I told Emily after the service last Sunday that she’d teed things up nicely for me, in a couple ways; I should note I hope to do the same for next Sunday for her when she takes up one of my favorite parts of Scripture, the opening of Revelation 21. That’s for later, though. One way she set me up was bringing the concept of “heaven” into the conversation, because that’s one of those words that when you say it, people think they can stop listening because they already know what you’re going to say. When we die, our bodies aren’t us anymore, and our immortal souls go up to heaven where we watch over the people we’ve left behind. Add in the usual clouds and harps and pearly gates, with St. Peter standing outside them behind a lectern with a huge book—and what on earth did poor Peter do to get stuck with that, anyway?—and you have the basic picture that floats around in the back of most people’s minds; that’s what “heaven” means to us.
Among churchgoers—well, and Kirk Cameron fans of a certain age—you mix in a particular popular understanding of the book of Revelation. At some point, on this view, there will be the Rapture: all true Christians will disappear from the earth in the blink of an eye, leaving their clothes fluttering to the ground and their tennis shoes smoking in the streets. Then will follow the Great Tribulation, with all sorts of terrible CGI-type events; that will continue until Jesus comes back and ends it with the Last Judgment.
Now, I believe beyond even my capacity for doubt that Jesus is coming back to set all things right and make all things new. For the rest? I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t believe I have an immortal soul, and I don’t believe it’s going up to heaven when I die, and I most especially don’t believe any of us in this room will be playing harps. (If you want to tell me heaven would be a place where I’ll play bassoon well enough that it will still be heaven for everyone else, we can talk about that, but I’m no harpist.) Obviously, if by “heaven” you mean the place where God lives and is fully visibly present, yes, I believe in that, but I don’t believe in heaven as most people think about it; and the reason I don’t is because the Bible doesn’t either. The Bible, instead, promises us two very different and very much greater things: the resurrection of the dead, and the new heavens and the new earth.
As Emily noted recently, the Hebrew word we translate “soul,” nefesh, at its root means “neck.” It isn’t referring to some ethereal part of us which is supposedly immortal without the rest of us, it means the whole person, this whole strange body-spirit union that we are. Jesus came to Earth to redeem us as whole human beings, body and spirit. Indeed, he came to redeem his whole creation, not just us. God isn’t in this just for “souls,” as if he’d be happy to let the rest of the world he made go to rot—he’s in this to take it all back. Anything less would leave death with some measure of victory in the end, and it would devalue the world God made and pronounced good. God isn’t interested in letting either of these things happen. His intent is to absolutely undo all the damage done by our enemy when he led Adam and Eve into sin, and absolutely destroy all powers opposed to him, leaving them no scrap of accomplishment at all. The total destruction of all death, and the infinite victory of all that is life, under the rule of Jesus Christ our Lord is what we have to look forward to—nothing less.
So if Revelation isn’t a playbook for the world after God sounds the two-minute warning, how should we read it? Well, Emily has made two key points the last couple weeks. First, it is given to encourage the church. The first three chapters, with the letters to the seven churches, aren’t a disconnected section irrelevant to the important stuff, they tell us what the book is for. And note well, “encouragement” doesn’t just mean nice, positive statements, it can and does include correction, rebuke, and warning when those are needed.
Second, it’s about discipleship under empire–and in particular, under a hostile empire. This is critically important to the American church in our time, which is no doubt why it’s almost universally unseen. Christians in this country grew comfortable living under empire. In fact, we were so foolish as to believe it was on our side. We accommodated ourselves to its demands, becoming collaborators and quislings. Now that the cultural worm is turning and the empire is openly turning against the church, rather than heeding the call of Jesus to “strengthen the things that remain”—which comes from Revelation 3:2, from the letter to the church in Sardis—many are reacting with efforts to reclaim and restore their former position as respected collaborators. Whether they do so by calling the church to conform to the culture or by fighting to “take back our country” doesn’t really matter; the fundamental error is the same either way.
Revelation isn’t a key to decode the end of the world, but: suffering Christian communities through the centuries have seen their experience reflected in its pages and believed it was about them, and that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. They weren’t entirely wrong. There’s a pattern in Scripture where prophecies have an initial fulfillment and then a later, fuller one; think of the Immanuel prophecy in Isaiah 7. That was fulfilled in Isaiah’s day, perhaps with the birth of Hezekiah, but it also pointed to a deeper fulfillment later with the birth of the Messiah. I think we see this in Revelation as well. Whatever it’s ultimately pointing to within history, we’ll know it when we’re living it—but there’s not only one Antichrist. The spirit of antichrist has been active in the world from the first days of the church, as 1 John 4 tells us. When the church in various times and places suffers persecution, these are partial fulfillments of the warnings of Revelation which connect the suffering church to the hope Revelation offers. One function of this book is to show us the kind of hope we actually need, as opposed to the kind we want.
So then, understanding that Revelation 7 draws on Isaiah 25, what hope do we see in these two chapters? For starters, look at Revelation 7:9: “After these things, I looked, and there was a crowd so large no one was able to count it! They were from every nation, tribe, people, and language. They were standing in front of the throne and the lamb and were wearing white robes, with palm branches in their hands.” If you were here the first Sunday of the year when I preached on Isaiah 60, you might recognize the theme here. Genesis 1 tells us humanity collectively was made in the image of God; as Richard Mouw put it in his book on Isaiah 60, When the Kings Come Marching In, “The image of God is, as it were, parceled out among the peoples of the earth.” Revelation 7:9 shows us God reclaiming the whole of his image as he is restoring and renewing the whole of his work; we’ll see the culmination of this in Revelation 21:5.
Second, look at 7:14: no Rapture here, no “Get Out of Tribulation Free” card. Rather than escape from great suffering, the hope we’re offered is triumphant perseverance through great suffering. Indeed, as the Mission House folks wrote in a song we’ll be singing in a few minutes here, it’s only in the dark that we learn the song of hope. There are a couple reasons for that. One, let’s be honest: hope is a flower that blooms in the dark. In the light, we don’t see the need. Two, hope is in part about the preparation of the one who hopes. In the dark, in the fire, we are tested, we are tried, we are refined, we are tempered, into people who can endure through suffering—and more than endure, can overcome.
There’s a line in Malachi which I think is helpful here, in 3:3, where the prophet tells us the Lord “will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver.” If that seems oddly specific to you—why does it specify silver?—you’re not the first. There’s a story—I don’t know where it comes from, but I’ve done some research and verified the details—about a group of women who were doing a Bible study on Malachi and had the same question, so one of them made an appointment with a silversmith to watch him work. As she watched, he held a piece of silver over the fire, explaining that refining silver requires holding it in the hottest part of the fire to burn away the impurities. The woman thought about God holding us in such a hot spot and remembered Malachi says the Lord will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. She asked the silversmith if he had to sit there in front of the fire the whole time the silver was being refined. He said he not only had to sit there holding the silver in place, he had to keep his eyes on it the whole time, for even a moment too long in the flames would ruin it. The woman was silent for a moment, then asked, “How do you know when the silver is fully refined?” The silversmith smiled at her and said, “I know it’s done when I see my face reflected in it.”
Third, God’s hope is already and not yet. As the Swiss theologian Oscar Cullman memorably put it, since the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, we live between D-Day and V-E Day: the outcome of the war is certain, but the enemy is fighting as hard and bloody-mindedly as ever for every square inch of territory. Even though Isaiah lived before Christ, we see this in Isaiah 25. Quoting from the ESV, because it comes through more clearly, here’s verse 2, “For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the foreigners’ palace is a city no more; it will never be rebuilt.” Then in verses 10-12, we get this: “For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain, and Moab shall be trampled down in his place . . . the Lord will lay low his pompous pride together with the skill of his hands, and the high fortifications of his walls he will bring down, lay low, and cast to the ground, to the dust.” This is not the reality in which the prophet and his people live, and so it is future promise—but at the same time, the prophet proclaims it as something which has already happened. To borrow from one of my favorite movies of all time, Stranger than Fiction, Moab’s destruction is already written, it just hasn’t been typed.
Fourth, we have the line which Revelation specifically draws from Isaiah 25: “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” This sentence points forward in the book, as it won’t fully land until Revelation 21, but we can feel its significance even here. Godly hope is not a hope for “your best life now,” for an existence in this world in which life works the way you want it to; it’s not for a better version of life as we know it. Rather, we are given the hope of a new creation, a new heavens and a new earth, in which sorrow and grief and pain and loss will all pass away. They will all, as I said a few minutes ago, be comprehensively defeated and utterly destroyed, leaving not even the faintest whisper behind.
That said, I don’t think I’m the only one for whom hope often comes hard. Look at our world! We have fouled our inheritance. To give just one example, one which haunts me for whatever reason, this is the Aral Sea, in central Asia. Or at least, it was. Here’s how it looks now. It has been drained nearly dry for the sake of irrigation. The same is true of the Colorado River, which reaches Mexico as little more than a muddy trickle. We have betrayed and exploited our neighbor; every day’s headlines dump a new truckload of evidence atop the truckload from the day before, and all we can do is cry out for mercy. As the Beatles put it, “I read the news today—oh, boy.” We have defiled and dissipated our souls; the twin scourges of online pornography and online gambling are two obvious cases, but so are social media and games like Candy Crush. Facebook and Instagram defile us less, to be sure, but that may only make them more effective at dissipating our energy, our focus, our attention, and our concern.
Hope is hard; but we make it especially hard when we keep looking for it in all the wrong places. The four characteristics of hope I laid out a few moments ago have a common essence, I think, and in a strange way—at least, I find it strange—I think my wife points us to it. You see, she has a particular way of reading books by authors she doesn’t trust—which is to say, most authors. She reads the first third or so, enough to feel she has a good handle on the book; then she reads the last part of the book to find out how the story ends. Once she knows that, she decides if it’s worth reading the middle to see how the author gets there. To read a book straight through without jumping to the end, she has to trust the author without reservation to be a good god or goddess to the characters. Authors who are bad deities to their characters are not to be trusted. Increasingly, I think the same is true of authors who leave their characters hanging because they can’t seem to figure out how to finish their stories. (Looking at you, George R. R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss.) To read a new book straight through, Sara has to read in hope—and to do that, she has to trust that its characters have a good author.
This is a point that would make Kent Denlinger smile. (For those of you who’ve come since Kent and Karla left, he was sort of the founding pastor of this congregation—it’s complicated—and his wife Karla was sort of the unpaid co-pastor, when her health permitted.) It’s odd that this came from Kent, since he read fiction about as often as Josh does, but he loved to say, “God is writing a good story, but there are hard chapters.” Boy, are there ever; as I said a few weeks ago, some of them are brutally hard and seem to go on forever. Even in those chapters, however, we can trust our Author as a good and loving God who truly is writing a good story.
How can I be so sure? Look at Revelation 7. I’m like Sara: I’ve read the end of the book! I can trust the middle will be worth the journey because the ending will make it right.
Now, if you’re a fan of Southern gospel (and this is the Gaither state), you may have heard this a little differently in the Cathedrals’ song “I’ve Read the Back of the Book (And We Win).” I don’t like that way of putting it, though, because the emphasis is wrong; it’s easy to make it about us winning and others losing. I certainly have my short list of people I want to see lose, I think they deserve it, and I believe I’m justified to think so—but if that’s where my energy is going, that isn’t justified.
The point of the story isn’t that they lose, and that’s certainly not where I’m supposed to find hope. Rather, the point is that God has showed us the last chapter of the book, and we know the story ends well. This is the hope we need, of an ending that will be worth everything it took to get there—not necessarily in this life; we aren’t promised that; but if we are in Jesus, the end of this life isn’t the end of our story. What’s more, a “happy ending” in this life isn’t even necessarily a good sign. Remember God’s clear authorial fondness for dramatic inversions and reversals—not even Shakespeare could come close. When God said, “The last will be first and the first will be last,” he wasn’t blowing smoke and calling it sunshine, he meant it.
If you ever doubt that, just look to this table. The greatest inversion and reversal of all came in Jesus Christ, and we remember and proclaim it every time we gather to break the bread and drink the cup. We celebrate thundering victory won by shattering defeat of an infinite God who became a most finite human being, a working-class commoner who suffered brutal death as a condemned traitor. We proclaim that he who died turned death inside-out by rising back to life, then returned to the throne room of creation to stand as a human being in the presence of God the Father; we acknowledge the Lamb sacrificed for our sin as the High Priest of all humanity and the Lion of Judah, the King of all that is and was and ever will be.
More, we declare that this is his table, with him at the head, set for all his people, for a crowd so large we will never able to count it from every nation, tribe, people, and language, from every age of history. This is already true by the power of his Holy Spirit, even though we are not yet able to see it.
And more yet, we confess that we are a people of hope, brought by hope to this table. The Brazilian theologian Rubem Alves once said, “Hope is hearing the music of the future. Faith is to dance to it.” We come to this table dancing, in spirit if not necessarily in body, because this bread and wine are a promise made manifest and the first course of the feast that is coming when our King returns in glory to claim what is his own.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, what we have received from the Lord I now declare to you, that on the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread; and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “Take, eat; this is my body given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
In the same way, he took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of sins. As often as you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.”
As often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the saving death of the Lord Jesus Christ until he returns; all those who have confessed their faith in Christ are welcome at his table. Come, for all things are now ready.
“Photomarathon 12: The End” © 2018 Jonas Hellebuyck on Flickr; image has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic