Mea Culpa to Credo remissionem peccatorum

I was 15 when my brother Chris came home from the Navy.  He had brought all of us little presents and whatnot and a day or two later we were alone and he was like, "Oh dude, check this out." and he introduced me to his collection of Playboys.  To a lonely young man, they were like heroin, drawing me to them over and over even as my disgust with myself grew, eventually the feelings of helplessness and loss of control caused me to throw them out just to get a little bit of peace.  And that peace lasted more or less until I moved into a college dorm with a broadband internet connection.  

A Psalm of David. To bring to remembrance.

O Lord, do not rebuke me in Your wrath,
Nor chasten me in Your hot displeasure!
For Your arrows pierce me deeply,
And Your hand presses me down.

There is no soundness in my flesh
Because of Your anger,
Nor any health in my bones
Because of my sin.
For my iniquities have gone over my head;
Like a heavy burden they are too heavy for me.
My wounds are foul and festering
Because of my foolishness.

I was raised very strictly Baptist, and 23 years of addiction to porn has brought me all of the guilt, and shame, and secrecy, and self-loathing that anybody is likely to find in this life.  I threw the magazines away so long ago, but I can't throw away every computer, every cell phone that I find myself alone with.  And no efforts to throw away the part of me that is drawn to what I profess to hate have been very successful.

I am troubled, I am bowed down greatly;
I go mourning all the day long.
For my loins are full of inflammation,
And there is no soundness in my flesh.
I am feeble and severely broken;
I groan because of the turmoil of my heart.

Lord, all my desire is before You;
And my sighing is not hidden from You.
My heart pants, my strength fails me;
As for the light of my eyes, it also has gone from me.

My loved ones and my friends stand aloof from my plague,
And my relatives stand afar off.
Those also who seek my life lay snares for me;
Those who seek my hurt speak of destruction,
And plan deception all the day long.

But I, like a deaf man, do not hear;
And I am like a mute who does not open his mouth.
Thus I am like a man who does not hear,
And in whose mouth is no response.

For in You, O Lord, I hope;
You will hear, O Lord my God.
For I said, “Hear me, lest they rejoice over me,
Lest, when my foot slips, they exalt themselves against me.”

We were always taught that Christians can rule over and conquer sin, and when we can't we are left lower than low.  Depression has lived in the backs of our minds for so long, ready with just a nudge to take over us.  And all of the inspirational racket the church makes has never changed any of that for me.  If I were to define addiction, one part of the definition would have to be that the addiction is stronger than you are.  You are bound to it, and all of the people that say you can overcome with willpower, and when the church tells this lie they add in the Spirit like the pixie dust that makes Peter Pan fly if he just thinks the right thoughts.  We just have to try harder, love God more than the sin and the self, do this, do that, and you will be free.  But I've been at this game long enough not to believe that anymore.  How many times do you think I will go around the same circle expecting to wind up somewhere different?

For I am ready to fall,
And my sorrow is continually before me.
For I will declare my iniquity;
I will be in anguish over my sin.
But my enemies are vigorous, and they are strong;
And those who hate me wrongfully have multiplied.
Those also who render evil for good,
They are my adversaries, because I follow what is good.

Do not forsake me, O Lord;
O my God, be not far from me!
Make haste to help me,
O Lord, my salvation!

Psalm 38

 

Mea Culpa-My sin, my fault.  Calvin said that whatever you feel, whatever is in your heart, the Psalmist has felt it and found a way to put it into words.  And maybe that is the great power of the Psalms, not their beauty or their uniqueness but their plainness and their commonness, their simple humanity.  Their power is the power to make us no longer alone, to let us see that at least one other person has felt what we feel and stood where we stand, and you know he did, David did, come out of it ok.  The Psalms descend into the miserable depths of the human soul, and they don't back away, they don't run off, they stay there, they live there unless and until God, through faith brings them out the other side.  And it's this common humanity, this lowliness, this refusal to draw back from humiliation that is the touchstone of the truly Christian.

The seed of all sin, the first lie is "You shall be like God".  If the truth is that God is way up there and we are way down here, then the lie works in two ways, it raises us up, at least in our own estimation, above common humanity, which is why Augustine says that all sin comes from pride.  And secondly, it brings God down, our desire to close the gap between ourselves and God causes us to see Him as less than He is, causes us to believe like Adam and Eve that He is holding out on us, that He has good things that He doesn't plan to give us, which is why Calvin says that all sin is unbelief.  Pride makes us see ourselves as more than we are, makes us despise humanity as something beneath us, while it actually erodes our humanity.  Unbelief, lack of faith, makes us see God as less than He is and do all we can to injure His Divinity.

For Moses writes about the righteousness which is of the law, “The man who does those things shall live by them.” But the righteousness of faith speaks in this way, “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ down from above) or, “ ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ ” (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith which we preach): that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. For the Scripture says, “Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.”  from Romans 10

The classic Protestant theory of preaching is to preach Law and then Gospel.  To use the Law to "afflict the comfortable", to make us feel our sinfulness, and then use the Gospel to "comfort the afflicted", to make us feel His salvation.  My criticism of this is that we have plenty of Law inside of us, our sense of our own failures is never far away, guilt and shame are the stories of our life.  When you see someone doing everything they can not to think about something, it's not really that necessary to remind them of it.  On the other hand, the Gospel is never inside of us.  It is always strange and alien, it always comes from outside as a shock and the Glorious Invasion of the Return of the King.  That is the only way that the Good News can still be news after 2000 years and good news to people who have lived with it their entire lives, by always being strange to us.  There is no little voice inside of us saying, "You are forgiven.  You are free.  God Himself has taken up your cause."  There is only the proclamation from outside, "I baptise you.", "I absolve you", "This IS my body, broken for You."

In our pride, we despise humanity, which we see as beneath us.  We have nothing but contempt for the weakness and foolishness which really are, and always will be, our defining features.  We despise the commonness of bread and wine and death, which are really the tokens of our humanity, which is what we truly despise.  But to Christ, and in Christ, humanity is become a chosen vessel and a royal priesthood, not by becoming something other than what it always has been, not by changing into something more than human, but by His glorious Choice, by His bare and solitary election to be human, to be weak, to eat and drink and die.  Because He has chosen to come to us in the things that we have rejected, we have rejected Him.

That means that all of our attempts to "draw nearer to Christ", are actually more of the same old shit.  Our spirituality remains a rejection of our own humanity, which is the only thing that we have in common with Christ.  God in Heaven was too high for us so we tried to snatch Him down.  God in the manger and the grave is too low for us so we try to pull Him up to an acceptable moral altitude.  But the "Word of Faith" latches on to His humanity, His humiliation, His lowliness and so comes to terms with our own sinfulness, our own humanity and this is the new thinking, the new mind which is real repentance.

A movement toward Christ must always be a movement toward our own humanity.  It is a rejection, a repentance of our upward striving, however spiritual we may believe that to be.  Our objective is the God in the Manger, the God walking in sandals laughing and crying, hungry and thirsty, lonely and tired, loving and frustrated, the God who is happily among His friends and the God who is betrayed and tried in a kangaroo court.  So, what is the movement to Christ?  Maybe the simplest way to describe such a move is to consider how it differs from religion.  Religion always aspires upward, to become increasingly removed from ordinary life and thus closer to God In Heaven.  But drawing nearer to Christ makes us closer to other people not further away.  Every religion is esoteric, which is to say that to move deeper into the religion involves obtaining hidden, secret knowledge that those at lower levels do not possess, that may even contradict the beliefs which are openly taught.   On the other hand, what is first taught In Christianity is the sum total of the whole and those who think that they have progressed are advised to hold the beginning of faith unchanged, and return to their first love.  The difference between the experienced saint and the novice is not that they have a different or larger creed but that they have more thoroughly internalized the creed we all share.  Growth in Christ is not knowing new things but taking the original ground of faith and integrating it more deeply into our lives. 

So, we know where we are, we are at Mea Culpa, I am the guilty one, it is my fault.  What will take us away from that, who will deliver us from this body of sin?  It is not some new stronger faith, not some will more impervious to temptation, not some strategy or trick, not some new knowledge, not some upwelling of love for God or one another.  It is to remain at and return to the beginning, the Creed.  To simply believe in the forgiveness of sins.

Come Quickly Lord Jesus

 So, a study of Revelation should end by talking about eternal life, about what our state will be when God's Mighty Acts are completed.  Which is a bit of a stumper since we don't, certainly I don't, know much of anything about the future state.  A much wiser, much more insightful, and much much much more inspired man than I wrote that, "Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is." from 1 John 3.  I personally think that John the Apostle, is John of Patmos, that is the author of John's Gospel is the author of John's Epistles, and also the author of the Revelation.  I don't know it for a fact but I suspect it.  Further, I think that the visions He records in the Revelation he had at a rather early date, probably in the 40 AD decade, long before he wrote the epistle that we call 1 John.  I think, that much of what seems so different between John's writings and those of the other apostles, and the Christology that critics say is much too advanced and developed for the first century, especially that found in his Gospel, is explained by years, decades more likely, of thinking about the Jesus that he saw in these visions recorded in the Revelation and looking for the unity between that Jesus and the Jesus that he walked around Galilee with in his youth.  And the man who saw the throne room of heaven, saw the New Jerusalem come down out of heaven, saw the city that needs no sun for it's light is the Lamb, said that it wasn't really clear to HIM what WE shall be in that day.  So you can bet that I don't know.

So much focus is put on trying to bring men to eternal life, but it's an eternal life that is a big mystery to us.  So, I want to look at it another way, in the light of John's comments that "seeing Christ as He is" will make us like him, and " this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent." from John 17.  So, our stated goal has been to Reveal Christ, to bring men to the knowledge of Him, so I will attempt to recap what we have said about Christ, not merely as a conclusion, but as offering us the only knowledge about the next life, about who and what we will be, which can be meaningful to us in this life.

So,  the story is about a Scroll that's how we began this journey almost two years ago, the knowledge of God sealed in a scroll, a knowledge which must be opened not once, but seven times, that is to say continually, by the Slain Lamb, the knowledge of God must never launch itself into exalted speculation but must be unceasingly grounded in the Hill of Calvary.  The knowledge of God is described either as four separate horsemen or as the four activities of the Rider of the White Horse.  He is the Conqueror, who is righteous in Judgement and when He makes War, and who is followed by and holds the keys to Death and Hell.

In what sense is He the Conqueror?  We said that legalism is the placing of God in a box, it is limiting what He can or will do for us, such that we seek good from other sources, from our own knowledge, from an apple, from a snake.  And so the conquering Gospel is the news that the Heavens cannot contain Him!  All of creation is too small an arena for His grace to be fully unfurled, and He is sovereignly determined to be absolutely as good and gracious as can be, and so certainly no temple, no box, no statutes, no limitations on who or how or when he might be merciful can be stipulated.  We are bound to ways and means, but His Gospel rides over the whole earth.  In short, the Rider of the White Horse may be said to always be riding down the Damascus Road, always taking us stubborn Sauls so zealous for the Law, so eager to persecute any who do not walk according to our traditions, always taking us and making us into Pauls.  Thus He irresistibly conquerors our rebel hearts.  We, then, will be Conquerors, more than conquerors as John has it in another place.  We will have the ability to bring the Gospel to bear in any situation, as Christ did to Saul, to transform our world by applying the power of His resurrection.

We looked at His judgments, specifically those which seem most abhorrent to us, His plagues.  When we see Him raining fire on the Earth, destroying the trees and grasses, killing the fish and the animals, poisoning the water, and causing diseases on men, our fallen minds conclude that He is unrighteous, we ourselves, conclude that He is unrighteous.  But just and true are all of His ways, and these plagues only take away the means, the signs of blessing and not the blessing itself.  He separates us from those things on which we imagine we are dependant, water and food the grasses and trees, all of those things which we imagine bring us good, peace and health, which we imagine we need, life itself, so that we can see that He alone has always been the sole source of our good.  If we lose all else and retain Christ then we have lost nothing, and we have gained clarity.  This absolutely applies to us.  Paul tells us that we will judge angels and are absolutely competent to judge earthly matters.  In the Resurrection then, we will be able to do what men have been trying to do since the Fall, to set the systems of society and the earth right.  Utopia famously doesn't exist, and every attempt to create it has only led to hate and destruction.  Every Revolution has only been a swapping of one set of oppressors for another.  But there is a time coming when He will rule the world from His holy mountain.  

 From Micah 4: Now it shall come to pass in the latter days
That the mountain of the Lord’s house
Shall be established on the top of the mountains,
And shall be exalted above the hills;
And peoples shall flow to it.
Many nations shall come and say,
“Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
To the house of the God of Jacob;
He will teach us His ways,
And we shall walk in His paths.”
For out of Zion the law shall go forth,
And the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between many peoples,
And rebuke strong nations afar off;
They shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war anymore.
But everyone shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree,
And no one shall make them afraid;
For the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.
For all people walk each in the name of his god,
But we will walk in the name of the Lord our God
Forever and ever.
“In that day,” says the Lord,
“I will assemble the lame,
I will gather the outcast
And those whom I have afflicted;
I will make the lame a remnant,
And the outcast a strong nation;
So the Lord will reign over them in Mount Zion
From now on, even forever
And you, O tower of the flock,
The stronghold of the daughter of Zion,
To you shall it come,
Even the former dominion shall come,
The kingdom of the daughter of Jerusalem.”

We considered when Christ makes war.  He makes war on those who accuse the Saints, whether in Heaven or on the Earth.  Though He waits long He will stand up for His martyrs and will show that in the words of the Prophets, "His arm is not shortened."  For our sake, He makes war on every idea, every Angel, every power, which is against His people and against the knowledge of the Cross.  Most of all, He makes war on the "handwriting that is against us", He makes war on Law, as it is understood by fallen hearts, He makes war on condemnation, He makes war on the whole system of the universe, when it proves itself, as it has, to be against Him and against His little flock.  Christ makes war on the Law, exactly by placing himself under it.  He makes war on the Law by being killed by it, and being justified against it when God raises Him not merely from the Grave but to the Right Hand of His Father.

But He has placed Himself not merely under Law but under Death and under Hell.  All of the things which condemn us are themselves condemned because they have condemned Christ, who is not merely undeserving of condemnation but is the Lord of Glory.  But they have been more than condemned, they have been conquered as completely as Saul of Tarsus.  Death is condemned for raising its hand against Jesus but is delivered from the futility to which it has been subjected so as to become the vehicle of Resurrection.  He has descended beneath all things that He might raise all things up with Him.

Law is confronted by something more primal, more basic than itself.  Mercy triumphs over justice in the way that the foundation triumphs over the superstructure.  And when all of the books of our works are opened and speak condemnation to us, they are silenced by Another Book, by the book of the True and Living Lamb.  And though we have grown old in the ways of this world, we will be made children again in His resurrection, though we have grown wise in evil and suffering, we will be innocent and simple once more.  There are New Heavens and a New Earth, an abiding home for us, a city with foundations, which Abel and Abraham and all of our Fathers before us have preferred to seek as pilgrims rather than to live in this world as their home.  If we didn't feel like strangers and pilgrims in this world previously, then the events of the past few months have made it painfully clear that we will never belong here.  Our home has been far away, invisible, it has been the stuff of dreams but it will not be so much longer.

Our beloved is returning soon, the very same Jesus who loved us and gave Himself for us, He is returning unchanged, returning in and through the Way of the Cross.  His feet shall stand again on the Mount of Olives shall again walk the paths of Gethsemane.  His return is a response to the cry of the martyr's under the altar who say, "How long, O Lord, until you avenge our blood?" for precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.  This world's attachment to its own righteousness is fundamentally irreconcilable with the Saints who do not justify themselves but hope that God will justify them, as He indeed does by raising them up just as He raised up Christ.  The Great Pauline Antithesis between Faith and Works must end, and it ends in blood, it ends with works being cast into the Lake of Fire that there may be rest.  The Lord has seen that all of Creation needs its Rest, its Sabbaths, and since we continue to deprive ourselves and our world of that rest by our obsession with justifying ourselves by our works, He will put an end to all works.  Human effort and the worship of that Beast is overcome by the Lord who would not fight the soldiers who came to take Him but healed the ear that Peter cut, the Lord who is returning is the Lord who said, "Take me then but let these go."  So that whatever attends the return we can see it is the return of the Beloved, and say with real feeling, "Even so, Come quickly Lord Jesus"

The Mount of Olives

Opposites attract.  Whether in Physics or Relationships or Theology, this seems to hold true.  Protons and electrons find no peace until they find the one that completes them.  Like the elementary particles, we rush toward one that seems most different from us, knowing that if we can get close enough we can find that deeper union, that the surface differences arise from some fundamental and elementary fit-ness for one another.  This has kind of always been my guiding principal to understanding the Scriptures.  That where I find the thing that sticks out, that seems different that is an opportunity to find the deeper underlying unity.  And the main goal of the study of Revelation has been to see how the strange, wrathful, warmaking, mysterious Christ of John's visions really hasn't changed since He walked and talked and loved and cried and died and rose.  He told His disciples that if they searched the Prophets they would find Him, because He was the One the Prophets wrote about, I have been searching the New Testament Prophet for the same purpose, to find Christ and His Gospel.

Some might argue that I have ignored the obvious in my search, that I have not so much found the Christ of Revelation as I have twisted Him into the Christ of the Gospels.  If I have, I have.  But this conflict between Christ's love and His wrath is one of the fundamental difficulties of the Christian experience.  And I can't pretend to resolve or even ease the difficulty that we all feel when we see our loving gentle lamb being the lion, in fact it's not even my goal today to try.  Instead I intend to wake up the difficulty, to bring it to the front of your life for a few moments, to rub your nose in the fact that there is a very real and true side of Christ that you and I find very difficult to accept.  If we wish to see these two sides of Christ then like everything about Him they seem to get turned up to eleven when you throw Jerusalem into the mix.

Jesus had this continual attraction to Jerusalem, for a lot of reasons that we can only partly understand, Zion, the Mount Moriah where He rescued Isaac, the City of David, that He rose up early again and again with Jeremiah to try and save, His Own that He came to and was rejected by, the City on the Seven Hills that stoned the Prophets and crucified Him both attracted and frustrated Him.  The great love of His life, His one great passion, that stormiest of romances could wheel from "Hosanna to the Son of David", to "His blood be on us and on our children" in such a short space of time.  When the Man of Sorrows wept, mostly He wept over Jerusalem's refusal to be loved by Him.  He couldn't stand to be away from Jerusalem and when as often happened He couldn't stand to be in Jerusalem either He had sort of an escape valve, called the Mount of Olives.  Over and over in the Gospels we see Christ in Jerusalem seeking a rest from Jerusalem in His hidden place on Olivet.  Now the Mount of Olives is one of the seven hills on which the city was built, it sort of supports the eastern side of the city, and many of its slopes offered a place of solitude while still being very near to Jerusalem.

In the Gospels, when you find Jesus teaching the twelve apart from the crowd, I think that very often it was in this place.  His habit of coming here was so pronounced that when Judas sought Him, he led the soldiers here with no doubt in his mind that they would find Christ in the hidden garden on the mountain.  But what does any of this have to do with Revelation?  Because it is to this place that He is going to Return.

From Zechariah 14: Behold, the day of the Lord is coming,

And your spoil will be divided in your midst.

For I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem;

The city shall be taken,

The houses rifled,

And the women ravished.

Half of the city shall go into captivity,

But the remnant of the people shall not be cut off from the city.

Then the Lord will go forth

And fight against those nations,

As He fights in the day of battle.

And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives,

Which faces Jerusalem on the east.

However much we don't like to think about it, Jesus Christ is the Lord of Hosts, He is the One who leads us into battle.  That's not something that is all in the past.  The Lamb does not supercede the Lion, but He is both simultaneously.  And the differences between the Children of God and the Nations of this World are not going to be settled amicably.  We try and pretend otherwise, we hope otherwise, but when it comes down to a fight as it inevitably will, know that the Lord is on our side. 

And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two,

From east to west,

Making a very large valley;

Half of the mountain shall move toward the north

And half of it toward the south.

Just a brief pause for those who think that maybe this is all in the past and relates to the Roman destruction of Jerusalem or something like that.  If you aren't sure, just check Google Earth and see if the mountain has been split in two, see if there is a big valley with a river in it flowing out of the Eastern Gate of Jerusalem through where the mountain used to be.  If there ain't then I am pretty sure that Christ's Return to Jerusalem to His garden on Olivet is something still to look forward to.

 

Then you shall flee through My mountain valley,

For the mountain valley shall reach to Azal.

Yes, you shall flee

As you fled from the earthquake

In the days of Uzziah king of Judah.

Thus the Lord my God will come,

And all the saints with You.

It shall come to pass in that day

That there will be no light;

The lights will diminish.

It shall be one day

Which is known to the Lord—

Neither day nor night.

But at evening time it shall happen

That it will be light.

And in that day it shall be

That living waters shall flow from Jerusalem,

Half of them toward the eastern sea

And half of them toward the western sea;

In both summer and winter it shall occur.

And the Lord shall be King over all the earth.

In that day it shall be—

“The Lord is one,”

And His name one.

All the land shall be turned into a plain from Geba to Rimmon south of Jerusalem. Jerusalem shall be raised up and inhabited in her place from Benjamin’s Gate to the place of the First Gate and the Corner Gate, and from the Tower of Hananel to the king’s winepresses.

The people shall dwell in it;

And no longer shall there be utter destruction,

But Jerusalem shall be safely inhabited.

This is the famous Millenial Reign, when Christ rules the nations from Jerusalem.  There is in this text, no indication of allegory, while the passage is filled with meaning on many levels, it is definitely not merely symbolic.

And this shall be the plague with which the Lord will strike all the people who fought against Jerusalem:

Their flesh shall dissolve while they stand on their feet,

Their eyes shall dissolve in their sockets,

And their tongues shall dissolve in their mouths.

It shall come to pass in that day

That a great panic from the Lord will be among them.

Everyone will seize the hand of his neighbor,

And raise his hand against his neighbor’s hand;

Judah also will fight at Jerusalem.

And the wealth of all the surrounding nations

Shall be gathered together:

Gold, silver, and apparel in great abundance.

Such also shall be the plague

On the horse and the mule,

On the camel and the donkey,

And on all the cattle that will be in those camps.

So shall this plague be.

And it shall come to pass that everyone who is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. And it shall be that whichever of the families of the earth do not come up to Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, on them there will be no rain. If the family of Egypt will not come up and enter in, they shall have no rain; they shall receive the plague with which the Lord strikes the nations who do not come up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles. This shall be the punishment of Egypt and the punishment of all the nations that do not come up to keep the Feast of Tabernacles.

In that day “HOLINESS TO THE LORD” shall be engraved on the bells of the horses. The pots in the Lord’s house shall be like the bowls before the altar. Yes, every pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be holiness to the Lord of hosts. Everyone who sacrifices shall come and take them and cook in them. In that day there shall no longer be a Canaanite(read Palestinian) in the house of the Lord of hosts

This is not what is known in modern Mideast politics as a "two state solution".  Now we can hear more about this war and this Millenium from Revelation especially ch17-20 but I assume no one doubts that that is there and I want to rush on to our main point.  Which is that however the Lord's return looks, however much it might appear that He is going to be king over this world, the kingdom He preaches is NOT of this world and never will be.  In the Old Testament the Mount of Olives is only mentioned twice that I can find, once as we have read from Zechariah as the place to which Christ will return, and once incidentally as a place David paused at while fleeing from Absalom, but in the Gospels this mountain takes on an importance, a centrality where His Return is concerned that only the presence and significance of His Garden can account for.  Christ's Return is a return to the Mount of Olives which I propose should be read first and foremost as a Return to Gethsemane.

Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?” from Matthew 24

Christ's famous discourse on His return, The Olivet Discourse, the so called Synoptic Apocalypse, where He gathered together all of the terrifying, upsetting signs and signals of His return, where He laid on the judgment as thick as He was able, was delivered in private to His disciples on the Mount of Olives, which means that in all probability it was delivered in the place where Judas was so confident He could be found, the place where you and I have found Him time and again.  Gethsemane.  So combine all of that apocalyptic, judgmental imagery with the tortured faith of Our Lord in His Father's will.  Combine, if you can, ruling the nations with a rod of iron, with patiently awaiting the traitor's kiss.  His return is not a new thing, but the completion of what Luke calls, "the decease, the death, He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem".  It is from this place that Christ ascended, and from this place, per Acts 1 to which He will return. He does not return to condemn and strike the wicked, but to deliver His people, the condemnation and striking is a necessary but incidental accompaniment to that salvation.  

His return is a response to the cry of the martyr's under the altar who say, "How long, O Lord, until you avenge our blood?" for precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints.  This world's attachment to its own righteousness is fundamentally irreconcilable with the Saints who do not justify themselves but hope that God will justify them, as He indeed does by raising them up just as He raised up Christ.  The Great Pauline Antithesis between Faith and Works must end, and it ends in blood, it ends with works being cast into the Lake of Fire that there may be rest.  The Lord has seen that all of Creation needs its Rest, its Sabbaths, and since we continue to deprive ourselves and our world of that rest by our obsession with justifying ourselves by our works, He will put an end to all works.  Human effort and the worship of that Beast is overcome by the Lord who would not fight the soldiers who came to take Him but healed the ear that Peter cut, the Lord who is returning is the Lord who said, "Take me then but let these go."  As horrible as a face-melting plague sounds it can like all authority in Heaven and Earth be trusted to the One who gave Himself for us.  The fundamental issue we need to see about the Lord's return is not when but who.  So that whatever attends the return we can see it is the return of the Beloved, and say with real feeling, "Even so, Come quickly Lord Jesus"

The Children Get Up and Reign-Another Book pt. 5

This is the fifth part in a series that begins with The Conqueror.  I am pasting here the introduction from Part 1 that serves as the introduction to the whole series.

"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, I don't know how far our little look into Revelation will get but 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."

A few weeks ago while visiting my dad, we decided to go and see his mother's grave since I had not been there since the funeral.  Cemeteries always hit me in a weird place, I don't know how to describe what I think or feel when I am there, but Carpenter Cemetery most of all because that is where my people are buried.  It is just a field deep in rural Florida.  I think the land for it must have been part of a farm before because it is still surrounded by fields with just a small wild growth around to separate the cemetery from the farmland.  There is no church attached or anything, it is just a well tended lawn with a few bushes and a lot of curious stonework stuck in the ground.  The kids had been cooped up in the van all morning so while Daddy and I were looking at and talking about our people who were there we let them run about on the paths.  But when they wanted to play hide and seek I had to tell them no because I didn't want them getting wild and I was concerned that it might be disrespectful.

And I think that that was the germination of my thoughts.  Who would it be disrespectful to?  Well, to the ones who were in the graves.  To the dead.  To Granny, and to her daddy that I never met, and to Great Gran, who we buried the first time I was in that place when I was just a boy?  But these weren't some anonymous, faceless dead who's presence called for an anonymous, faceless respect.  They were people who I knew, people who were planted there as seeds in the hope of rising again.  And as I thought about who they really were, it occurred to me that they would not be upset at children playing around their graves, and then I saw for a moment the dead rising, not as we had planted them but as children able to see the truth of the graveyard where they lay for so long, able to see that it would be an excellent place to play hide and seek.

From Revelation 20: Then I saw a great white throne and Him who sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away. And there was found no place for them. And I saw the dead, small and great, standing before God, and books were opened. And the dead were judged according to their works, by the things which were written in the books. The sea gave up the dead who were in it, and Death and Hades delivered up the dead who were in them. And they were judged, each one according to his works.

One of the great themes in Revelation is that things go like you expect them to, up to a point.  All of the ancient societies that we know anything about had a story like this, of men being judged according to their works after their death.  And Revelation follows the script.  Until it doesn't.

A lot of groups within Christianity that seem very different on the surface have very deep similarities.  I am thinking of the Church of Rome and the Dispensationalists.  I know that in a lot of ways they are very different but the similarity that I had in mind is that they both see Grace and Forgiveness as a sort of big exception to Justice, which they consider a fundamental reality.  The Dispensationalists go so far as to talk of Christ's Church and His New Covenant as existing in a "Parenthesis"-of it being an isolated thing that has no effect on the rest of time and space which lives under the rigor of the Law.  The Romanists on the other hand, see God as defaulting to a works based judgment and only being moved if some outside force, Mary or the Saints pleads in a specific instance for Grace.  Now, personally I think that both are examples of how the God of Philosophy, the God built out of what seems right to man, has been substituted for the God of Scripture.

And another book was opened, which is the Book of Life.  Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And noone found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.

First off, full disclosure.  I rearranged this passage slightly, moving the introduction of The Other Book down about two verses to be adjacent to the passage that describes the significance of the Book of Life, I also moved the negation in the last sentence.  The last sentence is usually translated something like "Anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the Lake of Fire." but I have written it as, "Noone found written in the Book of Life was cast into the Lake of Fire." because the point is not the destruction but the abundant Grace.  But back to the point.

Our sins and our virtues, if any, have been made irrelevant.  In John's vision, the books of our works are read into the record and a verdict is reached about us based on those works, and then something more basic, more fundamental steps in and revises the verdicts based solely on the goodness of God.  Paul draws the scenario rather more simply when he says that the writing which is against us has simply been erased.  But in both cases what is significant is that justice, not weak and corrupt human justice but the perfection of divine justice gives way before something older, something more fundamental.  Justice is shown to be logically accidental to God's nature when it collides with Goodness and Grace which are shown to be of the essence of God.  Mercy triumphs over justice and love covers a multitude of sins, and the Law not only cannot annul the Promise, which precedes it, but is annulled by the Promise on which the Law is built.

We have tried to focus on Revelation as "The Revelation of Jesus Christ" and we have seen Him righteous in judgment and when He makes War, and holding the keys to Death and Hell, but I think that here we have the beginning and end of John's vision of Christ.  It begins with only the Slain Lamb able to open the scroll, which I have said indicates that it is only through Christ's death that we can see the true nature of God, and almost the very end, after the wrath of God is finished, after the Krisis of Judgment, in which God is shown as an impersonal Law Enforcer the very idea of God that led Adam to hide behind the bush, "Another Book" is opened, the Tree of Life has been made into a Book of Life, and this is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, the Revelation of Gracious Salvation, the Noone who is in the Death of Christ is subject to their own Death.  That His Death is more alive than our lives.
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From 1 Corinthians 15 So also is the resurrection of the dead. The body is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. 

I remember my dead, and it is not that they had grown beyond play, that they had advanced to a sober mien and respectful deportment.  And as I am becoming older and carrying myself in a little more dignified way myself I recognize that this is not a growth or an advance.  We have not risen above play but fallen back from it, as our bodies are no longer up to the task of play.  I pray however that our hearts and our minds have not become so sick and frail as our bodies, and I know that my Granny's had not, and from what I remember of her mother she had not either.  And I dreamed them, risen as children, hiding behind and chasing one another around and over and through the graves that they vacated.

While I don't mean to say that we haven't made any progress from our childhood, much of what we have learned has been how to make do with reduced circumstances.  We have learned how to eat and live to take care of bodies that once could consume nothing but colored sugar and run and jump all day long without the slightest twinge of pain or fatigue.  We have learned how to get by in a world that provides only a scanty part of what we need mixed with great piles of futility.

It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body. And so it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being.” The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.
However, the spiritual is not first, but the natural, and afterward the spiritual. The first man was of the earth, made of dust; the second Man is the Lord from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are made of dust; and as is the heavenly Man, so also are those who are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly Man.

We have borne the image of Adam, and what is Adam's story?  It is to begin with freedom, and health, and power, and joy and to sink into slavery, and sickness, and frailty, and misery.  But we shall bear the image of Christ, and what is Christ's story?  It is to triumph in and through all of these things, a spirit who's life overflows so much that it brings life to all around.  The problem with the world that we live in can be defined very simply.  All of the imagination and creativity, all of the dreams are concentrated in the boys.  And all of the skill and the knowledge and the capability is concentrated in the men.  By the time that we learn how to make things happen, we have forgotten the grand and noble things that we once wanted to make happen, and we use our skill and knowledge to make trivial and petty things happen instead.  And so, greatness would be to obtain the skill and knowledge of manhood without losing the vision of boyhood, and I must insist that the Resurrection is not a rising to an eternal choir practice or an eternal church service but a new life, not simply being carried to a Senior Center of a Heaven but New Heavens and a New Earth, new worlds to explore, new adventures to have, and the capacity to have and enjoy those adventures.

Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does corruption inherit incorruption. Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed— in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O Death, where is your sting?
O Hades, where is your victory?” from 1 Corinthians 15

So, what does all of this mean?  What's the takeaway?  Just that we shouldn't let the failure of this body be the failure of our dreams.  So, I'm asking you simply to set goals and dream dreams that cannot be completed in this life.  When this life is over, our accomplishments will be meager, our contribution insignificant, and if in this life only we have hope then we are truly pitiful.  So, the book of human wisdom advises us to set goals consistent with the tight constraints we live under.  But there is another book, and it promises that what we can do now, compares to the potential, to the Glory that will be revealed in us, as a seed compares to a tree.  Don't let the end of this life be the end of your dreams.

Good Friday Part 1 - Judas

It was going to be a day where extremes met.  Light and darkness were meeting in the closest quarters.  The Divine and the Satanic were racing toward one another to a still collision.  And while most of the players in this drama of dramas were locked fast into their roles, all things hung on the free choice of one man.  It was certain that before the day was out life and death, hope and despair, faith and sin, love and hate would circle about each other, changing places, revolving round and round in a dance that would make the future, that much was certain, but whether the dance was an embrace or a grappling to the bitter end was hidden in the freedom and good pleasure of Our Lord on Good Friday morning.  This wasn't the first time that this Man had stood face to face with Evil.  When the Tempter had been thwarted he had departed to wait for, "an opportune time" and now that time had come.  This time the tempter was armed with more than hunger, and doubt, and plausibility.  He would bring to bear against The Lord God, Betrayal, and Death, and Desolation, and he would come with the face of a friend and with a kiss.

Our theories of the Atonement, of How Our Lord took away our sin, focus on satisfying divine justice, of substitution of the Innocent for guilty Sinners, and there is much truth in all of that.  But for a long time I have felt our hope is, or at least should be, centered not in the actions of Christ but in His mind.  Our hope is in the righteous Personality that swallows the sin of the world as the ocean swallows a single drop of poison.  Anyone familiar with my writing has probably noticed attempts to look into His psychology, and while I don't feel bound to call such attempts failures, I certainly can't call them successes.  The Son of Man is like us except for sin but I find His mind a million miles away from anything I can understand.  So, for this Good Friday, I am going to try and approach Him indirectly, that is I am going to try and look into the hearts and minds of two of the supporting characters in His drama to see, if we can, the Heart and the Mind of the Saviour.

Part 1 Judas

When we read the Gospels one thing that we can never keep in mind enough is the absolutely furious storm of Messianic expectation that had enveloped Israel.  Since the birth of our Lord the signs had been coming thick and fast.  A pretty good group of Shepherds had heard the heavenly choir sing his birth, Simeon's recognition of the one he had been waiting for must have made quite a bit of news in the priests, and no one had forgotten Herod's bloody attempt to forestall the divine Hope.  Everyone had lost track of the little boy in His Egyptian diaspora, but no one had forgotten Him.  Sometime around the date of the Lord's birth what Josephus calls the Fourth Philosophy of the Jews appeared in Galilee.  There were three recognized schools of Judaism, the Pharisees with whom we are fairly familiar, the Sadducees who were a group that took a less literal and material view of Judaism and denied the physical nature of the Resurrection, and the Essenes who lived a sort of monastic and ascetic Judaism.  The Fourth Philosophy could only have arisen in the context of all of these fulfilled signs of the Coming Messiah and the resentment of a conquered people against their oppressors.  It was grounded in the rejection of all government that did not find its source in the God of Israel and the certain expectation of the imminent appearance of God's Christ as the King of the Jews.  This Philosophy kept the Jews, especially the Galileans in a constant state of rebellion against Rome, usually held in check by the presence of the Legions like a lid on a boiling pot.

Many, maybe even most, of Jesus' followers, including many of the Twelve, were a part of this.  Before their association with Jesus quite a few of them certainly had credentials with the "Expectation of the Messiah", and were strongly influenced by the vision of a Theocratic King.  And I think that without seeing this it is hard to understand Judas.  Judas, I think, came to Jesus by way of the Messianic Expectation, by way of the Jewish Independence movement.  Judas, it seems to me, had a big part in the social aspect of Jesus' ministry, in the charitable activities of Christ.  Despite the Son of Man having no place to lay His head, it seems that Jesus Christ Ministries Inc. probably had considerable financial weight.  Why did people give Jesus their money?  Well for a lot of the same reasons that they do now, but even more so.  It must have seemed very clear to the people who encountered Him that if they wanted their money to do good, then giving it to Jesus, the tender hearted, yet surprisingly shrewd, miracle worker and multiplier of resources was a no brainer.  Some gave because they knew that money given to Jesus would wind up going to the truly poor and needy and meeting their needs, some gave because they had received so much from Him that gratitude and love drove them to give back, and some gave for "The Kingdom" that is to the warchest of the King of Israel, but everyone who wanted to give to Christ put their money in the hands of the trusted Judas.  The Gospel writers don't record it, but it seems likely to me, that often after Jesus miracles the next part of the story is that Judas sits down with the family and disperses funds.  The sick that Jesus healed undoubtedly had a lot of bills that they couldn't pay, whether medical expenses or lost wages or what have you, and I am confident that Jesus didn't neglect this very practical followup, that the people who "sold all that they had and gave it to the poor" when they followed Him, gave it to the poor by giving it to Jesus, that is His trusted steward Judas to be distributed.

I want to talk about the psychology of Jesus and there is nowhere that His psychology is more different from mine than in the matter of Judas.  Jesus knew from the beginning how it would end with Judas, yet they were sincerely friends.  This wasn't some "Jesus loves and is nice to everybody" thing.  He chose this man to be a close friend and they must have been close.  Somehow Jesus didn't let His knowledge of the darkness that would come between them poison this friendship and He trusted a man that, like me, He knew would prove untrustworthy.  I don't see how I could be friends with someone knowing that they will use that very friendship to betray me.  But how did it all end?  If I can't understand the mind of Jesus, I think I can at least understand the mind of Judas and it must have become dominated with the pain of the paradoxical distance between the Messiah, the Glorious King of the Jews and the Suffering Servant that it became increasingly obvious was how Jesus saw Himself.  Judas remains in the background throughout most of the Gospels, when he comes to the front I think that it is predominantly as one who is offended by the Cross.

When Jesus began to talk about His upcoming death, the crowds started to thin.  When He talked about Himself as a sacrifice and His broken body as a meal so many were offended and turned back.  I can't help but think that Judas, and maybe others even of the Twelve, would have liked to have turned back but found themselves too deep in it to back out.  For Judas there is not only the very legitimate problems of backing out of something that you have given your all to follow and have built your whole life and career and reputation around, but another probably insurmountable obstacle to turning back.  And it is simply this, Judas knew in a way that almost nobody else did that Jesus was the real deal.  Why?  Because if there was anything fake about Jesus then Judas would have been in on the trick.  If Jesus had been using any of the tricks that charlatans use then Judas would have been the guy doing the leg work for the scam.  He wasn't and he knew that no one else was either.  So how do you get psychologically to betraying a guy that you know is legitimately working miracles, how do you turn against someone that you know for a fact is the real deal?  I think that that requires a tremendously strong psychological driver, and I can only find it in the Scandal of Grace.  The more clear it became to Judas what Jesus was really all about, that His Kingdom was not of this world and only ever would be by the paradoxical conquest of the Rider of the White Horse, who wasn't interested in kicking the Romans out of His kingdom but was going to all lengths to get them IN to His kingdom, the more repelled He was by it.  And to be fair, each and every one of us, the more clearly we see Jesus the more clearly we feel our Self, our Soul revolt against what we see.  We are all spiritual bookkeepers by trade and when Judas saw that Jesus really wasn't interested in making the books balance, but instead offered him, the embezzler, the example of the Unjust Steward who can win even in defeat, he found himself in the pickle of all pickles.  Everything in him hated the idea of going forward, and he couldn't see any way to go back.  Being offended by the Gospel fundamentally means that we accuse the way of Jesus, the way of Free Grace and Grace Alone of being wrong and bad and unworthy of God.  We become the Accuser of Christ and the spirit of Satan enters us as Luke says it entered Judas.  So, what did Judas, the Satanic Accuser of Christ do?  He tried to put the Lord into a position where He would back down.  He tried, as he had in the wilderness, to find the limit of how far Jesus would be stubborn about this issue.

One of the strangest parts of the Crucifixion, that appears in all four evangelists, is this constant theme of Jesus being offered "outs".

Likewise the chief priests also, mocking with the scribes and elders, said, “He saved others; Himself He cannot save. If He is the King of Israel, let Him now come down from the cross, and we will believe Him. He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now if He will have Him; for He said, ‘I am the Son of God.’ ” from Matthew 27

The priests tempted Christ to give up His incomprehensible commitment to Salvation by Failure and do some straightforward Messiahing, they promised to believe in Him if He would just do some things that were a bit less unbelievable.

So then Pilate took Jesus and scourged Him. And the soldiers twisted a crown of thorns and put it on His head, and they put on Him a purple robe. Then they said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they struck Him with their hands.
Pilate then went out again, and said to them, “Behold, I am bringing Him out to you, that you may know that I find no fault in Him.”
Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them, “Behold the Man!”
Therefore, when the chief priests and officers saw Him, they cried out, saying, “Crucify Him, crucify Him!”
Pilate said to them, “You take Him and crucify Him, for I find no fault in Him.”
The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to our law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God.”
Therefore, when Pilate heard that saying, he was the more afraid, and went again into the Praetorium, and said to Jesus, “Where are You from?” But Jesus gave him no answer.
Then Pilate said to Him, “Are You not speaking to me? Do You not know that I have power to crucify You, and power to release You?”
Jesus answered, “You could have no power at all against Me unless it had been given you from above. Therefore the one who delivered Me to you has the greater sin.”
From then on Pilate sought to release Him, but the Jews cried out, saying, “If you let this Man go, you are not Caesar’s friend. Whoever makes himself a king speaks against Caesar.”
When Pilate therefore heard that saying, he brought Jesus out and sat down in the judgment seat in a place that is called The Pavement, but in Hebrew, Gabbatha. Now it was the Preparation Day of the Passover, and about the sixth hour. And he said to the Jews, “Behold your King!”
But they cried out, “Away with Him, away with Him! Crucify Him!”
Pilate said to them, “Shall I crucify your King?”
The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar!”
Then he delivered Him to them to be crucified. Then they took Jesus and led Him away. from John 19

Pilate would have let Jesus go if He would have said anything in His defense.  Pilate nearly begs Jesus to turn back from the Cross, but He won't do it.  The real driver of this whole drama is Christ's unwavering stubbornness, though He seems a mere man He moves the whole nation to a place that no one, not Satan, not Judas, thought they would ever be driven to with a Sovereign, Predestinating, Determinant, Obstinate Silence. I can't answer for Satan, though I suspect that he is much like his proxy Judas, who's end that we now come to, shows clearly that he didn't see how this would all turn out.

Then Judas, His betrayer, seeing that He had been condemned, was remorseful and brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.”
And they said, “What is that to us? You see to it!”
Then he threw down the pieces of silver in the temple and departed, and went and hanged himself. Matthew 27

Judas, when he saw that Jesus was condemned, was remorseful, and tried to take it all back.  It kinda makes your mouth drop at what feels like simple naivety.  You betray a man who has told you every way He can that He intends to die, into the hands of His enemies who run the government and want Him dead, and then you can't figure out how they come up with a guilty verdict.  It seems obvious from our perspective, as if nothing else could ever have happened, but that's not the case at all.  I hope to look at the trial itself a little more when we come to Peter, our next character in this drama, but we have already seen how the slightest defense or explanation offered by Jesus would have turned the tables, and this is even more the case in the Jewish court than it was with Pilate.  The group among the Chief Priests who sought to kill Christ was I suspect small but influential.  I suspect that in this court there were many, like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who sought a way to help this proceeding to not merely an exoneration but a coronation.  It would have been so easy for that faction to have had its way.  But there are two other factors in Judas' mind which must have made it impossible for him to foresee the outcome.  Firstly, as I've pointed out above He knew that Jesus was the Messiah, and his understanding of the Messiah just couldn't stretch to include failure and death.  And second, he knew that Jesus was innocent.  How inconceivable it must have been for him to accept that the Supreme Representatives of God's Law on Earth would execute an obviously innocent man.  Jesus' conviction was in the deepest sense the condemnation of the Law which condemned Him.  But the Law's failure was about to get worse for Judas.  He must have been stupified by the Law's shocking conviction of the innocent, but he was brought to despair by its refusal to bring him the justice that he needed.  What justice did he find himself needing?

“One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he commits; by the mouth of two or three witnesses the matter shall be established. If a false witness rises against any man to testify against him of wrongdoing, then both men in the controversy shall stand before the Lord, before the priests and the judges who serve in those days. And the judges shall make careful inquiry, and indeed, if the witness is a false witness, who has testified falsely against his brother, then you shall do to him as he thought to have done to his brother; so you shall put away the evil from among you. And those who remain shall hear and fear, and hereafter they shall not again commit such evil among you. Your eye shall not pity: life shall be for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. from Deuteronomy 19

Judas stood before the priests and judges of the Lord and confessed to testifying falsely against an innocent man and causing His death.  And the priests and judges told him that they didn't care.  The failure of the law, which had been caught up in the much more powerful mechanism of Grace, in condemning the innocent and letting the guilty go free, when it ought to have exonerated Jesus and executed His false accuser, left Judas with a choice.  The choice that we all find ourselves with ultimately.  To demand the death that our sins deserve or to simply hush and let the inexorable wheels of Grace pull us along.  The Law, being condemned by its conspiracy against the Lord and against His Christ can only look at our sins as it looked at Judas' and say "What does that have to do with me?"  If we are going to be punished for our sins, it must be by our own hands in the most needless, most senseless of tragedies, the tragedy of being Offended by the Cross.

No Rest for the Wicked-Another Book pt. 4

This is the fourth part in a series that begins with The Conqueror.  I am pasting here the introduction from Part 1 that serves as the introduction to the whole series.

"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, I don't know how far our little look into Revelation will get but 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." 

From Revelation 14 starting at verse 9:
Then a third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives his mark on his forehead or on his hand, he himself shall also drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out full strength into the cup of His indignation. He shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.”
Here is the patience of the saints; here are those who keep the commandments of God and the faith of Jesus.
Then I heard a voice from heaven saying to me, “Write: ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.’ ”
“Yes,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, and their works follow them.”

So, what I want to talk about today is Rest.  I think that most of us want rest but we can't seem to get it.  I suppose that our text today is the source of the saying, "No rest for the wicked.", and that's a pretty good summary of the first part of the passage we read, "they have no rest day or night" it says about God's enemies, it also mentions them being tormented, and that word torment suggests not so much being locked up in the torture chamber as it does hard labor, a job that is irksome, irritating, that makes you miserable.  One other issue, before we move on, with the way our text reads is with the torment of the wicked occuring "in the presence" of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb.  The word translated "in the presence" is enOPion, literally in the eyes of and it is often used exactly the way that we use the phrase "in somebody's eyes" in English.  Often in the New Testament this word is used to contrast something being one way in the eyes of God and another in the eyes of men.  And I can't help but wonder if there is some of that here.  Whenever we hear about the suffering of the damned in Scripture we are hearing about it from the point of view of the Lamb and the saints, in their eyes, but I suspect that it might look different to the ones who are doing this hard, unending, tormenting labor.  We imagine that the work with which we have filled up our lives is purposeful, meaningful and that the slavery which characterizes our lives is the way that good people live their lives.  And the Lamb, and the Saints look on in pity wandering how to show us what we are missing, searching for words that will convince us of the rest that God has in store for us, if we will only put our labors away.

God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high Hebrews 1

God, is not engaged in continual labor.  He is not always working.  He sat down.  He wrapped it all up.  Moses says that on the seventh day He rested, but actually Jesus said, "It is finished" and knocked off Friday at about 3, which is a very good example to follow.  Jammed right into the middle of His Law, shoved into the face of all of us who seek our own righteousness, is the Sabbath, the express image of God thumbing His nose in our faces, trying to wake us up to the rest we are missing.  And don't let the characterization of the "wicked" following the Beast and what not fool you, seeking righteousness is exactly what they are doing.  They are working 24/7 at being good parents, good husbands, good human beings, going ninety miles an hour the wrong way down a one way street.

Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says:
“Today, if you will hear His voice,
Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
In the day of trial in the wilderness,
Where your fathers tested Me, tried Me,
And saw My works forty years.
Therefore I was angry with that generation,
And said, ‘They always go astray in their heart,
And they have not known My ways.’
So I swore in My wrath,
‘They shall not enter My rest.’ ”
Beware, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God; but exhort one another daily, while it is called “Today,” lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. For we have become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence steadfast to the end, while it is said:
“Today, if you will hear His voice,
Do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
For who, having heard, rebelled? Indeed, was it not all who came out of Egypt, led by Moses? Now with whom was He angry forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose corpses fell in the wilderness? And to whom did He swear that they would not enter His rest, but to those who did not obey? So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief. from Hebrews 3

Those awful rascals with the Mark of the Beast get the same treatment as who, the Children of Israel who followed Moses out of Egypt.  And what is the sin that is being pointed out to us by their example?  "We become partakers of Christ if we hold the beginning of our confidence unchanged to the end."  And those who do not do this are accused of unbelief.  The beginning of our confidence, is simply the unmerited favor of Christ, we begin, confessedly unworthy, appealing for mercy based on His goodness not our deservingness.  And then, we think maybe His goodness is missing a little around the edges, we think that there are things that we need to do to complete Christ's work.  I mean, He should have at least kept going right up until the Sabbath, even if He was gonna take Saturday off, shouldn't He?  He went and sat down and left us this whole kingdom to build, this whole world to win, all this work to do.  So we see that we can not enter in because of unbelief, we cannot rest because we refuse to believe that our righteousness, our goodness is entirely superfluous, is in fact an obstacle, as much as anything can be an obstacle to the relentless, furious, saving love of God.

Our life of works and worthiness is the problem, all of the things that we are trying to contribute, to add on top of the works which were finished at the foundation of the world.  What then is the solution?

Then I heard a voice from heaven saying to me, “Write: ‘Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.’ ”
“Yes,” says the Spirit, “that they may rest from their labors, and their works follow them.”

The solution is to die.  To stop contributing, stop adding to the work of Christ, stop using our fig leaves to accessorize His pure, unalloyed, unmixed, goodness clean and white.  It's not just ok to give up, it's commanded.  The only thing that is required of us is something that all of us can do.  Die.

But Christ came as High Priest of the good things to come, with the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made with hands, that is, not of this creation. Not with the blood of goats and calves, but with His own blood He entered the Most Holy Place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption. For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? And for this reason He is the Mediator of the new covenant, by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions under the first covenant, that those who are called may receive the promise of the eternal inheritance.

The Old Covenant said, The man who keeps the Law shall live by the Law.  And no one kept the Law and so all died without that covenant providing the promised inheritance, the promised rest.  The New Covenant works by means of death, it brings life, by means of failure we become more than conquerors, by means of condemnation we are justified.  Our life, which in the eyes of God is really death, is replaced by the death of Christ, which is truest life.  Our righteous works, which in the eyes of God are sin, are replaced by the rest of Christ, an idleness which powerfully upholds all things.  Our accomplishments are buried in the depths of the sea and we obtain rest.

For where there is a testament, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is in force after men are dead, since it has no power at all while the testator lives. Therefore not even the first covenant was dedicated without blood. For when Moses had spoken every precept to all the people according to the law, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water, scarlet wool, and hyssop, and sprinkled both the book itself and all the people, saying, “This is the blood of the covenant which God has commanded you.” Then likewise he sprinkled with blood both the tabernacle and all the vessels of the ministry. And according to the law almost all things are purified with blood, and without shedding of blood there is no remission.
Therefore it was necessary that the copies of the things in the heavens should be purified with these, but the heavenly things themselves with better sacrifices than these. For Christ has not entered the holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God for us; not that He should offer Himself often, as the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood of another— He then would have had to suffer often since the foundation of the world; but now, once at the end of the ages, He has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. And as it is appointed for men to die once, but after this the judgment, so Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. To those who eagerly wait for Him He will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation.

The War In Heaven-Another Book pt. 3

This is the third part in a series that begins with The Conqueror.  I am pasting here the introduction from Part 1 that serves as the introduction to the whole series.

"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, I don't know how far our little look into Revelation will get but 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."

Before we get to our text for today I want to say that when dealing with dreams and visions, it is definitely possible to be overly analytical.   Such poetry is not aimed at the rational mind, but at deeper and more primal parts of us.  So, at least to begin with, let's not focus on identifying the characters or significance of the story.  Not worry about the timing of the events.  But try and feel the story.

From Revelation 12:
Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars. Then being with child, she cried out in labor and in pain to give birth.
And another sign appeared in heaven: behold, a great, fiery red dragon having seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail drew a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to give birth, to devour her Child as soon as it was born. She bore a male Child who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron. And her Child was caught up to God and His throne. Then the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, that they should feed her there one thousand two hundred and sixty days.
And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought with the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down. And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death. Therefore rejoice, O heavens, and you who dwell in them! Woe to the inhabitants of the earth and the sea! For the devil has come down to you, having great wrath, because he knows that he has a short time.”
Now when the dragon saw that he had been cast to the earth, he persecuted the woman who gave birth to the male Child. But the woman was given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness to her place, where she is nourished for a time and times and half a time, from the presence of the serpent. So the serpent spewed water out of his mouth like a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away by the flood. But the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened its mouth and swallowed up the flood which the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

 War in Heaven, the very idea touches something deep inside of us.  It feels like the Heavens should be perfect, that the wars and difficulties which trouble mankind should not reach to Heaven.  I guess the first thing that strikes me when I hear this story is, "Who would dare to bring war to Heaven? and Why?"  We aren't given a lot of background for this story, but the first thing that I would say is that the text we just read is the only source of information about this war.  There are other passages of Scripture that are sometimes thought to refer to Satan's fall, or to him as an angel, but the only time that this story is deliberately dealt with in Scripture instead of sort of a passing reference is right here before us, so this is where we need to look for our answers, we shouldn't build a story with inferences from somewhere else and then try and fit this story into our prebuilt scenario.

So, in the text, "Michael" is the aggressor.  Telling this story, for me at least, begins with a whole lot of caveats and here is the next one.  "Michael" is a rather mysterious character.  He appears I think a total of four times in the Bible and on his rather unknown shoulders a lot of angelology has been built up.  Books have been written about who he is, what armies he commands, his history, his future.  He has been represented in countless artworks and prayed to by almost every branch of the church.  On the other hand, going back to Calvin's Commentary on the Prophet Daniel and extending through various arms of the faith, there is a suspicion that perhaps this is another name for Christ.  To me, there is only one reason to spend as much time as I already have on the question of his identity.  I simply bring it up to make the point, that it doesn't matter.  In the long run the question of whether something is done by the physical body of Christ or some member of the mystical Body of Christ, the Church, is meaningless.  Whether something is done by Jesus of Nazareth or by Dennis Darnell, in whom the Spirit of Christ dwells, is for all intents and purposes the same.  Whoever Michael is personally, what we need to know about him is simply what spirit is within him.  Whether he is Christ personally or he is Christ sacramentally is irrelevant.  Those who are in communion with Christ are One with Him just as He and His Father are one.  So the main point, and it is to me at least a bit of a curve ball, is that the aggressor in the War in Heaven is Christ.  I realize that before the war started the dragon made some threatening gestures towards the Child's mother, his intentions were clearly hostile, but as soon as the Child ascended to His Father's throne, His angels, fired the first shots.  So, is Christ righteous when He makes war?

So, why does this war happen?  The classic answers about Satan arrogantly challenging God, or being jealous of man, are probably on the right track but I think that they leave out the part of the story that is most important for us to know, that neither of those theories is really indicated by the text in any way supports my abandoning them.  But the text does give us a reason.

Then I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, “Now salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night, has been cast down.

The one who was cast out, spent all of his time accusing the Saints.

So Satan answered the Lord and said, “Does Job fear God for nothing? Have You not made a hedge around him, around his household, and around all that he has on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But now, stretch out Your hand and touch all that he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face!” Job 1

From Zechariah 3: Then he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the Angel of the Lord, and Satan standing at his right hand to oppose him. And the Lord said to Satan, “The Lord rebuke you, Satan! The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you! Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?”
Now Joshua was clothed with filthy garments, and was standing before the Angel.
Then He answered and spoke to those who stood before Him, saying, “Take away the filthy garments from him.” And to him He said, “See, I have removed your iniquity from you, and I will clothe you with rich robes.”
And I said, “Let them put a clean turban on his head.”
So they put a clean turban on his head, and they put the clothes on him. And the Angel of the Lord stood beside him.

When Judah came back from captivity in Babylon, they were led by two men.  Zerubbabel, the heir to the throne of David, and this Joshua, the high priest.  He is called here a brand plucked from the fire, and we have a picture of him being clothed in the righteousness of Christ.  He was a lost soul, lost in his sins pictured by his filthy clothes, born in Babylon the epitome of a place under the curse of God, this is the fire that he was in.  But he was plucked from that fire, taken from a poor, enslaved, exile to be the Priest of the Living God and to dwell in His House, and clothed in pure linen, clean and white, the righteousness of the Saints given to him graciously.  Satan's accusations against him aren't recorded but they don't really need to be do they?  We can easily imagine what we would accuse him of and that must be the sorts of things Satan accused him of.  No doubt he had broken the law in many points.  He was born and raised in Babylon, all of his notions of righteousness would have fallen far below our idea of what the Law requires, far below Satan's idea of what righteousness is.

And now I need to break off a little, because I need to dispose of our cartoon supervillain notions of Satan.  God has no opposite.  There is no personification of evil.  Everyone acts out of what they believe is good.  Evil comes from wrong ideas of what is good.  All sins come from wrong ideas of what is good.  Selfishness, to take a simple example, is simply equating what we want with what is good.  So, what is Satan's wrong idea of what is good?  His idea is that people and things that aren't good should be quarantined from the righteous, especially from God.  And that quarantine which can never make the sinners clean turns into a giant garbage dump, the never ending tire fire, landfill outside of Jerusalem which is the prototype of Hell.  Which sounds a lot like the Law or at least with the way that I have always understood it.  The Accuser goes hand in hand with the "handwriting that was against us", and his being cast down with the erasing of that handwriting.

I suspect that angels and heavenly creatures are not personal and separate in the way that we think that they are.  If we are members of Christ and members of one another then that at least suggests that existence is not the disconnected, individual thing that we think it is.  I guess what I am getting at is that it seems to me that a lot of angels are what we call Ideas or Beliefs or Dreams or Hopes or Fears.  And The Law must be a very chief sort of angel, an archangel if you like that term, exactly as the rumors suggest the Devil once was.  How can I equate the Law which is holy, and just, and good with the Devil?

From Romans 9: For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

It doesn't say that humanity was subjected to futility, or that Earth was subjected to futility.  Our text today is the obvious proof that heaven and the celestial beings have been subjected to futility.  "The Creation" was subjected to futility, the whole creation.  Just to be clear, "the creation" means everything that was created, which is another way of saying everything except God Himself.  Which includes angels and drumroll please, The Law.  However good, and holy, and just, however perfect the Law is, we have one question that we have to ask about it.  Is the Law God?  If the answer is no, then it has been subjected to futility, the Law as we know it, even the Law as delivered by a man inspired by the spirit of God, even the Law as written on tablets of stone with the burning finger of God, is in the same sinking boat as the rest of us, which strongly implies that it is not the solution to our problems.  And what is true of the Law is also true of its angel.

But how is the Law, which is true, equated with the Liar?  We often assume that the way things are now is the way that they have always been.  And it is generally believed that Satan fell before the creation of man.  But that isn't what the Revelation of Jesus Christ says.  It places the war as occurring shortly after the Lord's ascension, the Child's ascension to the throne of God.  And to understand this text and understand our world, we must realize that the very foundations the world was built on were unmoored when the Child put His little flock of the last, the lost, the little and the least in possession of the whole kingdom of Heaven.  In Job and Zechariah, there is no suggestion that Satan is at all unwelcome in Heaven or before the throne of God.  When he accuses Joshua the high priest we hear a very restrained reply, "The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem rebuke you."  Civility might be strained but it is maintained.  Satan has a place and a role in Heaven, or at least he did.  The Angel of the Law must have had a rather depressing life.  He went out going to and from upon the earth, searching, hunting for a righteous man and he never found one.  He jealously protected the purity and righteousness of God by keeping all sinners far from Him.  He kept us in our filthy clothes out of the clean, bright City of God.  But the whole time he was a liar, although no one could see it.

Satan is the accuser.  And all of his accusations against us are true.  Everytime he calls me a sinner, he is dead on.  He is a liar, but no one knows that he is lying, because the things he is saying happen to be true.  It seems confusing.  But what it all comes down to is that he doesn't accuse me of being a sinner because it is true.  It just happens to be true.  It all went fine until he accused the Innocent Man.  Keeping sinners like you and me separate from God seems eminently reasonable, but the Law condemned Christ and demanded that His Father forsake Him.  That is the legal theory of purity, of holiness, to keep all of the sinners locked up, and it marks us all as sinners.  But when the Accuser accused Christ he tipped his hand.  Although his accusations against us are true, he never made them because they were true, if it was about truth he wouldn't have accused the Righteous Man.  The Law has become futile.  It can make us conscious of our failure, it can mark us as sinners, but that is the extent of its power.  It cannot make sinners righteous.  The Law should be a happy thing, keeping good people on the right track, but having no good people to work with and being unable to help people like you and me, it became sick, it became darkened, and it had to go.  So the whole concept of keeping sinners away from God has been rejected.  The purity which avoids all contact with the impure has been replaced with a purity which makes the impure pure, with a Messiah who touches lepers and makes them clean.

When Adam sinned, it wasn't just him and his children that fell.  Everything fell with him.  Maybe the angels and the better natures understood what was happening and submitted willingly to this strange prelude to the Revelation of Divine Grace and maybe they didn't.  But they fell either way.  The Law is called holy and just and good, but no created thing can be holy and just and good in and of itself, and when a part of creation thinks that it is good on its own then it is a wicked liar.  The Father of Lies is the one who thinks he is righteous apart from Christ.  I proved earlier that the Law is fallen and become futile by the fact that it is not the Creator, that all things besides Him are fallen, but when everything else had fallen, He Himself descended lower than any of them.  He placed Himself under the Law, under the self-righteous ones, under the criminals, even under the earth so that He might place all things on His shoulders and bear us with Him when He returned to His Father and Our Father.  However good and holy a thing is, like the Law or however evil and dirty a thing is, like the Devil all must come to the One who is full of Grace and Truth and all are called.  The angel flies over the whole earth crying out the Everlasting Gospel, "the Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let him who hears say, “Come!” And let him who thirsts come. Whoever desires, let him take the water of life freely."


Finally, let's look at how the war was fought and won.  They, identified earlier as Michael's angels, overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and the Word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives to the death.  I don't know a lot about angels but that sounds like the Apostles and Martyrs of the Church Militant, the church on this earth at war with the world, the flesh, and yes the Devil.  Satan has been defeated and cast out of Heaven by the exact same weapons and tactics that we are given that are called mighty for casting down strongholds and everything that exalts itself against the knowledge of God.  What is the flaming archangel's sword that wins the war?  It is the Word of God, the truth that Christ is righteous though not according to our ideas of righteousness, righteous when He judges and when He makes war.  The great weapons of our warfare are our testimonies.  The testimony that though we are sinful men still, that we are Michael's Angels, messengers of the Heavenly Prince entrusted with the ministry of gracious reconciliation.  Our testimony is that we are brands plucked from the fire, like Joshua.  Still liable to all of the accusations of the futile interpretation of the Law that our minds and Satan's produce, but righteous by the Divine declaration of the Angel of the Lord who clothes us in His own righteousness.  And as usual with Revelation, the instrument of our glorification is our death, and acceptance of that death, to not love our lives to the death,  unites us with the death of Christ, to hate our lives and welcome the Return, the Presence of the God who kills and makes alive is our victory.   Woe to the inhabitants of the Earth and the Sea because Satan has cone to them in great wrath.  But the good news is that though we appear to be inhabiting Earth it isnt true.  Your reality and mine is that we are hidden in God with Christ, a reality that we can't see with our eyes, but can hear in the preaching of the Gospel and feel and taste in the Communion of the Saints.