end of tonight, we can develop a more healthy relationship between what we call the futurist, the pretorist, and the literary approaches to Revelation. And I will define those terms as we get to them. So let's do this. I'm reading from Revelation chapter eight here. The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down on the earth.
Speaker 1:So some will theorize that this is an image of the aerial bombings during the second world war. They will point out that the kind of destruction and devastation wrought on Europe in particular during that war was unprecedented in human history. That war on that scale had never happened. And we had never seen anything like this, but they say John had. The second angel sounded his trumpet, trumpet, and something like a huge mountain all ablaze was thrown into the sea.
Speaker 1:A third of the sea turned into blood. A third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. This, they say, is an image of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. So a huge mountain all ablaze thrown into the sea. This is a vision of the mushroom clouds that rose from the bombings.
Speaker 1:The devastation that happened out in the middle of the ocean to the island of Japan. The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star blazing like a torch fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died. This one, the story goes, is an image of the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl.
Speaker 1:The water's turning bitter and poisoning people. This is an image of radiation poisoning that people suffered in the meltdown. And it's said that the name Chernobyl means wormwood. Now there's some date debate about that. The word here in Greek is the word, which is the Greek name for a particular plant that we call Artemisia vulgaris.
Speaker 1:And, that plant was used to treat intestinal worms, and it was indeed very bitter. In fact, there are references all through the Old Testament to this, specifically talking about its bitter taste. So Deuteronomy, Proverbs, and Jeremiah all reference this bitter taste, and the Hebrew word is la anah. Well, Chernobyl, it is said, derives its name from the Ukrainian word for artemisia vulgaris. Some Ukrainians, though, say no.
Speaker 1:It doesn't mean that. Chernobyl means black grass from the Ukrainian words chorny and bilia. But I don't know anything about Ukrainian, so I'm not going to weigh in on the etymology of the word or even attempt to pronounce those words with anything like a Ukrainian accent. Otherwise, it's an interesting connection. Except we have to acknowledge this, that we are still well into the realm of interpretation when bitter water all of a sudden means radiation poisoning, and a star falling from heaven means a nuclear meltdown.
Speaker 1:And this is important to remember. No one reads Revelation literally. A futurist reading that attaches things to historical events is no more literal than any other approach. Unless we're talking about actual monsters actually attacking the world, then we are all talking about metaphors here, and we are all talking about interpretation here. So let's keep going.
Speaker 1:The fourth angel sounded his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, a third of the moon and a third of the stars, so that a third of them turned dark. Now some will argue that this is the Gulf War near the end of the war. Saddam lit a number of oil wells on fire, And it actually took years to put those fires out as they billowed thick black smoke up into the air, literally blacking out large swaths of the sky in that part of the world. The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the abyss.
Speaker 1:And when he opened the abyss, smoke rose from it like the smoke from a gigantic furnace. And out of the smoke, locusts came down on the earth, and they were given power like that of scorpions. The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. On their heads, they wore something like crowns of gold, and their faces resembled human faces. These, they will say, are obviously attack helicopters preparing for some kind of future battle.
Speaker 1:Perhaps some will say, a kind of aerial strikes needed to carry out war against small inaccessible terrorist camps like we might find in Afghanistan. Locusts as large as horses, these are helicopters. Crowns of gold are spinning rotors. Tails of scorpions are missiles that they fire, and the faces of humans are the pilots that fly them. When the sixth angel sounded his trumpet, a large army masses, and their number was twice 10,000 times 10,000.
Speaker 1:So this is 2,000,000 troops. And the horses and riders I saw in my vision looked like this. Their breastplates were fiery red, dark blue, and sulfur yellow. The heads of the horses resembled the heads of lions, and out of their mouths came fire and smoke. So the reading goes, these are tanks that are amassing for some kind of final conflict with God.
Speaker 1:And the colors on their breastplates perhaps represent certain countries that they are, battling on behalf of. But then, rather than a final climactic battle with these tanks, what we have after the sixth trumpet is a long interlude before the seventh. Now, we already know how the story ends. We read that. Justice comes, God reigns, and the destroyers of the earth are destroyed.
Speaker 1:But between that, what we have are these two witnesses that come and prophesy on behalf of God in the temple. And this is where all futurist speculation coalesces together. Because the map that I just gave you, second World War, atomic bombs, Chernobyl, Gulf War, war on terror, and then some unnamed final battle. This is only one of many different futurist interpretations. Newton saw all of these things happening throughout history up until his time in the eighteenth century.
Speaker 1:Some you will find writing today see all of these seven trumpets happening at some point in the future. So they haven't happened at all yet. But the one piece that unites all of the speculation when we're attaching these to historical events are these witnesses that appear in the temple. Because if you know your history, then you know that the first Jewish temple was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians in the sixth century before the common era. And then the second temple was destroyed by Rome when Vespasian sent his son Titus to attack Jerusalem in the year '70 of the common era.
Speaker 1:And so since the year '70, there has not been a Jewish temple. In fact, the site of the temple that you can see on the screen is currently occupied by the dome on the rock. And this is the third most holy site in the Islamic faith. It's a beautiful piece of architecture, constructed in the seventh century. And at the center of it is something called stone.
Speaker 1:Now the foundation stone is important to Jews, Muslims, and Christians because in the Talmud, it says that the foundation stone was the first part of the earth to come into existence when God began to create in Genesis. So it started there with about one stone, and then it built out into the world around us. And so that's where the temple was built. But if the witnesses of Revelation 11 are meant to prophesy in the Jewish temple, we have a problem. Because not only is there not a temple, but the only space where a Jewish temple could exist is currently occupied.
Speaker 1:And so however you place the first six trumpets in history, you are stuck waiting for the construction of a third temple. And so this is why in futurist circles, you will hear all kinds of rumors about the plans for constructing a new temple in Jerusalem. This is why any negotiations between the Islamic authorities that control the Dome Of The Rock and the Jewish authorities that control the city of Jerusalem in which it is are followed incredibly closely. But for now, at least, we've hit a dead end here because we can't get to this final trumpet. So what happens?
Speaker 1:What can we learn if we go back and we look at the larger literary context of Revelation as a whole? And one of the things that we're gonna find is this, that John has already talked to us about the temple of God. Chapter three. Christ is speaking, and he contrasts the synagogue of Satan and the temple of God. Chapter three verse 12.
Speaker 1:Christ is speaking. He says to those who hold on to those who are victorious. He says, I will make you pillars in the temple of my God. Never again will they leave. For 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 my God.
Speaker 1:And they will also write write on them my new name. Whoever has ears, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches. So John has already given us his imagination of what the temple of God God is. And it is not the Jewish temple in Jerusalem. It is the very Christian image of the temple of God as the worshiping body of believers.
Speaker 1:You see this in Paul's writings. The temple is now us gathered here worshiping Christ. And so if you are looking for historical analogs to all the trumpets, it makes sense to think of the temple that shows historically. But if you are looking for the larger literary context of the letter, it actually makes sense to think of the temple the way John has already described it as the body of Christ. So let's go back and look at this larger section one more time with this in mind.
Speaker 1:This is the start of chapter eight. And I saw the seven angels who stand before God and the seven trumpets were given to them. Another angel who had a golden censer came and stood at the altar. The smoke of the incense together with the prayers of God's people went up before God from the angel's hand. Then the angel took the censer, filled it with fire from the altar, and hurled it down on the earth.
Speaker 1:So what are the last prayers from the people that we have read in Revelation? We have to go back to last week, chapter six, where we read this. How long sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood? That's the last thing that people asked for from God. And now, it's as if be God begins to do it.
Speaker 1:So hail and fire, mountains thrown into the sea, water turned bitter, light stricken from the sky, smoke and locusts, armies, and battles. But after all of that, what do we read? On chapter nine, we hear that humankind still did not repent. They did not stop worshiping demons and their idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone, and wood. They did not repent of their murders, their magic acts, their sexual immorality, or their theft.
Speaker 1:In other words, nothing changes. So God could send destruction after destruction, tribulation after tribulation, and yet absolutely nothing would change. Six trumpets have sounded, and there has been no redemption. No transformation. No repentance.
Speaker 1:Next verse. But then a seventh angel appears, and he was holding a little scroll. He gave a loud shout, and when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write. And this is where we suspect the story to go. Right?
Speaker 1:Six trumpets, no one repents. Now it's the final destruction of the world. It's at hand. Everyone who didn't repent is going to get it. But then John says, he heard a voice from heaven say, stop.
Speaker 1:Seal up what the thunders have said and do not write it down. Down. Because when the seventh angel is to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished. And the voice that I had heard from heaven spoke to me once more, go take the scroll. So I went to the angel and he said to me, take it and eat it.
Speaker 1:That's a strange image, but it actually comes from Ezekiel, where Ezekiel is told to eat a scroll and then prophecy on behalf of God. This is how God chooses to communicate with his world. It is not thunders, and it's not destruction, and it's not plague after plague that would prove utterly ineffectual to create change, but through the word of witness that challenges the world and calls for change. I was given a reed like a measuring rod and told, go and measure the temple of God and the altar and its worshipers. So here's the question.
Speaker 1:How do you measure the temple of God if the temple of God is the worshipers? How do you measure the worshipers of God? Well, if you are reading this passage and you consider yourself part of the temple of God and you see God for who he truly is, then the measure is whether you are implicated in the mission of God's transformation. The measure is, are you a witness? And so now we get a description of what true witness looks like.
Speaker 1:John tells us that two witnesses appear from in the temple, and then he tells us they are the two lampstands like Zechariah four. Fiery words come from their mouths just like the image in Jeremiah five. They have the power to stop it raining like Elijah in first Kings 17. They turn water to blood like Moses in Exodus seven. And eventually, they give their lives for the truth just like Jesus does in the gospels so that they can place their hope fully in the resurrection just the way Jesus does in his death.
Speaker 1:So the question is, how do you measure the temple? John says, you go back and you read the scriptures. Remember the stories of the prophets and the witnesses and those who gave their lives. These are composite images pulled from the Hebrew scriptures that together show us a right picture of what it means to truly witness to God. As Ken Brewer says it, the two witnesses here represent the Christian church.
Speaker 1:Judgment and calamity do not convert the world. What changes lives is the martyr witness of the church. But if that's true, what does that say about the all too comfortable Christians and churches in the West? What witness do we have to offer the world? See, the point here in this section about the trumpets is this, that God could send destruction, pain, tribulation after tribulation, plague after plague, but that would not lead to the mystery of God's reigning and ruling that we know is coming with the seventh trumpet.
Speaker 1:It wouldn't work. His pain and destruction doesn't transform people. Grace, witness, sacrifice, truth. This is what does. And so by reading this, you and I, we are implicated now in the mission of telling God's story.
Speaker 1:God just told us, I could do all these terrible things, but it won't change anything. What will change things is when you go out and you live the story and you sacrifice for others and you do what I have done. See, this is not an image of tomorrow. This is an image pulled from the past that points us towards tomorrow. And so this is where the pretorist, the futurist, and the literary approaches of revelation collide for me.
Speaker 1:Because a pretorist view is one that says, all prophecy has already happened. Everything you read in Revelation is a description of past events. That's what preterist view means. The problem that I have with that is it steals John's message from me. Because it makes Revelation interesting if I'm into history, but it means that for two thousand years now, we have all been reading a glorified history book.
Speaker 1:But as I read this, what I see is that John is not really interested in Rome. Revelation is not about Rome. I mean, clearly, we've seen already in this series, he's using images from Rome. He's critiquing Rome. He's interacting with metaphors from the empire.
Speaker 1:But John doesn't care about Rome. Rome is a blip. Rome is an illusion. Rome is nothing once we see the sacrifice of the lamb, the character of God, and the reign of his kingdom. Rome is nothing but a literary device for John.
Speaker 1:Revelation is not about Rome. But in the same way, the futurist approach that tries to show me things like trumpets as contemporary wars or horsemen as modern struggles, what that does is it steals John's message from the church because it makes revelation chronocentric. It makes it about me and my world and my time. And it's powerful and it's compelling. It's exciting to think that way, but it threatens to do it in a way that steals the significance of two thousand years of church thought and worship and reflection that has seen this book as for them too.
Speaker 1:You see, I think it's actually perfectly acceptable to look through Revelation and then search for parallels in your world. You should be doing that. In fact, to read Revelation responsibly, you have to do that. And so I'm actually fine if you wanna talk to me about whether we are seeing a particular rider of the apocalypse in our world right now. John is revealing things to us.
Speaker 1:We should expect to make connections in our world. And I'm actually fine. If you wanna talk about a certain trumpet and it's parallel to a particular historical event. That's fine. John is revealing truth to us.
Speaker 1:We should expect to see that truth operative in our world. But for me, that kind of speculation only comes once we've done the hard work to understand the larger literary context of what John is doing. So people have asked, are you going to acknowledge that we are in the end times in this series? Yes. Of course, I am.
Speaker 1:But we've been in the end times for two thousand years now. Ever since Christ left and the spirit came, we have been in the season of that final story before we move to God's kingdom. So, yes, we're there. And so that same spirit that has been operating for two thousand years now is the same spirit that illuminates you as you read and enlivens your eyes to see this text as very present in your world. And so when that happens and you say, oh, I make a connection with what I read to what I'm seeing, then grab a hold of that, take comfort in that, thank God for that kind of unique apocalypsis, that revealing in your world.
Speaker 1:But don't talk to me about scenes of worship around the throne unless you have in view John's contrast of the worthiness of God through sacrifice against the unworthiness of Domitian through power. And don't talk to me about what seal two means unless you have in view the larger literary context of John contrasting trust in the empire and trust in the living God. And don't talk to me about trumpet four and what that means unless you have in mind John's image of the futility of punishment to effect change against the power of true witness and martyrdom and story that we live out in a powerful way. And so once we have that larger literary context in place, then sure we can talk about these things. And we can wonder, and we can speculate, and we can find connections in our world because I promise you Revelation is about your life.
Speaker 1:It is for you. John is desperately trying to implicate you in the things that he writes, but we need to remember that he has been doing that for every single Christian who calls on the name of the Lord for 2,000 now. This book is for you, but it was also for them. And dare I say that Christ will be doing that through this book for quite some time to come until he chooses to return, and I don't know when that will be. But in the meantime, this is the story that I ground myself in.
Speaker 1:That punishment, retribution, and pain doesn't change the world. What does is when I take up the story of Christ, and I sacrifice for those around me, and I hold onto the truth, and I witness for what it is that God is doing in the world. Because this is my story. That the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and his Messiah. And he will reign forever and ever.
Speaker 1:And I will give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, the one who was and who is, because you have taken your great power and you have begun to reign. And the nations raged and your wrath came, but the time has come for judging the dead, for rewarding your servants both great and small, and for destroying that which destroys your earth. And that is a story that is worth looking forward to and finding ourselves in. Let's pray. God, help us as we interact with images and texts that have been come at from such a huge multiplicity of angles, ways that we have read them in the past, in the future, as images, as metaphors, as analogs for history.
Speaker 1:God, help us not to get lost in the confusion of all of these things and forget that you are very truly speaking to us in these words. And so help us as we wrestle through the parallels that we see as we look out into history in the world, not to lose sight of the bigger picture. That you are reminding us that change and transformation comes through grace and peace and sacrifice and witness. It comes when we are willing to stand up for the truth even when it costs us something. It comes when we are willing, to give up, to sacrifice, to pay a price, to tell your story, and to show love for the world.
Speaker 1:And so as we look and we read and we analyze our world, Help us never to become so fascinated with destruction, retribution, pain, and punishment that we would lose sight of the grace and peace that you are truly inviting us into. And so we ask for the wisdom to read honestly and clearly, for the clarity to make connections in our world, and for the courage to live out that conviction with grace and truth, standing up for what we believe it is that really changes. The sacrifice of the lamb and our call to join you in that story. You're a great God. And in the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray.
Speaker 1:Amen.
Speaker 2:This is a podcast of Kensington Commons Church. We believe that God is invested in the renewal of all things. Therefore, we wanna live the good news by being part of the rhythms of our city as good neighbors, good friends, and good citizens in our common life. Join us on Sunday or visit us online at commonstrick.org.