From God (Revelation 1:4-8)
Sunday, April 14, 2013
In the Elders meeting this past
week, I said, “The sermon this Sunday is about God.” Responses went like this. Um …
good topic. What else would it be about?
Then, I emailed Starlyn.
“This sermon is about God; … Find songs that talk about how
awesome God is.”
Coming
to church, one probably expects the pastor to talk about God. What could be more obvious? And yet, try it sometime this week. Describe God to someone. No matter what you say, something will be
left out. You could talk for days and
barely scratch the surface of all you could say about God.
No
matter what you say, something will be incomplete. In simply reviewing all God has spoken in the
Bible, we realize God has not shown us all of Himself and if God did, we could
not handle it.
No
matter what you say when you talk about God, someone will argue that you’re
wrong. Within evangelical Christianity,
we see numerous not just different thoughts, but competing ideas about God.
Add the ideas of Protestants. And
Pentecostals. And Anabaptists. Now, throw in Catholics. And Eastern Orthodox Christians. And Coptic believers and the Ethiopian
Orthodox Church. That’s just Christianity. What about Muslims and Jews and Mormons and
deists?
How
do we even begin to talk about God in a way that is intelligible? How do we talk about God in a way that’s
helpful?
Imagine
you are a part of one of the churches in Asia Minor in 96AD. Your congregation is one of the first to hear
the Revelation read publically. As a
church, you’re torn from three sides.
Most of the Greeks around you think you are some sort of Jewish sect and
in reality, Christianity is the faith that worships the Jewish Messiah. But Jews who do not believe Jesus was the
Messiah strenuously reject Christianity.
Because of this, over the centuries Christians have sinfully persecuted
Jews. There is nothing more Satanic in
history than the treatment of Jews by Christians. It is absolute evil and must be named and
condemned.
However,
in 96 AD, in Ephesus and the other Greek-speaking cities, the synagogue was an
established institution within the Roman Empire. The church was not. The Jews actually had achieved an exemption
from Rome. Rome required all subjects to
acknowledge that the emperor was a god.
Emperor worship and allegiance to the Emperor were laws enforced by pain
of death. The Romans knew the Jews to be
monotheists and exempted them from emperor worship. The Jews rejected the Christians – who
themselves were mostly Jews and Jewish proselytes who worshiped Jesus. So the Christians did not get the exemption.
Unlike
their Jewish cousins, Christians were required to practice emperor
worship. Christians were rejected by
Jews, mocked by Pagan Greeks, and arrested by Romans insisting on emperor
worship. Romans did not always persecute
Christians, but in the 90’s AD, in Asia Minor they did. Emperor Domitian demanded allegiance the
Christians could not give. What resulted
was a persecuted Church and it is to that church that an early believer named
John sent the letter we call Revelation.
Nowhere does John claim to be the
Apostle John, so I don’t identify him that way. I see him as a late first century
Christ-follower who received a visit from the risen, glorified Jesus, and wrote
down what Jesus told him to write.
One of the reasons modern
believers struggle to understand Revelation is we don’t live in the
circumstances of the original audience.
“Revelation is speech by and for the oppressed, those suffering under
the sword of Rome.”[i]
It is not for the successful, affluent, powerful church. It is also speech from God and so even though
the experience of the original hearers is foreign to us, the richness and truth
of the message transcends the original environment. What spoke to those beleaguered
Christ-followers still speaks here and now.
And what is said helps us understand God. It gives definition and substance and depth
to our description of God. Moreover, we
are able to see who we are because of God.
Revelation colorfully demonstrates what it means to follow and worship
and serve God.
Revelation is clearly a letter –
“Grace and Peace to you from him who is …”.
We don’t see anything novel here, but there certainly is something quite
new in this if we are reading it in 96 AD.
At that time no one began a
letter by writing “Grace and Peace.”
Greeks would start their letters with another form of Xaris from which
we get the word “grace.” They typical
Greek letters began with the form of the word that means “Warmest
greetings.” It is a nice opening to a
letter. But it didn’t mean “Grace.” Jewish letters would begin “Shalom,” which
means, “peace, wholeness, well-being.”
But the Jewish letters did not begin “Grace and peace,” just “peace.”
Only Christian letter began this way.
It was new invention. Why? In 96 AD, we’re asking, “Why does this letter
begin, ‘Grace and peace?’”
Well, who is it from.
“From him who was and is and is
to come.” This can only be a god. Many religions in 96 AD thought of their god
as the one who is and was and will be.
So this new form of Judaism, Christianity, wants its god to offer
‘grace,’ whatever that is, and ‘peace.’
Wait. There’s more!
“Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come,
and from the seven spirits who are before his throne.” Seven
spirits? What does that mean?
Listen to the uniquely Christian
greeting. “Grace to you and peace from
him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are
before his throne, and from Jesus Christ.”
The first statement unmistakably identifies God. Only God could fit that preexistent,
omnipresent, futuristic depiction. This wish
of grace and peace is from God. Seven
Spirits and Jesus Christ then are elaborations of God. Thus we can say about God that God extends to
all people grace and peace. And God
exists and presents God’s self to us in three persons – The Eternal Father, the
Spirit, and Jesus the Son. In talking
about God, we talk about the giver of grace and peace. And we talk about God who is three and
three-in-one.
This greeting reveals something
else that is easy to overlook. It says
God is the one who is and who was and who will be. … No, that is not what it says. It does not say God is the one who “will be,”
it says, God is the one who “will come.”
God is present but is also coming.
In the future something will happen where the present God will appear in
a way that God does not appear now. A new
God-event is surely coming. To our
understanding of God as giver of grace and peace and God as three-in-one, we
add that God is to be anticipated. God
is one who is to come.
The giver of grace and peace, the
three-in-one, the coming God is most fully revealed in Jesus, God in human
flesh. Revelation 1:5 says that Jesus
was the Christ, the Messiah. Jesus was
the faithful witness. In Revelation the
word used for witness is the Greek word ‘martyr.’ One who gave faithful witness held his or her
testimony even when threatened with death.
Jesus’ death on the cross showed him to be a faithful witness and after
that event many of his followers showed that faithfulness, proclaiming Jesus as
Lord even when doing brought suffering and death.
Jesus the Christ, the faithful
witness is also called the firstborn of the dead. His death was short lived as
the resurrection happened on the third day.
But Revelation does not simply refer to him as resurrected one, but as
the firstborn. There will be more. His followers will rise from death to eternal
life.
The Messiah faithful witness
resurrected one is the ruler of the kings of the earth. This statement was enough to get anyone who
made into hot water – or maybe boiling oil.
That would have been one way to deal with someone who declared a king
other than Caesar. John was already
exiled on Patmos “because of the word of God and testimony of Jesus"
(1:9c). He knew his writing could get
him killed but he wrote on anyway. Jesus
is the ruler of the kings of the earth – including the Roman emperor; including
the American president.
This Faithful Witness and King of
Kings can be known through his actions.
John writes to the end of verse 5 and into 6 that Jesus loves and
frees. Specifically he frees us from the
bondage of sin. John’s writing here is a
doxology. “To him who loves us and freed
us from our sins by his blood, and
made us to be a kingdom of priests serving his God and Father, to him be glory
and dominion forever and ever.
Amen.” We don’t have time to
explore all the implications of God’s actions.
I urge each one here to go back and read carefully word by word
Revelation 1:5-6.
God is known as he we see him in
Jesus and what does God do in Jesus? He
loves us. He sacrifices himself to free
us from sin. He makes us – not just the
clergy, not just the seminary-trained but all of us – to be priests who serve
God in the world.
John emphatically ends his
doxology with a declaration that his words are without question true. That is the meaning of the “Amen.”
Verse 7 reiterates what was said
earlier about God – he is one who “is to come.”
This sounds like a prophetic oracle.
“Look! He is coming on the
clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account
all the tribes of earth will wail.” And
this prophecy is punctuated just as the doxology was. With an emphatic “Amen!”
Do we notice that verse 4
described God as the one who “is to come,” and now in verse 7 Jesus is the one
who is to come? Do we notice that in
verse the entire earth sees the coming of Jesus and wails due to complicity in
his death? This verse announces Jesus’
divinity and proclaims that his coming is the coming of final judgment. Judgment is what caused the wailing of the
those who pierced him and now see him resurrected and in gloried form. This is implied here and laid out more fully
throughout Revelation.
One more reiteration of who God
is and also an anticipation of who Jesus is comes along in verse 8. “’I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the
Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. Alpha and omega are the first and last
letters of the Greek alphabet. God is
the A-Z. God is everything. In verses 17-18, Jesus appears in his glory
before John, probably similar to the form he had in the transfiguration before
the disciples, Peter, James, and John.
He says, “I am the first and the last, and the living one. I was dead, and see, I am alive forever and
ever; and I have the keys of Death and Hades.”
Coupled with the introduction to the letter in the verses we’ve been
discussing, Jesus here asserts that he is the eternal God, the everything, a
member of the trinity and of God; He was incarnated, took on human form, died,
and rose. He is alive forever – that’s a
key part of his resurrection. And he has
all authority to judge. This is who
Jesus is and Jesus is who God is.
The book of Revelation is a
letter from God. Even though we are
second-hand recipients and not the persecuted first century church that was
intimately aware of John’s imagery and the conditions that sparked John’s
writing, we see that Revelation is for us too.
The first thing for us to take hold of and never release is that this message
is to us from God. In this letter, we
see our God and in seeing and hearing, we start to come to know God.
I started out with a
challenge. Describe God! Revelation has given us good starting
material. God is the giver of grace and
peace. God is eternal and is
coming. God is Father, Spirit, and
Son. God is Jesus, the one who died for
sin and rose from death, and the one who loves and frees us from sin and who is
king of kings. He is the one who makes
us a nation of priests – each and every one of us. We are all called into God’s service. Jesus is also judge, the one who will come
and at his coming all who have rejected him will mourn. God is the first and the last, all-knowing,
almighty, and omnipresent.
If you didn’t get this all down,
review Revelation 1:4-8. And this week,
talk about God and think and pray about how each and every word that’s been
spoken about God affects your life. In
thinking about God, orient life upon God.
Fix all your attention on God.
And next week, we will again talk about God.
AMEN
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