Preached · May 14, 2017
Well, good afternoon. Anthony Parrott here, on staff at Good News Church. Over the past couple of weeks we've actually had a little bit of technical difficulty with recording our services, and I just wanted to take a few moments and rerecord what I preached on May 14th, when we wrapped up The Story — chapter 31 of the story — talking about Revelation, the end of time, and the conclusion of this great, epic story that we've been exploring since September. Thirty-one chapters, the whole of the Bible from front to back, cover to cover, in chronological order. It's been a great, great time. You did it. You stuck with it, and we're super excited that we did this as a church.
Pastor John used to joke that in 20 years of ministry he never preached a series on Revelation, because it's one of the more contentious, one of the more argumentative books of the Bible you can preach on. So of course, a month and a half after he leaves, it falls on me to preach on Revelation. I think when Pastor realized we were doing this series, and that Revelation would come at the end of it, that's about when he started looking for a job. That's a joke, by the way.
Anyway, I wanted to get this final sermon on Revelation right, so I'm doing this from a manuscript. I wanted to get the words exactly right, so give me a little bit of grace as I do it from this manuscript. It's also a recap of everything we've studied over these past seven, eight months together. So here we go.
In the Beginning
In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was formless and void, and darkness and chaos was over the surface of the deep waters.
And yet God's Holy Spirit was there over the surface of the deep waters — there in the chaos, there in the midst of the void. From the very first words of the story, we encounter a God who's not far off. He's not distant. He's not too holy to get too involved, not so righteous as to stay an arm's length away. We see a God who sits in the midst of the chaos, hovers in the midst of the darkness, dwells in even the primordial deep loneliness of a creation that needs order and light and life.
So God sees a creation in need of a word, in need of a good word. And so God speaks, "Let there be light," and there is light.
In ancient Jewish thinking, the waters, the sea — this was the source of all evil, of chaos, of demonic powers. And so God's next step is to separate the land and the sea, the waters of the sky from the waters of the planet below. In the book of Job, and the Psalms, and the prophet Isaiah, they all tell of God taking this monster called Rahab — this primordial idol-god of chaos, of the sea — and ripping Rahab to shreds, cutting it to pieces. Darkness and chaos, they have no place in God's ordered world. They are no match for God's light and goodness.
And so God continues in his creative symphony, bringing forth planets and moons and suns and stars, filling the sea and the land with fish and creatures. And then this divine symphony seems to be leading to a crescendo, a climax, its apex — a repeated refrain of God's voice declaring, "It's good, it is good, it is good."
The First Bride
But instead, the symphony actually quiets down for a moment. And God himself, this God who hovers over the deep chaos and brings order, then bends down into the dust and the dirt and the mud. And this God breathes into it and creates a human man. And it's in that moment, for the very first time, that there is a small hint of dissonance in God's creative symphony. For the first time, the refrain of "it is good" changes to "it is not good."
And so God embarks on the first of very many rescue missions for humanity. And God's response to this dissonance, to this something-wrongness of creation, is to make the man sleep, to slow down, to stop for just a moment. And then God creates a woman. And then the symphony of creation soars again.
The apex was not in the sun or the moon or the stars. It was not in the separation of the waters of chaos from the land below. It was not in the cutting down of Rahab. It was not even the creation of Adam. Rather, the symphony of creation reaches its most glorious heights when God brings forth womankind into the universe.
The Fall
And yet, we know that the story does not end there. Adam and Eve, our ancient parents, are given the choice to eat from the tree of life or to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And they make their choice, and they get exactly what they asked for. And so, for thousands of years, we have all borne the weight of their decision. Like our ancestors who decided many years before us to come to a new nation, to make their way to a new land, we bear the consequences of their decisions. We too live with the choice our ancient parents made for us. We too are living on a journey of knowing, of discovering both what is good and what is evil. And we all know the pain of that decision.
But God — this loving, triune God of creator, of spirit, of word — he does not abandon or forsake. He came into the chaos and darkness and gave it order and light. He came to the not-goodness of lonely man and gave us the finishing apex of creation, womanhood.
Born of a Woman: The Second Bride
And he came into the sinful desperation of the world, incarnating himself in human flesh as Jesus of Nazareth. And he did it in the most miraculous of ways: through childbirth. The divine plan honors both sexes, male and female. Jesus did not suddenly appear. He did not descend from the clouds as a grown man. Paul writes that Jesus was born of a woman, through the human process of childbirth. God was not ashamed or embarrassed of female or male bodies, of human embodiment, or of sexuality. Rather, both sexes, male and female, are dignified and sanctified by the birth of Messiah.
So this God, born of a woman, born as a man, did not consider equality with God as something to be used to his own advantage. But rather, Jesus emptied himself. He made himself nothing. He took on the nature of a servant and became obedient to death, even death on a cross.
The Wound That Heals the World
Jesus' crucifixion is the wound which heals the world. The forces of evil and darkness, of chaos and death, of pain and sin — they did their absolute worst to God the Son, hanging naked on a tree. And they lost. And so those dark forces, their power is exhausted. Jesus defeated the powers of death and the grave. They have no victory. They have no sting. Any final attempts they make to hurt God's people are like those of rigor mortis, like a spider crushed with its still-twitching legs vainly flailing about.
The life that Jesus lives in the resurrection is the life offered to all those who are in Christ — baptized into his name, living by his word, and empowered by his Spirit.
The God of Eternity
Our God is the God of eternity. He dwells in our present. He was active in our past. And God reigns in our future. For us humans, time is inflexible. It can't be toyed with, manipulated, or made to do our will. But for God, time is a creation. Time does his bidding. God can make the sun stand still, rivers flow backwards, and seas part. God can make the stench and the decay of death and disease rewind themselves. And so our Emmanuel, our God with us, is also our God ahead of us, already in the glorious future when all things are made right with the world.
In the resurrection of Jesus, God takes the future and explodes it into our present. The life and the light and the power of God's new age, his new creation, is not merely ahead of us, some distant future too far off to see or to know. Rather, God's new age has already begun in the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus told us many times that the kingdom of heaven is here, that the kingdom of heaven is in our midst. Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 1 that this current age is coming to nothingness. In 2 Corinthians we read that if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has already come, the old age is gone, and the new age is here — that the culmination of the ages has arrived, that the mystery hidden for the ages is now revealed to the Lord's people, that Jesus appeared at the culmination of the age.
The Now and the Not Yet
And yet, despite this all being true, we also recognize that not all things are right yet. Paul writes in Romans chapter 8 that creation waits in eager expectation and hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that all of creation, the whole of creation, has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, we who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, we groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption, the redemption of our bodies.
In other words, even though we know that God is exploding his glorious future into our present, we know that the work isn't done yet. We are still going to suffer physical death and decay. And even though we have confidence that it's temporary, that it's death's vain and pointless attempts at victory, we still cry and groan, waiting for the fullness of God's new creation to be revealed.
The Book of Revelation
Which brings us to the last book of the story, the last book of Scripture, the book of Revelation. The question about this book over the millennia has almost always been the same. Was it just about the past, the time of John, the author? Is it about our present? Or is it about the future? To which the answer is, of course, yes.
If we believe Jesus, that the kingdom of God is already in our midst; if we believe Paul, that if we're in Christ the new creation has already come — then Revelation can't merely be about the distant future. The promises of Revelation are already coming true. God's presence already does dwell with humankind. The church is already enacting God's power and authority over creation. These are truths happening today, now, through the power of the Holy Spirit indwelling each of us.
When we make Revelation only about the future, we're actually denying God's present work in and through the church. We're telling Jesus that he's wrong, that the kingdom of heaven has not come, that the new creation is not here, that the church is not God's presence on earth. When we make the book of Revelation only about some future that's not yet happened, we tread dangerously close to blaspheming God's Spirit.
Empires Masquerading as Kingdoms
Now, two millennia of readers have assumed that their Revelation has always been about their present time period. And perhaps that should teach us something: that until the culmination, the fulfillment of God's new creation, we will always have a Babylon attacking those who believe in Jesus. There are always going to be empires masquerading as Christian nations, but who are instead hell-bent on the opposite of what Jesus' kingdom is about. Instead of shalom and peace, they are about violence. Instead of equality, these empires are about distinctions. Instead of seeing others' needs as higher than our own, these empires are about me first, my country first, my money first. Instead of joining with God to reconcile all people and all creation to God, empires are instead about the false ideal and idol of making something great again.
And so the book of Revelation is right to name those empires as what they are: dragons and beasts, the whore of Babylon, the dwelling place of demons deserving nothing but eternal fire. Where the modern mind wants to blame individuals and shame single sinners, Revelation sees things from the divine perspective: a righteous judge who condemns systems of oppression, institutions of racism, economies of subjugation.
And so of course Revelation is about the past. Of course it's about the empire that John found himself in. He knew he would be immediately executed if he wrote about the evils of Rome, and so he wrote about Babylon instead. But all his readers knew what he was really talking about. And so of course Revelation is about our present, naming the evil empires of our day and age, recognizing systems of evil for what they are. And of course, even if Revelation is not only about our future, it has something to do with our future. Creation does groan. God's people do longingly, expectantly wait. The kingdom is inaugurated, but it's not yet consummated.
It's as if we are in the parade between the inauguration at Capitol Hill and the taking up of residence at the White House. We're in the time between the marriage vows and the wedding bed, the first rains of April and the first blossoms of May. We live in the now and the not yet, the in-between places — certain that God's future has broken into our present, and that our present is racing headlong into God's certain future.
Eden Remade
And so the story begins with God breaking into our chaos. And the first time God needs to repair something not good, God gives the universe the gift of femininity, of womanhood, of Eve — the first bride. And when God again breaks into creation at the culmination of the ages, he does so again through a woman, a peasant girl named Mary, betrothed to Joseph but overcome by God's Spirit, a virgin who gives birth to Jesus. Our Eastern Orthodox Christian brothers and sisters take so seriously the incarnation — this idea, this historical fact, that God became human — that they gave Mary a nickname: Theotokos, Mother of God. And so God again begins his rescue plan of humanity through femininity, through womanhood: Mary, the second bride.
In Revelation, we are given the story of Genesis once more, but told anew. We are told that creation can cease its groaning, that every tear is wiped from every eye, that there is no more death or mourning or crying or pain. We are told that land and sea aren't just separated, but there is no more sea — in other words, there is no place where evil and chaos can hide. We are told that not just light and day are separated, but there is no more night; we will not need lamps or even sunlight when the light of God himself will be all the light we need. We are even told that we are granted access to not just one tree of life, but a river lined with them, constantly bearing fruit for our continual enjoyment. Eden is remade, but it's not just a garden — it's a garden city, where the throne of God and the throne of the Lamb that was slain will take their residence, its gates never shut and its beauty never fading.
The Final Bride
But how? How does this all take place? What brings about this new, restored creation, this culmination of God's intention for the world? What is the apex, the climax, of God's symphony of eternity? Through what else but a bride? John writes:
I saw a new heaven and a new earth. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband, and it shone with the glory of God.
God brings about his future through us, his church, the bride of Christ, now in the present. God's rescue plan for the world, for the universe, is enabled by the Holy Spirit and enacted through the bride of his Son — you and me. We are caught up in the story, in God's story, the greatest story ever told. And we receive the honor of being the final bride, the mistakes of Eve undone, and the faithfulness of Mary bearing fruit. The church, by God's power, will welcome in the restoration of all things.
Come
The part that absolutely haunts me — the part that reminds me that time is but a creation in God's hands — is at the very end of the story. In the final verses, in the last chapter of the last book of the Bible, Revelation, we're told that there are two people calling out to us today in the present. And God's Spirit calls to us from a certain future of God's new creation, and God's Spirit calls us to come. And you know who else is calling us to come? Christ's bride.
In God's eternal point of view, those who are in Christ are already with God in eternity. Our salvation is so sure, our eternal destiny so secure, that Scripture itself ends with a description of us in the future calling out to us in the present, saying: Come, enter into your rest. Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.
