Today is All Saints Day. It is the day on the Christian calendar when we stop for just a minute to remember those who have left our company and have gone on into the presence of the Lord. Certainly, we never really forget those who have made an influence on our lives, and rarely will a day go by when we will not think of them. But on All Saints Day, we want to remember those who have gone before us in our faith. And I think that it is not only important to remember how crucial they were to us in our lives, but to also remember the hope that they had, and that we have, in Jesus Christ.
I know a lot of people who are interested in Revelation, but very few who actually understand what it is saying. And that’s because it is so full of Old Testament references, apocalyptic visions, and things that are, quite frankly, way out there. But I believe we can understand Scripture if we just take the time to do so, and Revelation is one of those books that just takes a long time to understand. So, to get into Revelation, let’s look at some of the background on the book.
It is generally agreed that Revelation was written by the Apostle John; the same one who was one of the original twelve disciples, and the same one who wrote the gospel and three letters in the New Testament. It was written around 90 A.D. And, as John says at the beginning of the book, it is a vision that he received while on the island of Patmos where he was in exile.
The timing of the writing is important as well. During the time that Revelation was written, Domitian was the Roman Emperor. To put it kindly, Domitian was not known to be a pleasant person to those who had different religious beliefs. In the first century, it is believed that the worst Christian persecutions were under Nero, but Domitian came in second in that category.
The book of Revelation became more popular about ten years ago when the Left Behind books came out. The writers of the Left Behind series took a very literal view of Revelation, and it caused all sorts of theological messes when it came out. But perhaps the biggest of these messes was that people began to fear the end times. The return of Jesus was not something that was celebrated, but it was something that was used as a scare tactic to get people into churches. The problem with this type of tactic is that it is not honest.
Yes, hell is real, and it is something that we should talk about from time to time, but to use the fear of hell to get people to come to church implies that coming to church is a “get out of hell free” card, and that’s not the case. We come to church to worship God. We come to develop as disciples. We come to experience the love of Christ in the midst of those around us. And we come to hear the message of the gospel – the good news. Hell is real, but all I’m going to say that we know for sure is that hell is separation from God. To use horrific images of hell to get people to come to Jesus is saying that the love of Christ is not enough to draw people to him. And that misses the point of our faith, and the point of the book of Revelation.
The key point of the book of Revelation is not to draw out exactly what the ends times will look like. There are a lot of people out there that look at Revelation as though it is some kind of key to interpreting political events in today’s world. Go to just about any Christian bookstore and you’ll find an entire section of books dedicated to this kind of study. Of course, the problem is, given enough time, these all end up getting proved wrong, especially those that are tied to today’s political events.
You see, we aren’t the first generation that has had people believing that we are living in the end times. Every generation believes that, and has believed it since the first century. And, in a sense, that’s good. We live as though we expect Jesus to be coming back tomorrow. However, we also need to be focused on what needs to be done in the mean time.
Their fundamental flaw is one of misunderstanding our task. Our task is not to predict when the end times will come, but to live as though they are coming. We live in a time of tension right now. We live in a time of excitement about what has come, and anticipation of what is to come. We know that we live in a time when death has lost its sting, when the grave no longer has victory over those who live in Jesus Christ. And we expect Jesus to return, and all of heaven and all of the earth will be renewed. We expect that because it is one of the promises that God has laid out in Scripture, and as far as I can tell, God hasn’t broken a promise yet.
When I read through Revelation, I don’t see something that needs us to obsess about the details, I see an end result that we need to be striving to accomplish. I mentioned last week that we need to be excited about what God is doing all around us, and even more excited that God has invited us to be a part of it. What we read here in Revelation is the end result. It is something that we chase after. It is a vision of things to come. But if a vision is just something that we want to accomplish someday in the distant future, then what good is it?
A vision isn’t something that we hope to accomplish one day. It is not something that we write down on a piece of paper and set aside before going on with life as normal. It is something that guides us and pushes us forward. Let me share this quote with you: “Vision is a mental picture of what could be fueled by a passion that it should be.” It isn’t a wish; it isn’t a dream. It is an understanding that there is something bigger out there for us. It is an understanding that complacency with the status quo is not enough anymore.
As Christians, this vision of a new heaven and a new earth has been passed down from generation to generation. Creation is renewed. That which was corrupted is no more because it has been replaced by what it was supposed to be in the first place. When John had this vision, he saw what things will be like one day. And the vision that we get here is one of God dwelling with humanity once again.
Can you imagine John as he is seeing this vision? He has seen some crazy stuff to this point; some horrifying stuff at times. This wasn’t Halloween. People weren’t dressed up and asking for candy. He was seeing the real deal. And after all this stuff that he has seen, he looks around, and he sees creation redeemed. He sees the new heaven and the new earth. No longer is there a decrepit earth surrounding him, but a glorious vision of the world as it is supposed to be. He looks up and sees the new Jerusalem, the dwelling place of God, decending upon the earth. And he says that it looks like a bride adorned for her husband. Then he hears a voice.
The voice says, in verses 3 and 4, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Now that is a vision, my friends. That is what this is all about. If that doesn’t get your blood pumping, I don’t know what will.
The Church, with a big C, has been given a vision here in Revelation. It is the ultimate goal for believers. What we need to do, here on the local level, is figure out how we can get as many people there as we can. Honestly, it really is that simple. Our goal as disciples of Jesus Christ is pretty easy. We’ve even been told how to get as many people in that final scene of Revelation as possible. We are called to make disciples of Jesus Christ through reaching out, sharing our faith, and teaching the ways of the Lord.
Sometimes the structures that we put in place are cumbersome and unnecessary when it comes to accomplishing this goal. We lose sight of the vision. We get caught up in the business, and the busyness, of the church that we forget about the goal. There are things that we have to do, but are we doing them because we’ve always done them, or are we willing to step out and do something different on the possibility that someone might catch the vision and catch on fire for God?
Everything we do as a church needs to be done so that we can make disciples. It needs to be done so that people are awakened to the world around them that has God’s fingerprints all over it. It needs to be done so that those who you know and love and care about will be among the great company standing beside John, seeing the new creation. How do we do that here? That question needs to be at the core of all our discussions about what is going on at this church. It needs to be the foundation of our meetings. It needs to be in our prayers and our thoughts.
Dream with me for a minute. What if we could start from square one? There are things that we have to do as a United Methodist church, but they don’t prevent us from thinking outside the box. The systems and structures that hold us back are the ones that we have developed. Our system as a United Methodist church gives us a skeleton. We have five committees that are required by the Book of Discipline. It is up to us to put everything else together. And we can do that in a way that makes sense for this church in this community, all the while, focusing on the larger vision.
The great thing about the book of Revelation is that we know how it all ends. We’ve been given an endgame. We’ve been given something to chase after. We’ve been given the means to accomplish this goal. A lot of the conversations I would like to have this year are not going to revolve around “what have we done before,” but “what can we do now.” We will pause from time to time to celebrate our past, but we will do so with the understanding that there is something ahead of us that our past was seeking after, and we need to seek after as well.
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