I wrote this in the fall of 2016. I had written a new message for today that continues our series on Revelation that I wasn’t tremendously happy with when I realized that I had already said most of what I was trying to say much better. But before I start I want to read the introduction to the series again.
"We are wrong about everything else but we are right about the Gospel." It's a pretty good one liner and I have kind of been using it as the unofficial motto of our church. "We are wrong about everything else but we are right about the Gospel." What I mean to imply by that is that the Gospel is the only thing that matters. The Gospel, quite literally, justifies all of our other mistakes, errors, and failures. So, for our look into Revelation the key that I intend to use is something like this. "I am wrong about eschatology. I am wrong about numerology. I am wrong about symbolism. But I intend to be right about what the Revelation says about Christ." Where it is necessary to try and interpret John's visions to tell my story, I don't intend to seek a coherent system of symbolism, I don't intend to offer any opinion on the chronology of the "End Times", not even in the most general of ways. Instead, I will shamelessly use all of the imagery and mysticism to try and illustrate the Christ of Revelation. If that is how John intended it to be used then it might work out pretty well. If it isn't, "Oh well."
Growing up in a small town deep-south Fundamentalist church the "End Times" were always being talked about and thought about. We were devoutly committed to the pre-tribulation, pre-millenial, futurist, vision of God raining down punishment on all of the people who did the things that we weren't free to do, and giving us bigger and better versions of the few things that we were allowed to enjoy, mostly ruling over others and being spiritually rich. I heard the views of our microscopic clique defended as the very Word of God and treated as if it were impossible for anyone who knew God to come up with any other conclusion when reading the strangest, most mysterious piece of literature ever written. Of course, we didn't really recognize John's Apocalypse as mysterious, poetic, and certainly not literary, in fact my mathematician grandfather wrote a book explaining all of the numbers in Revelation as if it were as straightforward as arithmetic and proving beyond all doubt that the "Tribulation" would begin in 1993 and the Lord would return in 2000 to set up a government in Jerusalem.
My childhood seems like an example so extreme as to be ludicrous but this idea of the Lord's return is deeply entrenched in Christianity. While we were willing to excommunicate over the details of our eschatological scheme, it seems like no one ever questioned the big picture of Jesus Christ as the ultimate Alpha male. Now, in a certain sense, no one should question that picture. He spoke the worlds into existence, He stared Adam down and judged the whole of humanity with all the authoritativeness of the most A-type CEO imaginable. He wiped the slate clean in a flood that forever changed the face of the earth, arbitrarily chose Abram from the rest of the idolaters as never a revolutionary dictator reshaped his country. He got straight in Pharoah's face and drug several million people, kicking and screaming, from the slave pens of Egypt like the greatest Superman comic book ever, and then proceeded to regulate the smallest details of their lives from a burning, storming mountain with unimaginable tyranny. This is a true picture of Christ, the Lord who never changes. But it isn't the only picture of Him.
I long ago rejected the theories of God which imagine some discontinuity between the God of Genesis and Exodus and the Christ of the Gospels. Christ must be the same both in Eden and Gethsemane, on Sinai and in the Sermon on the Mount, walking the forty years in the desert and walking the Via Dolorosa else He is not Himself. But the two pictures seem so radically different that it is hard, maybe impossible, for our minds to combine them in a single consistent picture. What two things could seem more opposite than Joshua conquering Palestine city by city, terrifying the inhabitants with divine might and disposing of all things as he chooses; and the Apostles chased from city to city, a laughingstock and a joke, in prison, on the execution block, helpless and foolish. As I grow older, I have become more respectful of those who seeing this difficulty simply throw up their hands and exclaim that this must be the work of two different Gods. At least they are taking an honest look and choosing an option that seems credible, rather than defending something that they think ridiculous simply out of fear that rejecting it will exclude you from the love of God. Is there a combination of the two in which we can rest? Can the Firstborn of All Creation be the last and least of men, rejected and despised? Can the Alpha of all Alphas be Omega? He claims that He is, and He is faithful and true.
It seems as if we are stuck with a picture that we can't get into focus. All of the lines seem blurred like a photo of a moving object. And I think that is the problem. Alpha and Omega is a snapshot at one moment in time of that which is outside time, the Eternal One. He never moves and He always moves. From the beginning He works but His whole being is a Sabbath rest. To begin to understand Him, we need that snapshot but we also need a video, a narrative and a story requires more than one character. The other character is made from the dust, the lowest and humblest imaginable. His life is lived in the very dust from which He came, toiling dragging his living from the soil. He is a murderer, a madman, a thief and a liar. It is fair to say that he has "sought out many schemes" which have turned Earth from a Paradise into a Hell. Every advance we have made has proven to simply be a way to increase the mayhem we cause. This man "made in the image of God" seems more like a photographic negative, and as God is all light we seem to be all darkness. And that is the problem which causes the plot of our story. Like all good stories it is a love story, a love story between one who is high and lifted up and one who is wallowing in his own filth.
It is the story then of a great prince in love with a peasant woman. The glory of love is to make the unequal equal. And in our imagination this can be done by raising the lower to the level of the higher, but reality is more glorious than that. In the real world, this must always be done by the greater willingly making himself less that He and His love might be one. The prince then becomes a peasant, not just in appearance but in reality. Reality is that Cinderella doesn't move in to the palace, happily ever after happens in a shack with the Prince digging ditches to put food on her table. He who previously owned the cattle of a thousand hills, must now either work or starve, but to get closer to the matter, He who once said, "Your brother's blood cries out to me from the ground." must say, "I am not a judge between you and your brother.", The wisdom which ordered all things is reduced to a simplicity which honest men find difficult to tell from retardation. I can't make this story as true as the Four Evangelists, somehow they show Him as both at the same time, which is the truth and beyond my poor ability. We get that He made Himself the lowest and least of men, but somehow we think it was just a show, that at the Ascension He became again what He was before. Such a thought is unworthy of Him. To do so would be for Him to go backwards, but He is not a man to repent. The great pattern of His story cannot be reversed, the Prince gets ever lower and lower. He was once All that Is, by His choice, He can now be trivialized, marginalized, overlooked.
The only thing that we can see lower than a baby in a stable, is a condemned man on a cross. But there is something yet lower. I don't know what it is because, despite it being almost 20 years after His predicted return, He has not shown it to us yet. Might I suggest, that His Second Coming will be yet more humiliating than His First, and will cement Him to ourselves yet more surely? The glorious picture that John, the greatest of all poets saw, can only be seen by the poetic part of man. In a literal way, His return will be pathetic, laughable, and probably end yet more tragically than His life. But, the question is, will your heart sing at the poetry of the Lord of Heaven and Earth becoming literally garbage for the woman He loves?
the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each having a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song, saying:
“You are worthy to take the scroll,
And to open its seals;
For You were slain,
And have redeemed us to God by Your blood
Out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation,
And have made us kings and priests to our God;
And we shall reign on the earth.”
Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne, the living creatures, and the elders; and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice:
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain
To receive power and riches and wisdom,
And strength and honor and glory and blessing!”
And every creature which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, I heard saying:
“Blessing and honor and glory and power
Be to Him who sits on the throne,
And to the Lamb, forever and ever!”
Then the four living creatures said, “Amen!” And the twenty-four elders fell down and worshiped Him who lives forever and ever
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