Speaker 1: Welcome to the commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week. Head to commcommons.church for more information.
Speaker 2: We made it. Well, almost. This is the last sermon in our series on the book of Revelation. Next week, we shift gears and we begin Advent together. Let me say this before we get started today.
I know that revelation is not everyone's bag. That's okay. Beasts and dragons and riddles and cosmic warfare is not for everyone. I get it. So thanks for hanging with us.
Ironically now, I have written a sermon series and a thesis in the book about the book of Revelation, but it is certainly not at all central to my theology or my faith. To be honest, I think that most of us could take it or leave it, just stick with Jesus and you will be fine, I promise. But that in itself is actually a big part of the reason that I wrote the book Upside Down Apocalypse. This conviction that if you don't read a book like Revelation through the lens of the Jesus who walked through ancient Palestine to reveal God to us, you will end up remaking Jesus in your own image. Relation is unique in the Bible because it is a completely different genre than any other book in the Bible.
It's unique in that it purposefully builds up our expectations only to then turn them upside down at the last moment. And so if you don't read keeping the Jesus of the gospels in mind at all times, it's very easy to miss that subversive element in Revelation. So yes, I wrote a book about Revelation, but really, maybe more importantly, I tried to write a book about reading the Bible with Jesus at the center. And that just felt like a very common thing to do. Now, today is the last day of the series, so we are gonna do a bit of a recap, and then we'll jump into a couple of the last important images in Revelation.
But I do wanna say to everyone who has already picked up a copy of the book and read it, thank you. That means a lot. In the series, we were really only able to touch on some of the depth that's there in the book. Audiobook is completed now, so that should be out before the end of the year. If that's the way you prefer to read, you can check that out.
And if you're intrigued in more, you know where to go. But if I could ask a quick favor ahead of the audiobook release, please, if you're inclined, head over to Amazon, give the book a rating and a review. Like it or not, Amazon is a big part of how books work these days, and those little reviews mean a lot. Plus, they're just kind of fun to read, even the really mean ones. And there are a couple of those there already, so that's fine.
Alright. Last week, Bobbi walked us through and battled the beasts. And I just want to say, I loved her closing image. The idea of the transformation of the defeat of evil into the healing of all that is broken. We commonly personify evil in this character of the devil.
But what would it mean for us to imagine the healing grace of extended even into those kinds of stories? That really stretched my imagination in new ways, which I loved. Still, the beasts and the dragon go together in Revelation because they are all part of this final cycle of the book, the story that deals with the destruction of that which destroys. So you have a dragon that represents evil, and you have these three beasts that serve the dragon. And it's really interesting narrative that John weaves because you get these three beasts.
First, a beast from the sea which represents the politics of empire. This beast is tied to Nero. That's what the six six six is about. But Nero is not the beast. In fact, John's point is that Nero can die, and Nero can come back, and Nero can be long forgotten, but empires will keep on churning out new monsters to scare us.
Truth is, Rome itself can fade away, but empires will rise and when they do, they will pursue power at the expense of people. A second beast appears and this one worships the first one. We're told it looks like a lamb, but it roars like a lion. In other words, he sounds nice and he seems peaceful, but truthfully he is a monster. And this beast represents religion.
And the way that religion can actually slowly, subtly end up worshiping political power. Now that should be no surprise to any of us who know anything about Christian history, the way that Christianity slowly became more powerful over time and then slowly came to think that holding on to that power was somehow Christ like. And yet here we are grasping for more. And then finally, we get this woman who rides on the beast but is drunk on the blood of the martyrs. And this woman represents the economy of empire.
John says, she has seduced the merchants that trade in human bodies and they lament her downfall when the beast turns on her. This is all about a predatory economy that churns through people and literally treats human beings as commodities in a slave trade. It's a very poignant image, but I think it's okay, maybe important even, to critically consider John's choices here. In my book, I quote the scholar Tina Pippin who writes, power is deprivileged and eventually eliminated in the apocalypse. Hooray.
But the ideology of gender is revalorized in Revelation. Boo. And what she's talking about here is the way that John critiques a predatory economy but clumsily uses the gender tropes of his day to do it. A sexualized woman to represent evil. Now, the critique is good.
It's important if truth be told, but the image he uses to make that critique is worth reflecting on. In fact, I think this is important precisely because the whole point of this scene is that these beasts that do so much harm in our world, politics and religion and economics, they are really only servants of a deeper evil. And John's point is that when we give in to unjust systems that surround us, we become complicit in them. So John is saying, you can't just blame the system anymore. If your politics or your religion or your economics hurts people, you need to change something.
Because even unintentionally, you have then fallen in league with the dragon. So this is what I wrote in the book. To be shaped properly by revelation is not to stop where John stops. His imagination is contextualized by a specific time and place after all. Instead, for revelation to properly do its work in us.
We must invite this vision to awaken us to all of the ways that the principalities and powers around us work to keep us divided. Economic, political, religious, yes, but also racial, gendered, and cultural barriers that still need to be brought down. So, there's the beasts that serve the dragon of Revelation. Today, we find salvation. First though, let's pray.
God of apocalypse, who continues to reveal the world to us, who helps us to see what is hidden and what we sometimes hide ourselves from, would we be courageous to look with open eyes and clear vision, to see the areas where we have become comfortable. The systems that hurt and depress and harm your children and your world. And once we do, once our eyes are opened and once we see as you do, might we be brave enough to make changes. Maybe starting small in our purchases and transactions, perhaps in our language and our accommodations for each other. But might we actively look for how the status quo sometimes excludes.
And then might we be part of the slow, steady, transformative change that you imagine for all of us. And in this, might we begin to see the ex welcome you extend to us as well as others. Every day, in every moment, in every fear, and loss, and success, and gain. Might our attempts to bring your love closer to those near us become the reminder of your constant love that searches us out as well. In the strong name of the risen Christ we pray.
Amen. Today, it's the apocalypse. More specifically though, it's Armageddon and then heaven. And along the way, we're gonna hit Armageddon, the divine warrior, the lake of fire, and promise you, we will end up at the good news. First though, does anyone remember that movie Armageddon where Bruce Willis went to space to fight an asteroid with Aerosmith?
Good movie. Possibly, I'm mixing up some of the story there, but that does sound about right for a Michael Bay movie. You know what I'm talking about. Regardless, today is actually nothing like that because we're not actually going to get much of a battle. Revelation is gonna do one more time what it has done to us all the way along, and it's gonna turn everything upside down.
But let's start by turning to Revelation chapter 16, where we find the only reference to Armageddon. This is starting in verse 16. Then they gathered the kings together to the place in the Hebrew that is called Armageddon. The seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air. Out of the temple came a loud voice from the throne saying, it is done.
There came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder, and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on the earth so tremendous was the quake. Now, by now, we might be recognizing some clues here. If you remember, we saw the threat of lightning rumblings, peals of thunder back in the throne room when we expected God to act like an emperor. And then, we heard the specter of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder when the martyrs called out asking God for vengeance in the model of Jupiter.
Both times, our expectations were then upended. So hearing this phrase again here should perhaps tingle our spidey senses to expect some kind of reversal that's coming. But even before that, we get another riddle. The kings of the earth are gathered to the place called Armageddon. And what's interesting here is that there is no place called Armageddon.
That is simply a transliteration of two Hebrew words, har and megiddo. Now, Har is the Hebrew word for mountain. Megiddo is in fact the name of a place. What's weird is that place Megiddo has another name. It's known as the Valley Of Jezreel.
And if you know anything about topography, you know that mountains and valleys are kinda the opposite. So what is John doing by talking about the Mountain Of Magitto? Well, he's cluing us in on how to read this section. Armageddon is not a place on earth you can find on a map. It is a literary device.
See, Megiddo had a long and bloody history. In the fifteenth century BCE, presumably around the time the Hebrews would have been in slavery in Egypt, if you're trying to date that, the pharaoh, Thutmose the third, fought a massive battle against an alliance of Canaanite tribes at Megiddo. Now, we know about this battle because it is actually the first record we have ever uncovered that included a body count after the war. In fact, those same ancient records say that each army had 10,000 soldiers ready for war. By ancient standards, that is absolutely massive.
Now, the record, when John gets around to describing Armageddon, he says that the kings of the earth bring with them 10,000 times 10,000, as if to say the world has never seen anything like this. But years later, the Hebrew judge Deborah would fight the Canaanites at Megiddo. Gideon fought the Midianites at Megiddo. King Saul was defeated by the Philistines at Megiddo. And in June, pharaoh Necho the second went to war with Assyria at Megiddo.
Now the Hebrews ended up getting pulled into that conflict. Necho called for a meeting with king Josiah from Israel to ask permission to move through their lands, but when he got there, he killed the king of Israel. Israel and Judah get involved. Israel's conquered by Assyria, then Babylon comes through, conquers Assyria including Israel, and then Judah leading to the exile. Still, we're not done because Rome, knowing how unstable this whole area was, they actually set up a standing army at Megiddo called the Legion of the Great Plains.
See, even they knew there was no mountain there. And still, we're starting now to get a sense of what John might be doing here. Armageddon isn't a place. The Mountain Of Megiddo is an image chosen to evoke and expand the memory of war and warfare and death and suffering. Think of it this way.
If I were to say to you, evil is about to meet its ground zero. You know exactly what I mean, but you don't imagine I'm actually talking about New York City. Right? That's what John is doing with Har Megiddo. And that's helpful because now when the battle erupts, we know that we are meant to be thinking figuratively.
We're not looking at maps. We're not picturing an actual battle. We're not deciding what countries are involved. We're using historical emotion to give context to our future hope. So what happens next?
Well, army's mass and the tension builds and the showdown looms and then Jesus arrives. Revelation nineteen eleven. 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 wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire and on his head are many crowns.
He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. 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. Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule them with an iron scepter.
He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh, he has his name written, king of kings and lord of lords. And, okay, this is Jesus. I know John likes to do this thing where he makes you guess. This is not really a tough riddle here.
This is the word of God, the king of kings, the lord of lords, the lamb that was slain now come to save the world. But here he is covered in blood, wielding a sword, waging war, and treading the wine press of the fury of God's wrath. That sounds a lot like the Jesus all the fire and brimstone preachers keep telling us about. I mean, was nice once. Look out because that's all over now.
No more, mister nice guy. And before we look at these images in more detail, let me say this is exactly why you have to read Revelation through the lens of the gospels. If the Jesus you look forward to, the Jesus of your eschatology, what's gonna happen when all is revealed, looks nothing like the Jesus who already revealed God to us, that is a big problem. In fact, I would be as bold as to say that is no longer Christianity. That is the kind of religion that reinforces all of our expectations of power, exactly the kind of religion that John warned us about.
The kind that serves the dragons of the world. So let's take a closer look at this image of Jesus. First of all, it's covered in blood. But note here that John explicitly mentions that his followers have been given new clean white robes to wear to battle on pristine white horses. And that means this isn't battle blood.
This isn't the blood of his enemies that Jesus wears. Everything is pristine white. This is Jesus' blood. The slain lamb that we've already encountered in Revelation, this is explicitly an image of nonviolence and the consequence that it bore for Jesus on the cross. Jesus is the one who shows up for battle already wounded.
Second, we hear that he wages war, but specifically he wages war with dikaiosune. Now this word in Greek is pretty straightforward. What's interesting is actually the English. See, means what is right. And in almost every language, that's how it's translated.
Hebrew, Spanish, French, they all have a word for In English, we don't. We have a word for what is right in society, that's justice, and we have another word for what is right morally, that's righteousness. And here, the translation that he wages war with justice is fine, except that it makes us tend to think automatically of things like punishment and law and rules and retribution. When perhaps to say that Jesus wages war with righteousness would bring us back to where we started, the images from Isaiah, caring for the widow, the poor, the fatherless, the foreigner, that's the righteousness God accepts. So it's all in there, but the English isn't helping us.
It's steering us to one side. Still, you might say, okay, he has a sword though. That's pretty violent. Right? Except again, John is explicit about this sword.
He tells us it comes from his mouth. You are not meant to picture someone here pulling a sword out like a sword swallower. It's a very common biblical metaphor. Isaiah tells us that the Messiah's words will be like a sharpened sword, and Paul tells us that the sword we carry is the word of God. So this is not a weapon.
In fact, you basically have to ignore biblical context to imagine Jesus holding a claymore here. Jesus' only weapon, if you can even call it that, is his testimony or the way that he lived in the world what we see in the gospels. Finally though, we hear that he treads the winepress of God's fury and honestly, in my opinion, this is the best one yet. Remember how John is using Isaiah as a template for Revelation. Isaiah imagines the story of God getting bigger and bigger each time he tells it until God finally writes the world and the cosmos, sets everything to the good.
That's exactly the model John follows in Revelation. It things get bigger and bigger, more and more massive. Except Isaiah is still very much rooted in an ancient world full of conquest and battle, and so this is how he described the final coming of the divine warrior. Isaiah 63. Who is this coming from Edom, from Bozrah, with his armaments stained crimson?
Sound familiar? Who is this robed in splendor, striding forward in the greatness of his strength? It is I proclaiming victory, mighty to save. Why are your garments red like those of one treading the winepress? Isaiah asks.
And the warrior responds, I have trodden the winepress alone from the nations no one was with me. I trampled them in my anger and trod them down in my wrath. Their blood splattered on my garments and stained all my clothing. So that is the image John is playing off here. But you see what he's doing with it in Revelation?
He says, yes, evil will meet its ground zero. And, the Messiah will come to right the world. And, yes, salvation will come in the darkest hour to overcome evil. But here's the thing. In Jesus, we discover that all of it is even better than we had hoped for.
Because the blood isn't the blood of God's enemies anymore. The blood is what God suffered to heal the world. And God's war will make things right, but it will be waged with righteous compassion, not religious violence. The sword will cut deep, but the sword is the truth of the way of self giving love that Jesus showed us in the world. You see Christ transforms even our most optimistic images of God's grace into something even better.
John is saying that everything is different because of the lamb, even our prophetic imaginations. Still, this is the apocalypse, and we are still here at Armageddon, and that which destroys still needs to be destroyed. So what happens next? But we are told that the kings of the earth are killed by the sword that comes from the mouth of a rider and the birds gorge themselves on their flesh. First, gross.
Second, to be honest, it kind of undermines everything I've just said here in this sermon so far. But we know Armageddon isn't a real place, and we know the sword isn't a real sword. So where does John give us clues of how to make sense of this? And we've said this before in Revelation, in this series, but this is why you have to keep reading. If you stop, you will get stuck.
So when you find something that doesn't seem or see or feel like Jesus, the trick is to keep reading until John brings it around because I promise you, he will. And with this one, a few things are gonna happen. After the battle, the dragon and the beasts are going to be thrown into the lake of fire. Notice here what the scholar's c b card says, the fire of revelation is reserved for conceptual images of evil and the systems that support it. After that, a new city, a new Jerusalem will come down to earth from heaven.
Notice, the world is not being abandoned in Revelation. No one's flying away. Heaven is coming here. But there are some very interesting things to note about this city. We read, it has streets of gold and its foundations are made of precious stone.
Literally, everything you and I think of as valuable is as worthless as asphalt in the city just fit to walk on. The city has springs of water that flow out of the city toward the world and fruit trees that never go out of season. That's the opposite of how our cities work. As they draw resources in toward the center, all of that is inverted in John's city. The city has no temple, no locus of religious power.
God now dwells with humanity. And then finally, we read this, that the nations will walk by the city's light and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it. On no day will its gates ever be shut for there will be no night there. You have a city with massive imposing walls that are rendered completely useless by gates that never shut. The city is not what it seems, particularly when we realize that the kings of the earth, the ones we just heard were killed by the sword that came from the mouth of the rider come and go as they please.
And that might sound like a mistake. Like maybe John just got excited about heaven and forgot about a plot point along the way. Honestly, that's understandable. There's a lot going on in this book. But this is not a miss.
It's a central part of John's imagination of heaven. Let me show you something here. Revelation twenty one eight. The cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and liars, they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.
Ouch. Then, two verses later in Revelation twenty one ten, John sees the holy city coming down from heaven. In Revelation twenty one twenty five, we're told the gates of that city never shut. In Revelation twenty one twenty seven, we're told that nothing impure or deceitful will ever enter the city. But then in Revelation twenty two fourteen, we read that outside the city are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
Outside remain those we were just told went through the lake of fire. It's really easy to get off track in Revelation if you try to imagine all of this too literally. Who goes there? And what happens to them? And what happened to the kings exactly?
That's not John's intent. John's objective is to root our imagination of God ultimately in restoration, not retribution. And so for John, the death that comes from the mouth of the rider is not the end. It is the beginning of a life that is then welcomed through the gates into God's presence. And the fire of revelation, as scary as that should sound to all of us, it is not sadistic.
It is an opportunity to choose to let go of everything that separates us from the good. Or if we choose to hold on and remain stubborn outside even though the gates never shut to us. Because God is still God regardless of what we choose, and God looks like Jesus. Look, the book of Revelation is not for everyone. I understand.
But it's also not what you have been told. It is not something to fear. It's not meant to make you afraid. It is not intended to transpose the goodness of Jesus into the vengeance of John Wick. It is an imaginative, creative, playful reminder that we can't even begin to make sense of the goodness of God.
And that because of this conviction that Jesus has saved the world, you can and I can trust with certainty that one day, all things will be made right. And everything that destroys will be undone. And that even the sickness within me, all that leads me to be selfish or violent or contemptuous or hurtful, all of that will one day be left behind. Because the goodness that sits at the founding of the universe, this unstoppable love that transforms all things, that God will one day wipe every tear from every eye, heal every broken heart, and make all things new. That's the promise of revelation.
And this, finally, at the end of the series is why revelation is actually important. Not because we can decipher the codes and unlock the riddles and name the beasts. Revelation is on a road map to history. It's not even a particularly coherent eschatology. It is a broad imaginative attempt to reconcile the world that we know to the goodness that we trust.
And John knows that if a vision for the inescapable goodness of God can grab ahold of us, it will carry us through whatever the world throws at us. Be that Rome or America or Canada or anything we experience this week. And that changes everything. Let's pray. God of gracious apocalypse who shows us the things we hide from.
As we sift through these images, these stories, these fantastic pictures of what the world may be like, might we be able to step back just enough not to get caught on the specifics, but to see the big picture of where you're taking us. This movement through the struggle and the death, the pain of life toward the goodness of trusting in your love. And God, if that vision can somehow grab a hold of us to believe truly that one day all things will be made right and that which destroys will be destroyed, then that will lead us to transform slowly our steps in the world. To move with more compassion, to love with more grace, to hope with more courage. God ultimately made a vision of revelation drive us back to the Jesus of the gospels who walks the path in front of us inviting us to follow the way to love.
May that seep into every decision we make this week. May we extend it to all those who are near to us. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.