Tag: eschatology

Begin With The End In Mind, Revelation 21:1-8 (Easter 5 Year C)

Revelation 21:1-8

Have you ever heard the saying, ‘Begin with the end in mind’? A novelist may have a beginning point and also know the end of the story but then has to work out how to get the characters from that beginning point to the end. We do something similar when planning a journey. Our sat-nav knows where we are, and we enter the place where we want to end up. It would be ludicrous just to set out on our travels with a vague hope that we will arrive at somewhere good. We begin with the end in mind.

But do we apply the same principle to the life of faith? I believe we should. A good, clear, healthy vision of the end of all things will guide us as we wonder how to live now.

And the book of Revelation does something like that for its readers. While I don’t believe it was written only to be decoded in our day with details that correspond to our world political situation, it does give a vision of the end that enables its readers to live faithfully now. I accept the common theory that Revelation was written for persecuted Christians, perhaps in the late first century. As they struggled to know how to live as Christians when under pressure and facing suffering, Revelation gave them a vision of the end, which enabled them to calibrate their lives right where they were.

We may not live our lives of faith in Jesus under the same level of stress that they did, but we too need to live with the end in mind. If we don’t, our lives will drift aimlessly, like heading out on that journey with no idea where we’re going.

Our passage today tells us about the end in verses 1 to 5 and then shows how we live with the end in mind in verses 6 to 8. So first of all we’re going to think about the end, and only then secondly are we going to think about how we begin.

Firstly, then, the end:

What is the end that we are to have in mind? As I said, it is described in verses 1 to 5, and to understand it I want us to think about a sandwich[1]. A sandwich has bread on the outside, top and bottom. Then just inside that, we have the butter on each slice of bread. Finally, in the middle, we have the filling.

Verses 1 to 5 are like that. The bread on the outside are the statements about things being made new. So on the top we have the new heaven and the new earth in verse 1 and on the bottom, we have God saying that he is making everything new in verse 5.

This bread of newness is buttered with the ‘No longer’ statements. The top slice is buttered with the statement at the end of verse 1 that ‘there was no longer any sea’ and the bottom slice is buttered with verse 4, where we hear

He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death” or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

What, then, is the tasty filling? It is that God and his people will dwell together in the holy city, the New Jerusalem, as found in verses 2 to 3.

The making of all things new, eventually leading to the renewal of the entire heavens and the earth, began with the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and that’s why it’s appropriate to read this passage in the Easter season. When God raised Jesus from the dead, while he was recognisable, his resurrection body clearly had new powers, as we see from the times when he suddenly appears and disappears before the disciples. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul tells us the resurrection body will be animated by the Holy Spirit.

We, then, are anticipating living in a new creation where everything is recognisable but has new powers and does not decay.

The butter on the bread is the ‘no longer’ statements, which show that in this new creation, suffering will be ended. Imagine you are a persecuted Christian in the first century and you hear that in the world to come ‘there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain’ – all the things you have gone through as either you have been tortured or your friends and loved ones have suffered and even been killed at the hands of the authorities.

And add to that the mysterious – to us – vision that ‘there was no longer any sea’ in verse 1. I suspect this alludes to the fact that the sea was a place of terror for ancient people, and that also earlier in Revelation one of the evil beasts had arisen from the sea. So if there is no longer any sea it’s not that H2O has been abolished: it is that in the new creation, not only is suffering gone, but the cause of suffering is no more. Evil will no longer have its way.

So at the end we have all creation renewed. It is identifiable but now no longer subject to decay but exhibiting new power at animated by the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, suffering and all that causes it has been given its marching orders.

But it gets better. Because the filling in the sandwich, the very centre and heart is the fact that we will dwell together with God. This is what everything is leading up to: creation – including us – is remade, suffering and its causes are banished, all so that the redeemed can live with God with no handicap. Such will be the new creation that, as Augustine of Hippo, the great thinker who inspired the new Pope, put it, everything will mediate the presence of God.

That is the great vision Revelation 21 gives us. That is the end. It is the end we keep in mind when we begin to live the Christian life now.

So secondly, let’s turn to the way we begin:

For now, by the vision we can see that both creation and new creation are accomplished. As God looked on his initial creation and said it was good or it was very good, so he has looked on his new creation and said, ‘It is done.’ (verse 6)

Now, we have a choice in the way we begin our journey with the end of the new creation, drained of evil but filled with the presence of God in mind.

God offers us the free gift of the water of life if we are thirsty (verse 6). Biblically, the water of life is the gift of the Holy Spirit. Our thirst will only truly be quenched by the Spirit of God. It is the Holy Spirit who leads us on in the direction of the end. I mentioned Augustine of Hippo earlier, and one of his prayers puts it neatly:

Breathe in me, O Holy Spirit, that my thoughts may be holy.
Act in me, O Holy Spirit, that my work may be holy.
Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit, to love what is holy.[2]

The way to get on the route from wherever we are beginning to God’s great end is to open ourselves to the Holy Spirit, and to all the Spirit wants to do in our lives. Paul says in Galatians we are to ‘walk by the Spirit’, the Spirit leads us on the journey from where we are now to the destination God has for us in the new creation and in his presence. The Spirit prepares us for such an existence, purifying our motives and transforming our lives, making us more into people who will be in harmony with God’s new creation where suffering and evil are gone.

To set ourselves on this route from our starting place to the end is what will make us ‘victorious’ in the word of verse 7. In other words, we will not bow down to the evil forces of this world that seek to get us to deny our faith in Jesus and our allegiance to him. The Spirit of God is offered to us so that we may persevere in following Jesus. Or to put it another way, when my least favourite Christmas carol ‘Away in a manger’ ends with the words ‘And fit us for heaven to live with thee there,’ the way God fits us for our destiny is by the work of the Holy Spirit.

The other choice is to reject all this and say, actually, Lord, I don’t want to live in your beautiful new creation where evil has had its marching orders and we live close to you in your presence. For those who choose the lifestyles described in verse 8 – ‘the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practise magic arts, the idolaters and all liars’ – are by their very lifestyle saying no to God’s new creation. These are examples of practices that will be extinguished there. Hence, there is nothing harsh and vindictive about the fate of the depraved being ‘the fiery lake of burning sulphur’ (verse 8). It is ‘the second death’ and this is the natural consequence of choosing against the beautiful end God has planned, designed, and promised.

That probably isn’t most or even all of us. But the tricky challenge we face is that sometimes we want the beautiful destination God has for us but we’d like to compromise – everything in moderation as it were, even sin. We can do a bit of cowardice, not always confessing our faith. We can be unbelieving if there are parts of the faith that don’t suit us. We can make concessions to the sexual standards of society. Magic arts? Well, I certainly think of those Christians who read their horoscopes. I see idolatry in the devotion of some Christians to Donald Trump or to the acquisition of wealth.

Some of us want it both ways, but Jesus doesn’t allow us that option.

Don’t get me wrong, I know we are all far from perfect, not least me. But there is a difference between on the one hand setting our sights on the presence of God in his new creation but slipping up from time to time, and on the other hand wanting to hoover up the blessings of God while not wanting to change our lives out of gratitude for all he has done for us.

So as we approach Ascension and then Pentecost, when God pours out his Spirit through the ascended Jesus, let us examine ourselves. Are we imperfect followers of Jesus who desire the ways of God as well as the blessings of God? Or do we simply want to have our cake and eat it?

Pentecost will be an ideal time to avail ourselves of the living water, the Holy Spirit, so that we can indeed live with the end in mind.

[1] This is my version of Ian Paul’s description of the chiastic structure of verses 1 to 5 in his TNTC on Revelation, p338f.

[2] Lectio 365 morning prayer, 16h May 2025, adapted and modernised from https://www.loyolapress.com/catholic-resources/prayer/traditional-catholic-prayers/saints-prayers/holy-spirit-prayer-of-saint-augustine

0

Holy Week Meditations: Jesus Under Question. The Resurrection and Marriage (3/3)

Luke 20:27-40

The opponents

When our daughter was at secondary school, she acted in a school production of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at the Rhoda McGaw Theatre in Woking. Debbie and I managed to see the production twice, having snagged tickets both for the preview night as well as the final show on the Saturday night. 

Seeing it twice alerted me to something I hadn’t noticed before. The theology in it is dreadful! Firstly, all reference to God is excised from the story. The key line in the Genesis account that what Joseph’s brothers meant for evil purposes, God meant for good, is not even hinted at. And secondly, the very title of the song One More Angel In Heaven gives away their failure to understand a book, Genesis, that has no direct reference to the afterlife.

Welcome to the world of the Sadducees, the latest group to interrogate Jesus in the temple and try to catch him out. They only accepted the Torah, or Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, as Holy Scripture, and since none of these books contained any direct reference to resurrection, they didn’t believe in it. Resurrection only gets a name-check in the Old Testament in the book of Daniel, and possibly Job. But to the Sadducees, these books weren’t scripture, whereas to the Pharisees and other groups they were – hence why the teachers of the law in this passage actually side with Jesus!

The other thing to appreciate about the Sadducees is that they were the aristocracy. They were wealthy and well-to-do, and exercised influence in Jerusalem. While they were not strictly part of the temple authorities, you can be sure that their money talked in the holy city. 

And like the religious leaders, they cosied up closely to the Romans. Doing so protected their wealth. For a rough parallel, think of Russian oligarchs keeping quiet to avoid the wrath of Vladimir Putin. Therefore, if Jesus’ good news of the kingdom of God was a threat to the Jewish powers that be in Jerusalem because it undermined the Roman Empire, it was also a threat to the Sadducees with their closeness to and dependence upon Rome. We are dealing with another unholy alliance of power. It is to their advantage to neutralise Jesus.

The issue

For Israel, Moses was the central and most important figure in their history. He led them from slavery in Egypt to the cusp of the Promised Land. He received the law from God on Mount Sinai. And the Sadducees, as I said, limited themselves in terms of biblical authority to those first five books of the Bible that were sometimes popularly known as ‘The Five Books of Moses’ (even though he didn’t appear in the first one, Genesis). So if Moses said something, it was very important. 

With their laser focus on Moses, they thought they could ridicule Jesus. And I say ‘ridicule’, because here is one of those times when it is important to see this story in its Holy Week context and the context of the two previous episodes we have considered in this chapter. If this story had existed somewhere else, the question the Sadducees pose could have been construed as an innocent enquiry. But the context in Luke’s Gospel demands that we see this too as an attempt to trap Jesus. 

What they try to do with their elaborate story is to say to Jesus, you believe in resurrection, but the teaching of Moses contradicts you. Their story about the woman who marries seven different brothers one by one is based on an Old Testament law of what came to be known as ‘levirate marriage.’ It was important to have offspring. Therefore, if a man died without having fathered children, it was his brother’s duty to marry the widow and have children that would be his heritage. It is like the popular modern belief that after death we live on through our descendants. The secular celebrant who conducted Miriam King’s funeral on Monday said something like that as she tried vainly to offer hope to her family and all at the funeral who were mourning. This view is called ‘immortality through posterity’, and what the Sadducees claim here is that the law of levirate marriage depends on it, and therefore the belief of Jesus (and others) in the resurrection is wrong and unscriptural. 

As far as the Sadducees are concerned, it’s game, set, and match to them. They reckon they have silenced Jesus in the way he has silenced others. How wrong they are. 

The response

Jesus’ response comes in two halves. The first is about how you understand Scripture. The second is specifically about the Sadducees’ hero, Moses. 

As to his understanding of Scripture, he talks about why marriage is not needed in the life to come. But before we get to that, I would just like you to see in passing a little detail that will take us off piste for a tangent, but which is a piece of incidental evidence for Jesus’ more positive view of women. It’s the way he refers to people who ‘marry and are given in marriage’, in English translations. We might read in there with the language of being ‘given in marriage’ the old custom of a bride being ‘given away’ by her father, as if her ownership is being transferred from him to the bridegroom. It’s something that is modified in the current Methodist marriage service so that the language speaks not of ‘Who gives this woman to be married to this man?’ but ‘Who presents this woman to be married to this man?’ (And it gives an opportunity for the man to be presented to the woman, not that I have ever had a couple avail themselves of that opportunity.)

However, the English translations let us down at this point. You might think that something translated ‘given in marriage’ was in the passive voice, but in the Greek it’s in a grammatical construction called the middle voice, and it should be rendered ‘those who allow themselves to be married.’ In other words, Jesus is allowing for women to have agency in the question of marriage, an utterly revolutionary thought in his day, and until relatively recently in our culture, too. 

That said, now let’s return to why Jesus says that marriage is not needed in the life of the age to come. He says that once death is abolished, there is no more need for people to have children. No more will dead people have to be replaced by the births of babies. Therefore, their extreme account of levirate marriage doesn’t stand up.

And why doesn’t it stand up? Because of what Christians call ‘eschatology’, that is the doctrine of the last things. The ‘eschaton’ is the age to come. In Christian terms, that is subjects like heaven, hell, the last judgment, the new creation, the kingdom of God, and so on. 

The point is that for Jesus you don’t just interpret Scripture in some flat way where you just read the meaning off the page (or the scroll!). You need to interpret it from a particular standpoint. And he says that the way to do so is from the perspective of God’s eternal, final, ultimate purposes. 

I wonder how we read our Bibles. Do we just lift verses off the page and out of context? Do we play what some people call ‘Bible bingo’? And it’s not just reading them in their immediate context which is important (and which we’ve been doing in this series), it’s about seeing the wider context of God’s great story and where it is heading. 

Now the Sadducees would object to this. ‘How can you do that,’ they would say, ‘when there is no evidence from the Torah that there is an age to come?’ So that is where the second part of Jesus’ response comes in. 

Here is where he says to these opponents, you say you go by what Moses teaches, but you don’t even understand him properly. The very thing you deny is there in the life, teaching, and experience of Moses himself! You want to talk about Moses, he says: well, here’s a question for you. How can Moses refer to ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ when all of those three men are dead? It makes no sense! If death is the end and that’s that, what on earth is the point of referring to God like this? 

The readers of Luke’s Gospel will not be surprised when Jesus says here that God ‘is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive’, because they have already heard Jesus give the Parable of Dives and Lazarus, where poverty-stricken Lazarus is carried off by the angels to Abraham, who is still alive. Jesus is consistent in his teaching, and Luke reflects that. 

The Sadducees thought they had game, set, and match, but not a bit of it. Jesus saved match point and turned the game on its head. It is their turn to join the company of those silenced by Jesus in Luke 20. 

The audience

Who is listening to this debate? We might expect it to be ‘the people’ again, but Luke has a surprise for us. Some teachers of the law are on the scene. It’s possible (but not certain) that these would have been aligned with the Pharisees, who originally were a more what we might call working class movement, and therefore not the most natural bedfellows of the Sadducees. 

Evidently, these teachers of the law take great delight in Jesus confounding the Sadducees. ‘Well said, teacher!’ they exclaim. And you would also expect them to have some sympathy with what Jesus teaches here. Remember they did not limit themselves to the first five books of the Bible. Although there is some debate as to when the canon of what we call the Old Testament was definitively agreed in Judaism, I think we can assume they accepted the books that mention or hint at resurrection. Hence, on this at least, Jesus is an ally. 

So is this good? Yes and no. On the one hand, this may be a sign of what was to come later in the early history of the church when some Pharisees sided with the first believers. In Acts 23, when Paul is on trial before the Sanhedrin, he cleverly says that he is on trial for believing in the resurrection of the dead, leading to a fierce example between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, where some of the Pharisees support Paul as an innocent man. 

But on the other hand, in the next few verses of Luke, Jesus will condemn the very same for not understanding the Scriptures as regards the Messiah, for not living their lives in the light of the age to come, and as hypocrites who love status, exploit the poor, and make a show of their spiritual practices (Luke 20:41-47). 

Overall, then, it seems that these are people who affirm some of the right doctrines, but it makes little difference in their lives. Being doctrinally accurate does not make them followers of the Messiah. It’s all very well cheering on Jesus for getting one over your rivals, but the bottom line is whether we are going to follow him as Saviour and Lord. 

And that following him will soon become quite tricky, as the story of Holy Week progresses. 

0

Tom Wright On Mission And Eschatology

 

From today’s latest Hope Together email, Bishop Tom Wright on mission and theology:

“We talk in our day about ‘mission-shaped Church’. But mission has to be shaped by what in the trade we call eschatology. In other words, what you believe about what God has promised to do eventually, must shape the way you do mission.”

Similar thoughts to follow in this weekend’s sermon.

0

Sermon For Sunday Week: In Christ Alone My Hope Is Found

Tomorrow (Saturday) I begin a week’s leave to spend half term with Debbie and the children. I have just finished writing my sermon for Sunday week, when I return to duty. Here it is.

Revelation 21:1-8

All around me I find people struggling for hope. For some, it is the economic uncertainties of the recession. Will they have a job? Can they pay their mortgage? For others, it is the onset of serious or potentially terminal illness. I think of two families I know where a child has cancer. Or people wonder what legacy we are leaving to our children and grandchildren from the environmental devastation our greed has caused.

And of course, I find it in the church. I think of one church facing an imminent decision about possible closure, and another where the signs are not promising for ten years’ time.

I’ve come to the conclusion that our problem is that we conceive of hope wrongly. This is all hope based on circumstances, or on what people do. It’s an uncertain hope: “I hope that such-and-such will happen.” Such-and-such may or may not happen.

Christian hope is different. Let me introduce it this way. A couple of weeks ago, Debbie and I went to a concert by the worship leader and hymn writer Stuart Townend. We sang his hymn ‘In Christ Alone’, and it’s easy to slip past the profundity of that first line: ‘In Christ alone my hope is found.’ The Christian hope is in God. Our hope is in God in Christ.

So to our passage from Revelation. We’re familiar with it at funerals, where its words bring comfort, and that’s good. But there is so much more it can offer us. Why? Well, if you want a bunch of people who needed Christ-shaped hope, the first readers of Revelation would be good candidates. Facing persecution in the AD 90s under the Roman emperor Domitian, they saw loved ones arrested, tortured and killed. Our troubles look small fry in comparison. The vivid pictures that John gave them form a Christ-shaped hope. I believe we need a Christ-shaped hope to fit a Christ-shaped hole in our lives. Come with me as we explore this. Let it strengthen us for whatever we are facing.

Firstly, there is hope for creation. Whenever we go on holiday, an important item on my check list for packing is books. This year, I packed three but only got through one. Last year, I took a couple and only managed one. You’d have thought I’d have learned my lesson this year, wouldn’t you? But you’ll perhaps remember I never want to be caught short of reading material!

And the book I read on holiday last year was one that has helped a lot of people rethink their understanding of Christian hope. It is called ‘Surprised By Hope’ and was written by Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham. One of the most important slogans in the book is this: ‘Heaven is not the end of the world.’

Got that? Heaven is not the end of the world. We frequently speak about the Christian hope after death as being the hope of going to heaven to be with the Lord. That is true as far as it goes. But the Bible talks about so much more. The biblical story doesn’t end with heaven: it ends here with ‘a new heaven and a new earth’. In some way that Revelation doesn’t explain, heaven and earth will be renewed. 2 Peter speaks about the destruction of the earth, but again followed by a new earth where righteousness will reign.

Our hope is not to be disembodied spirits floating somewhere in space, it is physical. God is interested in the physical and the material. He made it and he will redeem it. Just as God will not simply leave the dead in Christ in heaven but will raise them to life with new bodies, as he did with his Son, so he will also bring in a new creation.

What does that mean for us? It gives us hope for creation. Since God cares about his physical creation, so do we. Christians should be at the forefront of concern for the environment. We shouldn’t be like some Christians who say that the human race was put in charge of the earth and we can do whatever we like with it. That’s wrong. It’s God’s world, and we look after it as his stewards. One day he will renew it.

Debbie and I are no experts on green issues, but we see it as our duty to encourage Rebekah and Mark in a responsible attitude to the creation – not in a negative, hectoring way, but by filling them with a sense of wonder. Every now and again, we visit a country park near Basildon and Pitsea called the Wat Tyler Country Park. There are plenty of the usual attractions for children there, but there is one place we always visit when we go there. The RSPB has a place there, and we take the children to that so they may gain more of a sense of wonder about wildlife. It does help that Rebekah fancies herself as a young Doctor Doolittle anyway, but Mark enjoys the activities, too – I recall him coming out once, very proud of the wormery he had made!

As adults, we know this is serious stuff. You may well be aware of the forthcoming Copenhagen Climate Summit. At the time I prepared this sermon, European Union leaders were in deadlock about how to take further steps in reducing climate damage. So I’ve done my little bit of lobbying. Various organisations make it easy to do this, especially if you are online. I use something called Superbadger from TEAR Fund on Facebook. Recently, I have sent a couple of emails to Gordon Brown, asking him to continue his efforts in this area. So have thousands of others.

But let’s remember, this is about hope. The fact that God will replace the current heavens and earth with a new one means that whether we succeed or fail in our efforts, the purposes of God will not be thwarted. We put ourselves in harmony with his purposes when we care for creation. Done with the right spirit, creation care is for Christians an act of worship, and a sign of God’s hope.

Secondly, there is hope for humanity. The holy city, the new (there’s that word again) Jerusalem, comes down out of heaven, like a bride adorned for her husband (verse 2). Mention of the bride makes me think about the Church, the Bride of Christ, rather than a literal city. This speaks of the redeemed community.

The hope for humanity is a simple one: God dwelling in the midst of the redeemed community, for the voice from the throne says,

‘See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them …’ (verse 3)

You may think me odd, but this puts me in mind of Magnus Magnusson on old editions of Mastermind. This is one of those “I’ve started, so I’ll finish” moments. Why? Let me render part of verse 3 more literally: ‘See, the tabernacle of God is among mortals. He will tabernacle with them …’

Perhaps you remember the tabernacle, the ‘portable sign of God’s presence’ in the Old Testament. Holding that in your mind, go back with me to John chapter 1, where we read of Jesus, ‘The Word became flesh and dwelt among them’ – or, more literally, ‘The Word became flesh and tabernacled among them.’

So here in Revelation 21, God’s purposes in John 1 are fulfilled. What God started in Jesus, he will finish. The mission of Jesus will be fulfilled. God will dwell with ‘his peoples’ – and note it’s ‘peoples’ not ‘people’. The Bride of Christ will be composed from every tribe, tongue and nation under heaven, a vision that must be anathema to Nick Griffin and the British National Party. How distorted is their attempted takeover of Christian language. In Christ, people are reconciled to God and to one another. It’s a sign of hope for a divided and troubled world. Be clear about one thing: the extinction of the Church is not on God’s agenda. Rather, it has a vivid, glorious, multi-coloured future in God’s new creation.

What is our part in this now? If God’s mission to dwell in the midst of reconciled peoples was expressed in Christ dwelling in the midst of the human race, then we are called to something similar. For Jesus said, ‘As the Father sent me, so I send you’. Therefore, just as Jesus dwelt in the midst of those he came to reconcile to the Father and each other, so must we. No religious ghettos. No spiritual escapism, where we run inside our castle, pull up the drawbridge and be relieved that we can worship without the distractions of the world. No more the increasingly futile approaches to mission that wait for ‘them’ to come and meet ‘us’ in our comfort zone. Instead, as the Father sent Jesus, so he sends us. Our sharing in God’s hope for humanity means we choose not to engross ourselves in church-filled lives but live out God’s love in the midst of the world, where we are needed. For now, I’ll limit myself to these words from Henri Nouwen:

More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems. My own desire to be useful, to do something significant, or to be part of some impressive project is so strong that soon my time is taken up by meetings, conferences, study groups, and workshops that prevent me from walking the streets. It is difficult not to have plans, not to organize people around an urgent cause, and not to feel that you are working directly for social progress. But I wonder more and more if the first thing shouldn’t be to know people by name, to eat and drink with them, to listen to their stories and tell your own, and to let them know with words, handshakes, and hugs that you do not simply like them, but truly love them.

Thirdly and finally, our passage has hope for the individual. I want to consider those famous words from verse 4 that make this reading so apposite at a funeral:

‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.’

To those who first read Revelation or had it read to them, these words had immense impact. Remember ,they were facing hideous persecution. Tears, death, mourning, crying and pain frequently soundtracked their lives. How they longed for it to pass. How they, the suffering ones, longed for justice – which is surely why Revelation takes delight in the downfall of the wicked.

So this constitutes the good news of God’s hope for individuals. Whatever we struggle with in this life will be abolished in the new creation. Be it sickness or injustice, its days are numbered. One day, God will call time on all that corrupts the beauty of his creation and will restore all things. Indeed, this is so important that when the voice from the throne says in verse 5, ‘See, I am making all things new’, this is at most only the third or fourth time God himself is reported as speaking directly in Revelation[1]. Not only that, God has given an advance sign of his promise to do all this in the Resurrection of Jesus. The Resurrection constituted amongst other things – the healing and transformation of a body traumatised to the point of death, and God’s vindication of his Son in the face of those who condemned and executed him. The Resurrection is healing and justice. We look forward to both of those in full measure when God’s new creation comes. The Resurrection guarantees our hope in God’s healing and justice.

But meanwhile – what do we do? Shall we lie down and allow pain and wickedness to walk all over us and others? By no means! We pray for healing, we campaign for the oppressed and we accompany the suffering – for that is what we must do if, like Jesus, we are to dwell in the midst of the world, with all its pain. Sometimes, we shall see victories and rejoice. At other times, it will seem like evil has won the day. But when it does, with Christian hope we can laugh at the darkness, for whatever battles it wins, God’s hope means the war is lost. Whatever discouragements we have, our certain hope in God means we need never completely lose heart. We have a vision of hope to fortify us, and the Resurrection to guarantee it.

In conclusion, let me take you back to that Stuart Townend concert I mentioned near the beginning. He introduced another of his famous hymns, his version of the Twenty-Third Psalm, ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’. He talked about how loved that psalm is by millions, both inside and outside the Church for its sense of comfort.

However, he said we needed to do something with that comfort, and that was why he wrote the chorus with its words,

And I will trust in You alone.
And I will trust in You alone,
For Your endless mercy follows me,
Your goodness will lead me home.

If we are comforted, then we need to trust, he said. And I think it’s the same with the Christian hope, which we find ‘In Christ alone’. We may be encouraged by the prospect of God’s hope for creation with its new heaven and new earth. We may find succour in the hope for humanity found in the God who dwells in the midst of peoples reconciled to him and to one another. We may be comforted by the thought that one day, sickness and injustice will finally be completely conquered when all – like Christ – are raised from the dead.

But we need to trust. And that means action. Action in creation that is consistent with God’s purposes of renewal. Action in the church, as we dwell in the midst of the world to offer reconciliation in Christ. And action for the sick and oppressed, as we anticipate the fulfilment of their hope in Christ.

Let us be strengthened in God’s hope. And let that hope propel us to trusting action.

[1] Robert H Mounce, The Book of Revelation, p373.

5

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑