Following themLamb Wherever He Goes (3)
Ch.2:
Four Biblical Essentials for Interpreting Revelation
The
following four biblical themes are essential for properly interpreting Revelation.
They set the larger context in which the book makes best sense. They deal with
the identity of the church, the eternal purpose of God, the three keys themes
of the biblical story, and the tension of living as biblical people.
01.
God's People as a Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement
The people
of God have the DNA of what I call God's Subversive Counter-Revolutionary
Movement. This is to be the consistent character of this people in whatever
form they exist. Whether as a people enslaved in Egypt, fleeing Egypt,
wandering nomads, a united and divided monarchy, a people in exile in Babylon,
and a people exiled in their own land under foreign rule, they are to be a
Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement (SCRM). Jesus of Nazareth entered the
story of his people under the last-mentioned condition. They are to be God’s
SCRM because this world is not as it was meant to be.
Instead of
a world lathered and luxuriating in God’s presence and the abundance of life on
this planet in its full flourishing, humanity turned its back on God in the
cruelest expression of ingratitude. Breaking relationship with God unraveled
the good order of his creation. We could no longer live with ourselves, each
other, or the creation.
God,
however, never acquiesced in this fallen state of his creatures or creation.
Immediately, he began a reclamation and restoration project. God called Abraham
and Sarah from out of the pagan rebellious world to be the parents of a new
people. They received a threefold promise in their calling (Gen.12:1-3):
-God would
make from them a great nation,
-God would
bless and protect this people, and
-God would
use this people to spread his blessings throughout the world.
As the
instrument of divine blessing to the world, this people, Israel, was to declare
and demonstrate God’s will and way for his errant and erring creation. This
entailed a subversive and counter-revolutionary existence for Israel.
-Subversive
because they had to contest the distortions in thought, attitude, and action
now inscribed into life and world by human rebellion. And they were to do this
from below, as it were. Not by seizing control of the world and imposing
solutions top-down but from a patient and persevering practice of the life God
intended for all humanity.
-Counter-Revolutionary
because the church acts in the interest of God’s purposes. These purposes will
not be fully established until the End. Therefore, the church counters the
revolution of humanity into sin and death not by a return to a previously
established state of affairs (the Garden of Eden) because that state was only
the beginning of the journey toward the End, which is a city encompassing a
garden. The Church heralds a count-revolution then that is forward looking,
ever-provisional, and perpetually self-critical.
(I use
these two designations, usually on opposite sides of our political spectrum, to
indicate the counter-cultural, eclectic nature of this movement. No doctrinaire
political platforms here. We would expect to find this people supporting effort
from all sides of the spectrum depending on the timing and the issue.)
In his
birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension Jesus subverted and countered
human sin and its effects in a climactic and decisive way. He
-brought
Israel’s exile to an end
-reconstituted
it as God’s Abrahamic people, and
-equipped them to go into the world
discipling all nations.
Jesus embodied and enacted the
ethos and ethics of this “subversive counter-revolutionary movement” and
enjoined them on the new people of God centered on him.
After
Pentecost the church no longer takes or needs the form of a nation-state. Now
it’s spread into every nook and cranny of the globe as a transnational
community with no boundaries, many tongues and ethnicities, male and female,
children and adults, rich and poor, the lowly and the well-placed, and so on
across every division that separates us from each other.
Though the
church is a community of the Spirit, it is not a “spiritual” community in the
sense we so often take it in North America, as an invisible, inward relation to
God and Jesus through the Spirit that has nothing to do with the material,
physical, political, economic, or social aspects of our lives. The church is,
in the Spirit, a political body. It is a public community, committed to a way
of life that directs us to live in certain ways rather than others that can be
observed by other people and groups in the world.
As noted
earlier, because we live in a world hostile to and running from God, to live in
God’s way will mean we run into opposition. Opposition that wants to either
shut us down or convert us to its way of living and relating. And we learn in
the New Testament that this opposition and hostility is ultimately rooted in
cosmic powers created by God but which unfathomably and inexplicably rebelled
against God and sought to seize control of the world for themselves. And human
empires are a chief way they exercise their illicit rule.
Jesus
defeated this rebellious cosmic cohort at the cross and by his resurrection
rules over them and the whole world. He is rehabilitating those powers that can
be rehabilitated and defanged those that cannot. The latter continue to foment
trouble for God’s people with their lies and illusions. They cannot make us do
their bidding; they can only lie and deceive. It’s only our capitulation to
these falsehoods that gives them any ongoing power over us.
But Jesus
has equipped us to resist and deflect this demonic assault. In fact, God
intends to use his New Testament people to manifest his varied wisdom to these
still hostile-though-defeated-powers announcing that Jesus is Victor, their
power is gone and reign of terror over, and destruction awaits them.
The
dynamic of God’s SCRM is maintained by two sets of practices. First, perpetual
reminders of to whom they belong, who they are, and what they are to be about
in God’s world. Worship, the Sacraments, and Word are central here. This
involves both extolling the triune God and critiquing and rejecting the
imperial ideology, the chief mark of human rebellion against God, that
continually seeks to seduce us. Second, practices of “healing and restoring
that which the empire has crushed and destroyed, acts of both resistance to the
imperial powers and of solidarity with those the empire has turned into victims.”
[i]
I know
this does not sound much like church to many in this country. That it doesn’t
is a measure of our distance from the gospel. We need a thorough rethink of the
nature and purpose of the church from the ground up. We have entered a new
epoch in the history and culture of the West, “the world come of age” as
Bonhoeffer called it. And as Bonhoeffer saw, a new form of church is required
for this new age. But this new form of church, whatever and however various it
may turn out to be, must always bear the character of God’s Subversive
Counter-Revolutionary Movement. Arner provides a splendid summary statement:
“The
ekklesia (church) organized itself as an alternative form of political identity
based not upon the power of the sword, but on the kenotic law of love. By
offering a vision and organization for an alternative form of social
interaction, the movement challenged the perception that Rome was the
desirable, rightful, invincible ruling power. It rejected the empire's
totalizing claims and version of social reality that brought benefits to a few
and hardships to many. By contextualizing the empire in God's greater purposes,
the Christians demystified it, relativized its power, exposed its shortcomings,
burst its illusions, revealed its lies, and numbered its days....They exposed
the empire's vulnerability by displaying the limits of its claims to human
allegiance.”
“Demystified
it, relativized its power, exposed its shortcomings, burst its illusions,
revealed its lies, and numbered its days....exposed the empire's vulnerability
by displaying the limits of its claims to human allegiance” - difficult to top
that as a description of what Revelation is up to and what I mean by a
subversive, counter-revolutionary movement.
02. God’s BHAG
What is
God up to in the world, anyway? Our picture of the divine end game will
determine how we think of God, human destiny and creativity, creation’s role,
salvation, righteousness, and much else beside. Revelation typifies for many
people a view of God’s ultimate purposes for humanity and the world. I don’t
want to get esoteric here. I have something very specific in mind that hits at
the heart of what we understand the gospel to be – and there’s nothing more
important than that!
Do you
believe that the primary purpose of God in saving us is that each person
escapes the clutches of the evil world system and even material existence
itself? That we will spend eternity with God in his realm (“heaven” not earth)
praising him for all eternity? And this existence will be “angelic,” that is,
immaterial?
I suggest
that if you answer 2 or all 3 of these questions in the affirmative you will
not be able to understand Revelation (or the rest of the New Testament, for
that matter). For Revelation is about God’s intent and action to save humanity
as a community (no, this is does not mean that everyone is necessarily saved)
with whom he wills to spend eternity here on the earth he created for this
purpose. Life with God, eternal life, beginning now and extending into eternity
is a fully human life, in the body which we shall have forever. In this
“eternal life” we will experience life as God always intended us to. The life
of God’s image-bearing stewards protecting and nurturing the creation God has
placed in our care.
This is
God’s BHAG – Big, Hairy, Audacious, Goal – for
his creatures and creation. And as BHAG needs a Bigger, Hairer, More Audacious
God than we can imagine. In the 11th century St. Anselm proposed
this definition for God: God is "that than
which nothing greater can be thought."[ii]
He intended this definition to be the premise for an argument for God’s
existence. However that may be, it admirably pictures a BHAG God. This God
designs and implements a plan
-bigger than we the biggest big we can
imagine,
-more intricate and complicated than the most wide-ranging venture
any of us can ever envision,
-wilder and beyond the imagination of earth’s greatest dreamers and
visionaries,
-infinitely
more satisfying than anything else.
God
pursues this grand BHAG with all he has and is. And in all their different
accents and dialects the biblical writers tell this story. John’s Revelation is
among these voices and he certainly has his own distinct accent among the
biblical writers. This BHAG-perspective on the biblical story makes a big-difference
in how we read Revelation.
We can see
it clearly in Rev.3:20, the promise Christ gives to the church at Laodicea. “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my
voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with
me.” The individual salvation view (noted above), which has been the default
view of most Western Christianity, reads this promise as Christ at the entrance
to a human heart bidding entrance and new or renewed relationship with that
person. Warner Sallman's famous painting captures this view perfectly.
Here we
see Jesus at an individual’s home knocking for entrance and shared fellowship.
A more careful reading of this message of Christ must recognize, however, that
it is addressed to the church there. And as we read through his message to
them, we realize this whole church has gotten way off track. So far, in fact,
that in rather shocking imagery, Christ himself has been left outside this
church. This means the “door” in question is not that of a person’s home but of
the gate to a city which is closed to strangers and travelers in the evening.
And once closed, was not easily or often opened again till the next day.
That a
church might find itself in such a dreadful position of locking Christ outside
reminds us of the community view (also noted above). It is the corporate health
of this church, and all of the churches Christ addresses, rather than each of
their individual members, that is under review here.
If we read
this promise from the communal perspective, however, the imagery of a shared
meal takes on its proper reference as a eucharistic meal, the Lord’s Supper.
And in the overall view of Revelation the Supper has a large significance (as
we will see). And in the big picture of the biblical story this imagery of a
shared meal between Christ and his people is a powerful picture of the great
feast of eternal festivity that is eternal life with God.
The gains of reading within the
framework of a genuinely and fully biblical story are enormous.
-a properly BHAG-view of God. Reading
the Bible with a reduced or limited view of God and God’s purposes skews the
whole thing and reduces, limits, or pulls out of shape who God is and what God
is up to in the world.
-Keeping the communal focus central,
that is, that God intends, creates, saves, works through, and celebrates with a
people. Participation in this people gives us our primal identity and true
sense of vocation. The typical Western individualistic way of reading robs us
of these essential insights.
-Finally, reading communally enables
us to recover the importance of the Eucharist in the biblical story and in the
life of the church as well.
We do
well, then, to keep the big picture of the biblical story as the frame within
which to read Revelation. It’s the only way to do justice to the book. And more
importantly, to the God and salvation to which it bears witness.
03.
Covenant, Kingdom, and Presence
I believe
the biblical story is constituted by three interrelated and mutually
reinforcing themes: covenant, kingdom, and presence.
-covenant
is God’s irrevocable commitment to be with us as our divine Parent, the Father.
-kingdom
is God’s sovereign rule over his creation.
-presence
is the goal of creation and creatures, life in the presence of “the who is, who
was, and who is coming,” the Holy One of Israel.
T. S. Eliot writes in Little Gidding: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make and end is to
make a beginning. The end is where we start from.”[iii]
And when we read the Bible that way we discover:
-Creation ends as a world-wide Holy of
Holies where God is present with his people forever; the fulfillment of the
embryonic temple in the Garden of Eden where God dwelt with Adam and Eve.
-Covenant ends as the worldwide
multi-ethnic throng living with and praising God as his family; the fulfillment
of the pre-fall situation where God and Adam and Eve dwelt together as family.
-Kingdom ends with the throne of God
amid the new creation signaling God’s unrivalled rule over it; the fulfillment
of the implicit reign of God over his new world..
In between
Genesis 1-2 and Revelation 21-22, the great bookends of the biblical story from
which we learn the purpose of whose we are, who we are, and what we are to be
about the world, lies the sprawling, twisting, meandering tale of covenant
refused, kingdom rejected, and presence resisted.
The book
of Revelation reflects all three of these primary biblical themes, as would be
expected for the book which pictures the consummation of all things. God
desires to be present with us as his
family and has the power to achieve his goal. If presence
is the goal, covenant and kingdom are the drivers that carry the story to its
appointed end. As mentioned above, these strands interweave and are implicated
in each other all through the story.
Along with
the people of God as a Subversive Counter-Revolutionary Movement in a fallen
world, and the big picture God is working on, this threefold theme of presence,
covenant, and kingdom carries us nearly to the threshold of our text. There is
but one more “preface,” one more time of clearing my throat, before we are
there.
04. Already/Not Yet
In World
War II the turning point in the European theater was the Allied victory at
Normandy. After this battle, D-Day, the outcome of the war in that theater was
no longer in doubt. It took nearly a year, however, before the peace treaties
were signed and the hostilities ceased (V-Day). Between D-Day and V-Day the battles
raged on despite the hopelessness of the Axis’ plight. Allied forces remained,
alert, battle-ready, kept up their training, and on the outlook for desperate
unorthodox sorties by the Axis forces. In other words, they may have won the
war, but many battles remained to be won before the enemy was pacified and the
peace realized.
A New
Testament scholar named Oscar Cullmann applied this D-Day/V-Day scheme to the
New Testament’s view of salvation and discipleship in the middle of the last
century. In distinction from the Jewish view of history which moved linearly
from the present age to God’s new age via God’s decisive intervention to set
things right.
Current
Sinful Age God’s
Intervention New Age
The New
Testament, however, presents a more complex picture. What happened in and
through Jesus has unexpectedly modified this scenario. It looks a lot like the
D-Day/V-Day picture Cullmann pointed out. The resurrection of Jesus is the
decisive turning point in human history. Here God won the decisive victory over
sin, death, and the devil. It is D-Day. After the resurrection God’s victory
and achievement of his purposes for us and creation are achieved and secure.
They cannot be undone. Yet instead of the New Age of Peace commencing
immediately afterwards there is a gap between this decisive victory and the
Bible’s V-Day, Jesus’ return to earth to fully and finally establish God’s
kingdom. This gap is analogous to the interim period between D-Day and V-Day.
The old age is passing away and the new age has dawned. But the old age and the
powers underwriting it don’t go down without a fight. Thus this time is
conflicted and the people of God are the agents of engaging this struggle just
as the Allied forces in Europe continued to battle with the defeated but not
vanquished Axis forces.
Jesus’ Resurrection
Christ’s Return
New
Age/Already New
Age/Not Yet
Present
Sinful Age
Gordon Fee explains:
“The
fundamental framework for all of Paul’s theologizing, especially for “salvation
in Christ,” is his eschatological understanding of present existence – as both
“already” and “not yet.” With the resurrection of Christ and the gift of the promised Holy
Spirit, God has already set the future inexorably in motion;
thus salvation is “already.” But the consummation of salvation awaits the (now
second) coming of Christ – the “Day of Christ,” Paul calls it (1:6, 10; 2:16);
thus salvation has “not yet” been fully realized. The fact that the future has
already begun with the coming of God himself (through Christ and the Spirit)
means two crucial things for Paul: that the consummation is absolutely
guaranteed, and that present existence is therefore altogether determined by
this reality. That is, one’s life in the present is not conditioned or determined by
present exigencies, but by the singular reality that God’s people belong to the
future that has already come present. Marked by Christ’s death
and resurrection and identified as God’s people by the gift of the Spirit, they live the
life of the future in the present, determined by its values and perspective, no
matter what their present circumstances.”[iv]
D-Day means victory. God’s SCRM engages God’s enemies as
victors. This does not mean everything is hunky-dory, It means that it meets
the hardships and continued struggles it faces with a confidence and certainty
that not even death can dim. The new world has begun. It is from that new
world, that new reality, that God’s SCRM lives and draws its resources. The
limits and possibilities of the present sinful age which is passing away no
longer constrains or determines the limits and possibilities of obedience.
V-Day means the hope we live in and from. God’s BHAG achieved.
His people rest from their struggles. The battles are over. We are God’s family
(covenant) living gratefully under God’s gracious rule (kingdom) and
experiencing our full humanity in the presence of God.
It is crucial to keep
this Already/Not Yet (D-Day/V-Day) framework always in mind. It is central to
John’s message in Revelation where he portrays God’s people as “conquering” the
devil but also conquered by his minions (12:11; 11:7; 13:7). The victory is
secure but the struggle goes on as God’s people participate in his witness. You
cannot understand what discipleship or following Jesus is outside it.
[i] Arner, “Resisting the Empire,” https://preachingpeace.org/resisting-the-empire-fidelity-to-the-gospel-of-life/.
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