Hold On

By

Reverend Litton Logan

April 29, 2007

Scriptures:

Revelation 7:9-17 (NRSV)

⁹After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. ¹⁰They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

    “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

¹¹And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, ¹²singing,

    “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom

    and thanksgiving and honor

    and power and might

    be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

¹³Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” ¹⁴I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

¹⁵ For this reason they are before the throne of God,

      and worship him day and night within his temple,

      and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

¹⁶ They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;

      the sun will not strike them,

    nor any scorching heat;

¹⁷ for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,

      and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,

      and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Sermon:

I generally do not like to preach from the book of Revelation because the book is so misunderstood and misinterpreted I think it should be studied and not preached.  I say this unless one believes that the author’s purpose in writing the book was to keep each generation of Christians on their toes with his “the sky may be falling soon, the sky maybe falling soon” images and prognostications.  Therefore, before we look at our text for today I would like to take a cursory look at the Book of Revelation.

The commercialization and misinterpretation of the Book of Revelation has turned it into some kind of morbid Christian horror story, veiled in pseudo-mystery, and doom and gloom.  This is not only an injustice to the book but is needless fear mongering.

          First, let me say, the book is not some encrypted forecast for our time or for our future, yet it does have a message for us. The book was written to Christians in the last part of the first century of Christianity.  The first readers or listeners would have understood John’s veiled and encrypted message as being relevant to their time and situations.

The backdrop of the book is God’s providential will at work in the world.  The word providential comes from “pro”—for, and “video”—to see.  Thus, in God’s foreseeing events of history God reveals their meanings in a vision to John, a Christian exiled on the isle of Patmos because of his Christian witness. John tells of his vision in an apocalyptic, eschatological letter to seven churches in what we now call modern Turkey. Apocalyptic means simply “the revealing of that which is hidden”.  Eschatological comes from the Greek word “eschaton”, which means the end.

Thus, the author while in the spirit—contemplating, meditating, praying about the events of his life and times has a revelation from the risen Christ that reveals hidden meanings to events in John’s near past, present, and the near future that point to the coming end of the world. 

Most Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature was written during times of persecution between 200 B.C.E. and 100 C.E.; therefore, apocalyptic literature is persecution literature.  Apocalyptic literature says that things may be bad, the may get worse, but the awful things that are happening to God’s people are not meaningless tragedies. There is divine meaning and purpose in all these bad things; there is a good end for those who patiently and faithful endure, so hang on.

Typically, the authors of apocalyptic literature cast reality into some kind of cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. However, in God’s time God is going to destroy all evil, pain, suffering, and death and usher in a new creation, the kingdom of God.  This kingdom will be perfect and will last forever. However, only the righteous people of God will have a place in the new and glorious world, so faithful Christians hold on.

I point out that John’s idea of the kingdom on God is not in keeping with the Old Testament’s understanding of the kingdom of God or the prophecies of John the Baptist and Jesus. In the Old Testament’s, in John the Baptist’s, and in Jesus’ understandings  the kingdom of God was generally understood to come on earth by the divine transformation of human hearts and minds not through a cosmic war. 

          Another source of misunderstanding the Book of Revelation is to be found in the modern translation and understanding of the Hebrew word for prophet and its Greek translation prophetes.  The word for a prophet and its meaning in much of the Old Testament and New Testament has to do with a divinely inspired person who is called to speak forth God’s words of warning and judgment on people’s actions in the prophet’s present or near future. I point out that those folks, who claimed to predict the future such as astrologers, necromancers, seers, diviners, etc., were strictly condemned and forbidden among God’s people. God’s people are to live by faith in God not so-called divinations.

          Therefore, the author of the book of Revelation in the vein of the Old Testament prophet interprets recent and current events in historical context for Christians in order to reveal heretofore hidden divine meanings.

John saw current political and military events and natural disasters as warnings of God’s coming judgment.  I imagine John found a lot of divine meaning in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79, C.E. that killed hundreds of thousands, darkens the sky for weeks, spawned localized famines, plagues, and insect and rodent infestations.  Archeologists tell us that in the period we are talking about Asia was also rocked by several major earthquakes that killed thousands upon thousands and destroyed many cities and villages.  The great famines of the early nineties of the first century of the Common Era also spoke to John of tragic times and the coming of the end. The threat of the Parthians, who had recently defeated the Romans in the eastern part of the empire, signaled the beginning to the end of the Pax Romana—the peace and stability of the Roman Empire.  John’s audiences could have easily recalled Nero’ persecution of Christians in 64 C.E. and although the beast Nero was dead it appeared that one like him may be rising again in the person of the Emperor Domitian.  John also has in mind the fact that Christians had been caught up in the carnage and destruction of the Jewish rebellions of 66-70 C.E. and they continued to live under the threats of persecution from Rome and Judaism.  Christians were generally looked upon by the Romans as unpatriotic because they would not worship the emperor and as atheist because they had no gods. 

Therefore, John uses highly symbolic and encrypted language and references to animals and numerology as he seeks to encourage, instruct, and comfort the churches he writes.  He uses these bizarre images and encrypted language to protect his readers should his letter fall into the wrong hands.  The author did not want to let the Romans know that God was about to wipe out the world and possibly employ Christians in this divine pogrom.

John’s over arching message is that God is the sovereign Lord of history, nations, and nature; therefore, the awful things that are happening and may happen are not senseless disasters and tragedies.  Rather, they are all part of God’s plan so hang on, history and nature are pointing to the beginning of the end. 

          In the letter, John writes to the seven churches.  He exhorts, commends, or condemns these churches for their witness, faithfulness, ineffectualness, indifferences, or falling away from true doctrine.  We glean from the words addressed to the seven churches that given the delay of Christ’ return to earth, many Christians were abandoning the faith or rethinking their faith in ways that accommodated Roman religions and culture.  They did this in order to take the pressures off themselves and their churches. John’s tells those unfaithful people that a greater disaster than Roman persecution awaits them when Christ does return.

          In summary, the book of Revelation was written to Christian Churches of John’s day in highly symbolic and encrypted language telling Christians that God is the sovereign Lord of all existence, so, hang on, the end is coming soon, things are going to get worse but the faithful will be saved and given places of glory in the new heaven and new earth.

          To this point in today’s scripture, we see a scene of heavenly praise and worship of God and the Lamb, symbolic of Jesus as the Paschal Lamb.  In the congregation, 144,000 Jews who have received the seal or sanction of God worship and follow the Lamb.  John also sees a huge multitude of people from every nation clothed in white robes of redemption and glory.  John is approached by one of the twenty-four Elders that make up the heavenly court, possibly reminiscent of the twenty-four priestly families in 1 Chronicles.  John is asked a question concerning this crowd of heavenly worshippers. We may paraphrase the question this way, “John, do you know who these people are?”  John replies, as if it may be some kind of trick question, “Sir, who better than you to tell me who they are.”  The Elder tells John that these are the people that were martyred in a great ordeal—what ordeal we are not told.  These people have actively washed their robes in blood, that is, they purposely kept their faith in God like Jesus even unto death.  These martyrs in the cause of the Lamb have paradoxically washed their robes sinlessly white in the blood of Christ and the blood of their own martyrdom and have received divine glory.

          These faithful ones, seemed to have by-passed a stay in the grave to await the final resurrection of the dead by taking the express lane of martyrdom to heaven and now worship before God daily.  These faithful of Christ from all nations, who hung in there, will never again be persecuted, hunger, thirst, or suffer the distresses of nature.  Paradoxically, the Lamb will be their shepherd and they will know no sorrow.

          John’s world ended and from it rose new generations of people, new worlds, new struggles, new disasters, new wars, and new plagues. However, the faithful of the Church of Jesus Christ won the day, they hung in there and here we are, modern Christians, facing the signs of the times of the demise of our world and its values—wars, rumors of wars, famines, pestilences, plagues, natural disasters, mindless violence, rampant immorality and vulgarity.  Yet, for those who are faithful in the Lord, God’s eternal love and grace sustains them in this life and awaits them in death.  From the ashes of the death of our world, God will raise up yet others to experience and participate in the next increments of the coming kingdom of God until all shall be fulfilled in God’s good time.

          These scenes from John we’ve heard today along with the entire book of Revelation confirm eternal truths that reside at the heart of all Scripture and particularly in the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Those truths are—God is sovereign, Creator and Sustainer of all existence and God will never loose or forget what God loves.  Those who are faithful to God until the end, even if faced with martyrdom, have the assurance that they will rest in God’s grace, love, and peace.

          Different biblical writers express these truths in different ways—some highly stylized prose, poetry and maybe by modern standards a bit cryptic and bizarre—but each bible writer understands this isn’t the best of all possible worlds, it can and will be better when God’s complete rule holds sway. In the kingdom of God, there will be peace, justice, security, and plenty for all nations and people. 

And, in death there will be no sorrow only joy because we will rest eternally in God’s love, however God chooses to keep us and love us—so hold on, hold on, the best is yet to come.