"The Lamb's Drama: His People and the Competition"

Scriptur Readings: Revelation 12:1-11, & 17; Revelation 13:1-18
(Actually the sermon is based on the whole of Revelation 12:1-15:4)

I have only worked a wheat harvest once. That was my first summer here. It was long, hot work. I didn’t do anything but work, and eat, and work, and sleep, and work.

And then it was done. We were done. We stood in the last field. We had turned it all to stubble. We stood in the stubble of that last field, in our cluster of combines and trucks.

Nobody said anything worth remembering. Or, if they did, I don’t remember it. But it felt really, really, really good. It was victory!

The Book of Revelation celebrates the victory of God and his people. It shows the whole game of the contest of heaven and earth, with God’s victory scene, over and over again.

For us to read the Book of Revelation would be like being on a very big and strange football team that would review videos of their last game from beginning to end. But the videos of this game come from more than one camera. If you were on this team, you would have to watch each video, from each camera, from beginning to end, one after another after another.

Say that one video came from cameras set on the goal posts, another camera was held by someone who followed the plays back and forth along the side lines, and another camera was on top of the quarterback’s helmet, and another camera was just focused on the coaches. Maybe that’s not the most efficient way to do it, but that is what happens in John’s vision that forms our Book of Revelation. More than once you get to the end of the game and you think “victory!” but there is still more footage to see, and think about.

In Revelation, the final harvest of heaven and earth takes place at the beginning of chapter eight, and again at the end of chapter eleven, and again at the end of chapter fourteen, and there are still eight more chapters to go. In chapter fifteen, the beginning of the next video-version of the game is announced; but that one is interrupted by the song that the winning team sings at the end, just the way our team does it.

This is how John says that he sees it: And I saw what looked like a sea of glass mixed with fire and, standing beside the sea, those who had been victorious over the beast and his image and over the number of his name. They held harps given them by God and sang the song of Moses the servant of God and the song of the Lamb: Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the ages. Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship before you, for your righteous acts have been revealed. (Rev. 15:2-4) That is the victory song at the end of the great game of the old heaven and earth.

What John calls the sea of glass, mixed with fire, is a real part of the picture of harvest and victory. Glass represents the purity of the victory; and fire represents the hardship, and tribulation, and just the plain trouble that went into the victory process.

Back in the Old Testament, the courtyard of temple that Solomon built had a great big thing in it called a “sea”. It was a basin made of cast bronze, about 15 feet across. The sea stored water for cleaning and washing in the temple. (1 Kings 7:23-26)

Washing is a kind of harvest too. It is the harvest of all the dirt and the sweat of the harvest. To come in from a long, hard, hot, harvest day, and take a shower, and sit down is a kind of victory. It feels really, really good. The crowd in John’s vision, who stand beside the sea of glass and fire, have come home and washed after the last, long, hard, hot day of harvest is over, and they have put on fresh clothes, and they have (over, and over, and over again) done the one thing that John says is so important.

He says that getting through the troubles and temptations of this world “calls for the patient endurance of the saints.” (Rev. 13:10 and 14:12) They have done this one great thing. They have patiently endured. That is why they are singing victory at the end of the harvest game.

The sister of a friend of mine once commented to her about me (once when she saw me dressed up). She said, “Dennis cleans up good.” Revelation is all about how belonging to Jesus gets us through life so that, in the end, we clean up good.

In the fourteenth chapter of Revelation, there is a final harvest. Actually there are two final harvests: a harvest of grain, and a harvest of grapes.

A field of stubble, after the harvest is done, is a very different place from a field of ripe grain. The field is empty. The fruit of the harvest has moved on. The life has gone somewhere else. But the vision of the final wheat harvest in the Revelation is told as a happy thing.

In the final grape harvest, the juice that will come from crushing of the grapes to make the wine of judgment is compared to a river of blood. This is not a happy thing.

These two final harvests clearly show that the final harvest of heaven and earth will be good for some: a happy thing; a great day. It also clearly shows that the final harvest will be a catastrophe for some: a day that crushes them, a day of destruction.

There is something violent about any harvest. It is a kind of battle or conquest. It is violent to the plants in the fields and the vineyards. The truth is that our lives are shaped by battles.

For a farmer, a good harvest is a joyful battle, and that is how life can be. In fact we need joyful battles. We work. We play. We strain and weep. We celebrate and rejoice.

Patient endurance does not mean grim endurance. Patience knows how to grunt and sweat, and how to laugh. Life is what Paul calls “the good fight.” (2 Timothy 4:7)
But the part of the last harvest where the blood flows so deep, and so far, is a clear warning that the final judgment will be a time of gut-wrenching crisis. There will be unspeakable fear.

At yet, in that final time there will be more than one kind of fear going on. There will be the bad fears, but there will also be the one good fear.

There is one good fear. We read about it in that line from the song of the victors: “Who will not fear you, O Lord, and bring glory to your name?” (Rev. 15:4) How odd that, when you fear the Lord, you are full of joy. Your life shows how good and gracious the Lord is.

It is true that if you dearly love someone and, even more, if you know that someone dearly loves you, there will be things that make you afraid. You will be afraid to do certain things, if you are truly loved. And it is said that the person who truly fears God will fear nothing else. And this will be possible for us, even if we are the ones on the scene who are left to face the final judgment.

In the two harvests, the wheat and the grapes are people. We are either wheat or grapes, and ripeness is everything. In the two harvests, no one is touched until they are ripe. You must be everything that a grain of wheat can be. You must be everything that a grape can be. You must be finished to be harvested. You must be ripe. The great question is: will you be ripe wheat, or ripe grapes?

There are two great powers pictured in these chapters. There is the Lamb who was slain. And there is the Beast (well, there is the dragon, represented on earth by the power of the two beasts).

Have we ripened in the Lamb, or ripened in the Beast? The real beast is the dragon, which is Satan; and the Lamb is Jesus, who is God in the flesh.

Now, in the twelfth chapter of Revelation, we see the defeat of Satan described in three different ways. In the first version, Satan is defeated by a baby boy, the son of the woman who is clothed with the glories of nature; the sun and the moon and the stars. The woman’s son is born and taken up into heaven.

This son is Jesus; and this summarizes everything he did between being born and ascending into heaven. Here we have his incarnation (his birth as a human to share life with us), his humble life and service, his death on the cross, his rising from death, and his going up into heaven. (Rev. 12:1-6)

In the second version, the defeat of Satan is pictured as a battle in the heavens: the archangel Michael and his angels fighting against Satan and his fallen angels. But that is just another way of seeing what Jesus did. The birth, and life, and sacrifice, and resurrection of Jesus are a cosmic victory. It is a victory on the earth. It is a victory in the spiritual world. It is a universal victory. (Rev. 12:7-9)

The third version of the victory over Satan happens in the song. The song is about our victory over Satan: “They overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” (Rev. 12:11)

There are two choices. There are two powers to live by in this world, and this choice of what power we will live by is how we decide to ripen for the harvest. There is the ripeness of the Lamb and the ripeness of the Beast.

The power of the Lamb is in his blood. Here is Jesus, and his power is his dying for us and rising for us.

This is how he makes us his own. This is how he seals us. This is the mark that he puts on our forehead and on our hand. The mark is his label. The mark is his claim upon us, his ownership over us, his power working in us.

Jesus, living for us, dying for us, rising for us is the love of God made flesh. It is grace. It is forgiveness. We respond to his love by loving others. We respond to his grace by being gracious to others. We respond to his forgiveness by forgiving others.

If this is true, then this is the power that makes us ripen as the good harvest, the joyful harvest, of the grain. The power of Jesus in us is what makes us like Jesus.

The power of the Beast makes us different from Jesus. The power of the beast is power for its own sake. We live for ourselves. We use others. We do not give grace. We do not forgive. We measure our value by what we have and what we get.

The image of the beast that tries to make people worship the beast is a technological idol. There were pagan idols (in ancient times) that were rigged with machinery that enabled them to move, and speak, and do other things. It is all about stuff, and techniques, and methods of getting results, getting what you want, and getting others to do what you want.

What this stands for is what happens when people carry on their lives by means of methods, and tools, and techniques, and possessions, and stuff. It is life by using and manipulating, and not by living, and feeling, and caring.

In the world of the early Christians, the Roman Empire was a world of power for power’s sake; a world where the end justified the means. One of the emperor’s titles was Savior. The emperor saved by his power. If people were hungry, the emperor fed them. If people were restless, the emperor entertained them. People did not help others because the emperor and his local representatives did that. It was not the job of a normal human being to be compassionate.

There have been times when societies and nations worshiped power, and order, and control. The communists and the fascists encouraged the worship of governmental power focused in the person of a great leader: a Stalin or a Hitler.

The Revelation of John foresees a final crisis where the fate of the whole human race will seem to rest on (and depend on) the power of government and, perhaps, the power of one human being, and the common worship of that government and that person. Anyone who stands against this will be considered an enemy of all that is decent and good.

There is another way of seeing this. There was an ancient Christian hermit named Anthony who said, ‘A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying, “You are mad, you are not like us”’
Those who base their lives on human-based power, and the salvation based on human systems, and human effort, will become the fruit of the Beast. Those who base their values on the principle “the end justifies the means” will become the fruit of the Beast.

The spirit of these principles is the mark of the Beast. The person who lives a life guided by these principles is marked. You can identify such people by the way they live their lives.

The world tends to reward the people who conform to the world’s ways. The world tends to raise obstacles against those who do not conform. Before the end comes, this will grow much worse. Even now, human beings live with one of the two marks of life: mark of the Lamb or the mark of the Beast.

But let’s not judge anyone before the time; not even ourselves. Strangely, until the time when they are fully ripe, a spiritual grain of wheat can be mistaken for a grape, and a spiritual grape can be mistaken for a grain of wheat.

The woman who gives birth to the son whom the dragon wants to devour is the Old Testament church, the people of Israel. By the end of the twelfth chapter, without any explanation, the same woman is the mother of those who belong to Jesus. Here she is the New Testament church. In a sense the woman is us. We are that church, and that church is our mother, all at the same time.

This woman is part of the truth that the power of Jesus begins with his incarnation, with his becoming our own flesh and blood. Jesus becomes us in order to save us.

If the woman is our mother also, and also us, at the same time; it gives us a similar lesson about ourselves. The power to overcome, and to be victorious, comes to the people who will incarnate Jesus; who will seek to be Jesus in this world.
We are called to be his hands, and feet, and back, and shoulders, and his voice in this world, no matter how troubled the world becomes, no matter how risky and dangerous it may seem to follow him.

If we love Jesus, as the scriptures show him to be, we will not be coerced or deceived. The Lamb, who is Jesus, died to hold us close to him forever. We can overcome by the blood of the Lamb; and by the humble, patient endurance that is willing to fight the good fight.

"The Lamb's Drama: His People and His Warnings"

Scripture Readings: Revelation 8:2-13; Revelation 11:1-15

A man was going for a drive with his wife. Now this man had the habit of driving faster than the speed limit, and she had the habit of pointing this out to him. He politely dealt with her habit by ignoring it. But on this drive, after ignoring his wife a number of times, he got pulled over by the state trooper, and got a ticket. When this was over, they went on their way, and the man complained to his wife that the officer could have just given him a warning. But his wife commented: “John, I gave you the warning.”

We live in a world full of warnings. And there are all kinds of warnings.

Some are really important. Don’t run with scissors. Look out for snakes.

Some warnings may seem silly, but they make sense when you really think about them. For instance, there was the warning label on the toilet bowl cleaning brush that said: Do not use orally.

There are warnings that we may want to ignore. As serious as they are, we don’t want them to be serious for us. Do not steal. Do not lie. Do not covet. Do not commit adultery. These might actually seem silly when they get in the way of our getting what we want, but they are dangerous to ignore. They take their toll. They are given to us to make us think.

There are other kinds of warnings that make us think. There was a time, many years ago now, when I got further and further behind paying my federal income tax, and this turned out to be very embarrassing and it really made me think.

I haven’t been in any real natural disasters, but my family did evacuate our home just before Christmas, when I was thirteen, because of flood warnings. Actually we did this a couple times. And during my time in the Midwest I spent time, more than once, in basements, wondering whether the tornadoes were going to hit the house I was in. These things make you think.

The Great Depression, in the nineteen twenties and thirties, made a couple generations of Americans think, and our economy right now is making us do the same kind of thinking. The great dangers that seem to face our country from abroad, and the thought of young people from our families or our communities serving their country, in harms way, makes us think. The death of Drew Swank at our homecoming game makes us think.

Such things make us think: how do we give thought to the people around us? What should we see when we look at them? What should we hear when they speak to us? How do we live? How do we live with passion, and energy, and faith, and hope, and love? And how do we help others live? The world is full of warnings that make us stop and think about such things and, hopefully, to follow through.

We find that the Book of Revelation tells us something important about Jesus and such warnings. The very first words of Revelation are these: “The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.” (Revelation 1:1) The revelation of Jesus means, first of all, that we have to see and know Jesus himself.

We have to see and know Jesus, and what he is like, because the issues and the events that will take us through history to the end of this age, and to the judgment, and to the beginning of a new heavens and a new earth, are all based on who Jesus is, and what Jesus does through us and for us.

It may seem to contradict what we know about Jesus in the fact that the Book of Revelation is so full of destruction. But the very world we live in is full of destruction. It is a beautiful, magnificent world, where so much good is spoiled by anger, hatred, violence, fear, exploitation, abuse, corruption, greed, injustice, self-righteousness, and so many other sources of harm (or even such seemingly little things like jealousy and gossip).

Toward the end of chapter eleven, John, the writer of the book, is told: “The time has come…for destroying those who destroy the earth.” (Rev. 11:18) All of these negative things are destructive in their own way. What is to be done with the destroyers: What would Jesus do?

In the section we are looking at today, there are four things to be done with the destroyers. There are prayer, and warning, and sanctuary, and witness. We are involved in all of these.

There are seven trumpets to be blown in this part of Revelation. These trumpets are symbols of warning. In the end, there is a stubborn remnant of human beings who will not think when they have been warned. They will not repent. They will not have a change of heart. They will not stop, and turn, and surrender. (Rev. 9:20) But this is the point of the warnings. Their purpose is to give anyone who will only think a chance.
The seven trumpets of warning are tied to prayer. John gives us the picture of an altar where all the prayers of all God’s people have been collected, and offered to God, and are sent back down to the earth in the form of the seven warning trumpets.
When we pray all kinds of prayers, for all conditions of people, all over the world; when we pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we pray for the warning of the world. We pray for God to put a stop to all the destruction caused by the destroyers. And God’s first answer is to give them warning.

The number seven, in the Book of Revelation, and in most places where it is found in the Bible, is a number that represents perfection or completeness or the essence of the thing. It is like when a parent says to a child, “How many times have I told you?” Of course, in that case, even if you have told them enough times, it is obviously not enough, and so you go on telling them.

Whatever we need to know, God will tell us enough times for it to be enough, and more than enough. He will tell us that he loves us more than enough times for us to hear him. And he will warn us, wherever we need to be warned, more than enough times for us to hear him. All of the prayers of all of the saints add up to this.

Revelation is full of sets of seven things: seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls of wrath. These are not all set end to end, as part of a complicated time-line. They are like pictures, or parts of a picture, that overlay each other. Each layer adds to the design of the layers above and below it.

The seven seals tell about the facts of the world as it is, and always is. The seven bowls of wrath to come (that follow the seven trumpets) represent the reality of judgment. The seven trumpets, in the middle of the other two, represent warning. The trumpets are worse than the seals, and not nearly as bad as the bowls of wrath that follow.

This does represent the message that there will be a time when things will go from bad to worse; and from worse to worst. When we pay attention to the pattern of growing seriousness and growing alarm, the purpose of this, too, is to make us, and the whole world, think. The purpose is to make us, and the whole world, decide how we need to live, and how we need to change.

There is one more thing about prayer and warning. The prayers are offered at the altar in heaven. In John’s vision there is one altar, alone, that represents sacrifice and prayer (see Rev. 6:9-11 and 8:3-4). This altar represents Jesus Christ, who died for us and who also prays for us. (Romans 8:34)
Jesus died for the sins of the world because he and his Father so loved the world (John 3:16). The warnings in the Book of Revelation come from God’s love for the world.

The first four trumpets announce warnings that take the form of damage to land, and ocean, and fresh water, and the air that is darkened so that the sun, and the moon, and the stars fade in the sky. If God wants to warn those whose actions destroy the earth, perhaps we are being shown pictures of the warnings in which the destroyers are allowed to see the outcome of their own work. And yet God does not allow them to be destroyed by their own doing. He only warns them.

A couple of the trumpets show us that destruction is not only a physical thing. We are shown some pictures of swarms of mutant locusts that come out of hell, and pictures of the 2,000,000-strong army of mutant creatures.

These mutants are not human beings, and they are not human weaponry. These mutants are evil made visible. They are evil with a demonic face. They show that evil and destruction are not just something that humans do to the physical world, but that they also destroy the heart, the mind, and the soul of human life. The toll this takes will be huge. And there are those who will look at what they have done square in the face; and they will refuse to see it, and they will refuse to change.

There are two more things we are to do in a world full of warning. This is for us to be a sanctuary and witnesses.

The temple John is told to measure is us. The Bible tells us that Christians are the temple of the Lord. Paul tells the Christians in the city of Corinth: “Don’t you know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16, also 1 Peter 2:4-5) We are the temple because we are in Christ, and Christ is the true Temple. The Temple is the only place where God is truly to be met, and known, and served.

Jesus said that he was the Temple, and that he would become that Temple by dying for the sins of the world and rising from the dead. In the Gospel of John he says, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” (John 2:19) If human beings build a new Temple in Jerusalem (as exciting as this might sound) it will not be the real temple at all. Jesus is the only place where truly we meet God face to face and serve him. This is true for everyone who belongs to him.

In a world full of God’s warnings, we are a sanctuary together. We are to be a haven and a shelter in a crazy and fearful world. We are to be safe people for the shelter of others who need refuge, and strength, and peace. We are to live together in a way that the world does not live.

We also need to have a source of life beyond ourselves that makes such a way of life possible. We can only be a sanctuary because we have taken sanctuary in Jesus, who is our life. In John’s vision we are protected as God’s sanctuary even though we may feel surrounded and besieged. (Rev. 11:1-2)

Being the sanctuary means being in a zone of safety. However, we also have to faithfully function as God’s people outside the zone of safety, because we are witnesses. The witnesses in John’s vision go out, and are eventually killed. There are only two witnesses in John’s vision, but they stand for us. They stand for the church.

They are also Moses and Elijah, but Jesus does a strange thing with Moses and Elijah. In the gospels, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up to a high hilltop, and he changes before their eyes. Jesus starts to shine and dazzle them. We call this the transfiguration. And Moses and Elijah are there with him, and with the disciples. The disciples see the three of them together: Jesus, Moses and Elijah; and they hear Moses and Elijah talking about the death and resurrection of Jesus.
Then Moses and Elijah go away. There is a voice from God who tells them to listen to Jesus. (Luke 9:28-36) And so the disciples become the witnesses of Jesus, in place of Moses and Elijah.

The disciples take up the task of Moses and Elijah, they take the place of the law and the prophets who are the Old Testament witnesses of Jesus, and we follow in their path. This is our job, the job of the church, to be witnesses to Jesus, right up to the very end of the very end of those days.

The fire that comes from our mouths, in John’s vision (Rev. 11:5), is just the truth, and it is the gospel of the love of God in Christ. Love always burns the most those who resist it the most.

This world will be a world full of the gracious and loving warnings of God, right up to the day when everything is finished and the angels say: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.” (Rev. 11:15)

Our job is to pray, and to be a surrounded and besieged sanctuary, and to be faithful witnesses, until that time. This is how we will give those who do not know Jesus a place to go when the warnings of the world make them stop and think.

The vision of Revelation is scary and threatening. The world we live in now is scary and threatening. But the vision shows us how to be on the right path in scary times. It shows us that we can live with passion, and energy, and faith, and hope and love in Christ, and be his partners all the way.

"The Lamb's Drama: Who Can Stand?"

Scripture readings: Revelation 4:1-5:7; Revelation 7:9-8:1

When I was little my parents bought a big set of encyclopedias to help us kids in school, when we were older. I have always been addicted to reading, and it wasn’t long before I became a reader of encyclopedias, although I must confess that I started out with the pictures. One of the kinds of pictures, in those encyclopedias, that fascinated me was, for lack of a better word, the cross section. (I know there’s a better word for this.) It was something like a three dimensional picture; say of the human body, or of a gasoline engine. It was always done on several pages of clear plastic that overlaid each other.

For a gas engine (for example), it would show, first, the outside of the engine. Then you would turn that page and see what was under the outside of that engine (maybe it showed what was under the head of the engine and some of the other systems). Then, the next page would show you the next thing under those (maybe the valves). Then it would show you the next thing under those (maybe the cylinders and pistons). These pictures gave the illusion of looking through the layers of the engine and its various systems.

From the earliest centuries, Christians believed that the Book of Revelation was like a wonderful set of these pictures. It doesn’t so much show us one thing after another. The Book of Revelation is not a complicated time-line or order of events. It just peels back views beneath the surface of one great thing. It shows us a cross-section of one great thing: the change of the heavens and the earth (as they are now) into the heavens and the earth as they will be, when God recreates them. It shows us this one thing from different depths and different angles; until we have something like a three dimensional vision of the one great thing that God intends to do.

It is hard to get our minds around this one great thing that God intends to do; taking the heavens and the earth as they now are, and recreating them into the heavens and the earth, as he intends them to be. It is a really big thing. So he gives us this book of many pictures, to help us imagine what he wants to do, and why.

The Book of Revelation gives us many pictures of nature and God’s creation. Some of these pictures are scary. In some of these pictures, nature seems to be in crisis and turning on the human race. Waters turn bitter, or as red as blood. The earth shakes. The world burns. The skies turn dark. Things in space fall upon the earth. That’s one scary picture.

Another picture is a heavenly view of things; a heavenly view of nature and God’s creation. We see this picture in the fourth chapter of Revelation. The four living creatures standing by the throne of God are a picture of this.

In the Bible, the number four represents the world of nature and God’s creation. One living creature is said to look like a Lion; the second like a bull; the third like a human; the fourth like a flying eagle. For the ancient people, the lion represented nobility, the bull represented strength, humans represented wisdom or intelligence, and the eagle represented swiftness. The four living creatures represent everything that is noble, and strong, and wise, and swift in God’s creation.

And John sees that the creation is all eyes. Not only is creation wonderful, but it is full of wonder. Creation is full of attention toward God, and full of worship. Creation, in some mysterious fashion, not only worships and glorifies God, but creation is aware of God. It sees God. Perhaps creation sees us, as well.

So the pictures of nature and God’s creation show us that the creation can play a part in the judgment of the human race. But creation is also right beside us in the presence of God. Creation is a partner with us, in our wonder and worship of God.

This helps us understand the extreme passion of God for everything he has made. It helps us understand our accountability to God for how we live on this planet.

This is true, because we can see ourselves standing side by side with God’s universe, before the throne of God; standing, and bowing, and singing alongside nature in the presence of God. We can see ourselves in that picture, represented by the twenty four elders with their crowns, and their thrones, and their harps (5:8). The number twenty-four (or 2 times twelve) is what identifies us. The number twelve represents God’s people. There were twelve tribes of Israel in the Old Testament, and there were twelve disciples, or apostles, in the New Testament. More than once, the Revelation brings the two times twelve together. (Revelation 21:12-14) The twenty-four elders are all of the people of God from Israel and the Church, the Body of Christ.

Some of the pictures of us, in the Book of Revelation, show us persecuted, and hunted, and endangered, and even dead, but this picture, early in the vision, shows us safe. We see ourselves as God sees us. We are just as Paul describes us in his letter to the Ephesians (Ephesians 2:6): “God has raised us up in Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly places.”

We are enthroned, sharing in the Lord’s rule of the universe, as we say “yes and amen”, and cheer the Lord on through all the things that he does. We see pictures of us, in prayer and worship, and we see pictures of how all our prayers are wound up in the things that God does. (Revelation 8:3-5)

This is our job: to be involved, however we can, in what God wants to do in this world where we live. Prayer is part of our involvement in God’s activities. This is the job of our lives: to become a living prayer in action.

We see many pictures of Jesus in Revelation. There is the Lion. There is the Lamb. There is the one who can open the scroll in heaven.

There is a vision of a scroll with seven seals that cannot be opened. The scroll contains the explanation of everything that is going to happen in human history, and in the judgment of the human race. We are told (in this vision) that no one can open this explanation of everything, except for the Lion of Judah.

John turns around so that he can see the picture of the Lion, but he sees the picture of a Lamb instead, and this Lamb has been killed. It has had its throat slit. It has the wounds of a lamb that has been sacrificed for our sins.

We often want the Lord to be a Lion, and scare away our enemies. Instead, the Lord does his greatest work as a lamb who dies for us.

We often want God to use his great power in order to deal with the way the world works; when his chosen way of dealing with our world is by being the Lamb that was slain for the sins of the world. In all the horrible things that go on in this beautiful world only a wounded God can make sense. In Christ, God gave himself for the sins and evils of this world, and only this can explain everything. Only this can ultimately answer our questions about the meaning of everything. The great Lion can only open the scroll because he is also the Lamb who was slain.

The Lamb who was slain has the kind of authority to explain the meaning of everything the way a surgeon would have the authority to perform a particular surgery based on the fact that that surgeon was not only competent to do that surgery, but had actually had that surgery performed on him or her first. This is the authority that the birth, and the life, and the death, and the resurrection of Jesus give him to be the only one who can unseal the scroll that explains everything.

There is this vision of the scroll that explains everything, and this part of Revelation is in the fifth through the beginning of the eighth chapters. If we want to know what this world is really like, we can see it, from beginning to end, in the opening of the seven seals.

The first seal reveals a rider on a white horse who goes forth to conquer (see also 19:11), and this is another picture of Christ, to add to the Lion and the Lamb. The first explanation of this world is that we live in a world where Christ goes out to win people, to claim them, to meet them and make them his own. This is a fact of the world we live in. If we don’t understand this, then we don’t understand what anything means.

The second seal reveals another rider on a red horse. This rider carries a big sword and takes peace away from our world. This shows us that the world we live in is a place of conflict, and destruction. But the lack of peace is not just about war.
Paul said this about a world that is empty of peace: “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – having a form of righteousness but denying its power.” (2 Timothy 3:2-5) Don’t you think the world has been a place like this (a world without peace) for some time now?

The third seal represents another rider (this one on a black horse) carrying a set of scales, and the rider says that we live in a world where many people will barely have enough, if anything at all, and yet the luxuries of the world will be safe. This third explanation of the world is that we live in a world of terrible poverty side by side with great abundance. This is a fact of the world we live in.

The fourth seal represents a rider on a pale horse. This rider’s name is Death. This tells us that we live in a world where we all die, and where too many people die tragically, and untimely. This is a fact of the world we live in.

The fifth seal reveals those who have been slain for the word of God. This tells us that we live in a world where good people suffer, where good people suffer for doing good, and where those who trust in God and seek to show his love and justice in the world may be hurt and killed for their lives of faith, and love, and justice.

The sixth seal reveals that we live in a world that will be judged accordingly. It will be as if everything in the world of human affairs and everything in the world of nature is falling to pieces and turning against us. It will be terrifying.

And, at the end of this, John says that the sky itself and everything in it will be gone (all rolled up together), and the mountains and islands and the masses of the earth will also be removed. The world as we have known it will all disappear, in order for a great change to take place.

The seventh seal reveals silence. This is an odd place to stop. What happens beyond the silence is what we will see at the end of the book. But the silence is an amazing thing in itself. The silence means that what happens next will be wonderful beyond words.

There are two more pictures of us in these chapters. John shows us a world that is set on pause, where angels at the four corners of the earth hold back the four winds. The winds represent the forces that bring pain and judgment into the world. John is taken back in time before any harm comes to the world and, I think, before there was any need for the gospel, before there was anything to take away the peace of the world, before there was any scarcity, before there was death. Before anything happened, God’s people were all numbered, and claimed, and sealed.

It is like going to camp, and your mother writing your name on all your clothes, even on your underwear, so that you can sort them out if they get mixed up with other people’s clothes. No one will take them because they have your name on them.
God labels us with his own name. That is what it means to be sealed. But he labels us on the inside. He labels us with his Holy Spirit. He puts more than just his name in us. He puts his resemblance in us so that, in our heart of hearts, we are made for him.

We are all counted and accounted for. John hears this action described as if it happened to the people of Israel; as if they were the ones being counted and sealed, but when he turns to see the people of Israel, he sees a surprising sight. Instead of seeing only the people of Israel, as he expected, John sees a multitude, an uncountable crowd of everyone who belong to Jesus; Jews and Gentiles both. (For the case in favor of identifying all Christians with the people of Israel; see Romans 11; Ephesians 3:6; Philippians 3:3; Colossians 2:11).

Everyone who belongs to Jesus has something in them, something about them, that cannot be taken away, that cannot be lost.

The world sometimes seems like a scary and dangerous place. This world is a place where there is a lot of anger, and fear, and injustice, and evil. The Book of Revelation puts you and me face to face with the consequences and the responsibilities of living in such a world.

It tells us that we are not alone. We are not alone because we are labeled by God and we are always, essentially, in his presence. We are also not alone because we have brothers and sisters of every nation, tribe, people, and language.

We all hear the same words. We all have the same work of prayer, and of being faithful witnesses, and examples, and servants of the good news of the love of God in Christ. We are all nurtured and strengthened by the same things, including this meal and this table.

When we share in this meal, we all come to the same God who will help us to overcome all the way. We all come to be fed with the same bread and cup that unite us with the body and blood of Christ.

"The Lamb's Drama: His People in the World"

Scripture Readings: Revelation 1:1-20; Revelation 2:1-7

Boiled down to one sentence, the message of the Book of Revelation is this: Our side wins. If you come across anything in the Book of Revelation that you find mysterious, or confusing, or frightening, or threatening; take a breath and fall back on this one sentence: Our side wins.

Now here is another way to boil down the Book of Revelation into one sentence. It is this: This book is a picture of the Gospel, the good news of Jesus.

That’s it. The Book of Revelation is about the good news of Jesus. It gives us, in picture language, the message of why God came down from heaven in Christ. It shows us why Jesus became human and took the role of a suffering servant, and died for us on the cross, and rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. It shows us how to live in this world as the people of Jesus. It shows us his faithfulness to all people who put their trust in him. It shows us how serious it is to live in a world that is determined not to know him. It shows us how we can overcome the pressures that this world puts upon us to compromise and conform. It shows us that it is not easy to follow Jesus. It shows us that Jesus will not fail in his mission to recreate the world as a place that is free from sin, and injustice, and violence, and evil. It shows us that if the world, as it is, tries to prevent this liberating and transforming plan, then Jesus will put a stop to the world as it is and to those who stand in the way of this plan. It shows us that Jesus will not fail to make us, and all those who follow him, a part of that new world. Most of all, this book shows us how to be joyful and thankful people in this world as we know it. This may seem like a lot, but the gist of all of this is still the good news of Jesus.

We do not want to lose track of the summary. The Book of Revelation is a picture of the good news. If you ever come across anything in this book that makes you think it is about anything else; stop, take a breath, and return to the summary.

The very opening phrase of the book tells us this. It is: “The revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him.” (See also, John 12:44-50) The book reveals Jesus the Messiah. I find no reason to suppose that the Jesus we read about in the Book of Revelations is any different than the Jesus we find in the gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. If we think it tells us about a different Jesus, then it is possible that we have never understood the Jesus that we read about in the gospels, in the first place.

Jesus has a cause and there are things in the world as it is that make him angry. In the gospels, Jesus made a whip out of cords and drove the merchants out of the Temple in Jerusalem, where they were set up to profit from the worship that took place there. Their activities made him angry and so he put a stop to what they were doing. But he did this out of love for his people. (John 2:13-17) He even got angry with his own disciples, when they did not trust him, or when they tried to stop him from going to Jerusalem in order to get crucified. (Matthew 16:21-23)

In the Book of Revelation we can read about the wrath and anger of God, but the motive for his anger is his love. There is a good saying that God loves us just as we are, but that he also loves us too much to let us stay as we are. When we know that God loves us, we can understand this.

Revelation is a book about love; and the action that takes place in the book comes through Jesus who has, himself, borne the brunt of the evil and cruelty and injustice of this world, as it is, in his body, on the cross. He has done this so that, in his own time, he can put a stop to the world going on as it is.

The Book of Revelation reveals Jesus and what it means to faithfully follow him. In many ways it is a commentary on our lives right now, where there are many things that are hard to understand, but we can summarize our lives by saying that we can see Jesus in our lives. The experiences that are so confusing and off-putting, in so many ways, can be dealt with by seeing how Jesus dealt with such things as he lived among us, and we can see our lives “interpreted by love.”

The author, John, identifies himself this way: “I, John, your brother and companion in the suffering, and kingdom, and patient endurance that are ours in Jesus.” (Revelation 1:9) These three things (the suffering, the kingdom…meaning the kingdom of God, and the patient endurance) come up again and again in the Book of Revelation. They are the marks of the Christian life. Anyone who follows Jesus will have these three things: the suffering, the kingdom, and the patient endurance.

These three marks of the Christian life are like spiritual algebra. They are like an equation as follows: the suffering, plus the kingdom, equals the patient endurance. What are the parts of this equation?

There is the kingdom. The kingdom means so many things. The Lord is your king. Jesus has John write to the church in Ephesus to tell them that they have lost their first love. I think the kingdom of God is like being in love. The whole center and foundation of your life changes. It is centered in someone else. New things seem possible for you because someone loves you. There is someone else to think about besides your self.

And the kingdom is strongly about the future. There are promises, and hopes, and dreams. The kingdom of God is something that is here, now, and it is also something we are waiting for. The kingdom of God is like all this.

And there is suffering. Following Jesus does not protect us from the kind of suffering that everyone else has. Following Jesus does not rescue us from sickness, injury, failure, loss, acts of nature, accidents, bereavement.

And following Jesus actually adds to our suffering. Following Jesus will cause some people to laugh at us, or to take advantage of us, or to look down on us, or to try to tempt us or to get us to betray our faith, or to pass us over for opportunities or advancement.

The patient endurance is the sum of the suffering and the kingdom. It means knowing that there is a purpose, and knowing what is important, and staying true to what you know.

The interesting thing about the suffering part is that the older translations translate it as tribulation. And tribulation is a word that describes the special suffering that will be experienced just prior to Jesus’ returning. The suffering which John and his earliest readers shared, and which we share with them, is covered by the same special word for that period of time that precedes the coming of Christ.

I believe that the Bible teaches that the end times began with the death and resurrection of Jesus. The end times have been going on for almost two thousand years. John, himself, in the letter called First John wrote: “Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour.” (1 John 2:18)

I don’t think there is any division between the present tribulation and the greater tribulation to come. It is only a matter of degree and what you might call progress.

There are common threads and common issues that we share with the ancient church in the days of the Roman Empire, and those same themes and issues will continue until the final days come. Patient endurance is about keeping watch and keeping alert on those themes and issues, and not to be fooled.

In the seven letters to the seven churches we find the followers of Jesus were challenged by temptations to compromise on issues of immorality and idol worship. Just to keep this simple, let’s concentrate on that idol worship.

There were three common temptations to worship idols (which doesn’t just mean worshiping statues of gods, but the worship of anything that is not God). People in the Roman world tended to worship money, sex, and the government (in the form of the Emperor). Imagine a world that worshiped money, sex, and government.

Our modern world tends to worship these as well. And some Christians would like to find reasons to fit in with the world as it is, and combine chasing after the same things that the world around them worships with their Christian faith.

John writes about this. When you see through the deceptions of the idolatry of our time and live a different way of life you can be one of those who overcome.

One strange thing about the Book of Revelation is its use of number. It seems like everything happens in sevens. The number seven, in the Book of Revelation, and all though the Bible, tends to mean the fullness or the completeness of a thing.
Knowing this helps us understand the main message without getting distracted by the details. For example, the seven spirits of God are not some special thing. Seven stands for fullness and completeness; and so the seven spirits of God, before the throne of God represent the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

The seven churches are real churches in the Roman province of Asia Minor, but as the unit seven they represent the fullness and the completeness of the church, the Body of Christ, all over the world, in every age of history. The promise of Christ to come to them, and the need for them to resist compromise, and the need for them to endure and overcome, so that they could meet Christ when he comes, really applies to all Christians in all times and places.

We all have our temptations. We all have our struggles with compromise. We all need the Book of Revelation to teach us about how to play our part as a follower of Jesus in our own time and place.

Revelation is a book about love: God’s love for us and our love for God. God’s love for us and our love for God are stimulated by the fullness of the Holy Spirit and the fellowship of God’s people who are the church.

Revelation reveals the good news about Jesus. John sees him in a long white robe with a golden sash around his chest. Here Jesus is dressed like a Jewish high priest who offers the atoning sacrifice in the holy of holies in the Temple on the High Holy Day, the Day of Atonement.

Jesus shows himself dressed this way because he is the highest of priests. He offers the sacrifice of his own life for ours on the cross.

The golden lampstands represent the churches, but the seven stars represent the angels of the churches. For the ancient Jews and the Greeks, as well, everything on earth had a heavenly counterpart, a spiritual reality that was eternal. Although the Lord’s people seem to be separated into one group here and another group over there, the heavenly reality is that all God’s people, in all times and places, are all together in one place, in the hand of Jesus.

Jesus, who gave his own life to make us one, in himself, with his Father, makes us (you, and me, and every Christian who has ever lived or will ever live) into one great thing that he is doing. And he holds us safe in his hand. And, whatever he may say or do in this strange and wonderful Book of Revelation, he says and does as the one who will, at all costs, hold you safe, if you let him in your heart. That is why we need listen to this book, and why it speaks to us.

"God-Impacted Life: Suffering and Reformation"

Scripture Readings: 2 Samuel 15:1-18, 23, 30, 18:1-19:4; Mark 15:33-34

We have been learning from the life of David: the shepherd boy who became the King of Israel and the ancestor of Jesus; so that Jesus became known as the Son of David.

I have been calling David’s life a “God-impacted” life because, whether he was living well or living badly, he seemed to always live in the presence of God. A large part of the Book of Psalms was written by David, or inspired by the example that he set of a life lived in the presence of God.

Look at the Psalms for yourselves. When David was inspired, and full of faith and peace, he communicated with God. When David was desperate, or ashamed, or afraid, or grieving, or angry, he still communicated with God. Wherever David was at, with God, made no difference, there was no distance between them; not on God’s part, and not on David’s part.

Because there was no distance between them, David was always capable of completely surprising everyone around him. David was totally free and he lived life to the fullest, because there was no distance between him and God.

We can see this in the story of David bringing the ark to Jerusalem. (2 Samuel 6) The ark was the gilded chest that held the treasures of the journey of Israel from their slavery in Egypt to the freedom of the Promised Land. Those treasures included the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments written on them, among other things.

Bringing the ark to Jerusalem, it was well known that no human hand was allowed to touch the ark. But one of the priests did touch it, and that priest died.

This made David angry. He was furious and afraid, and he would not let the ark be brought the rest of the way to Jerusalem. And then, lo and behold, a few months later, David decided it was OK after all.

So he rounded up a new parade and they brought the ark home to Jerusalem. And on the way home David danced so hard that the short robe he was wearing bounced up and down so wildly that it showed that he wasn’t wearing underwear underneath.

His wife, the queen Michal, who was born of royal blood, was far too dignified for her own good. She was watching from a window while David danced so wildly, and she scorned him for his lack of dignity. But his lack of dignity was really, only his freedom. David was free because he was in love with God; and so he danced just as he lived, with all his might. He was not afraid to say or do anything in his friendship with God. Nothing held him back.

There was no distance from God in David’s life, and so he was “God-impacted”…except for the times in his life when he wasn’t.

David had a golden time in his life, early in his kingship, when he was God-impacted because he was supremely happy. And in his happiness he seems to have gotten bored and (because of this) he seems to have forgotten some things about the God-impacted life.

In his forgetfulness, he looked down from the terrace high upon the roof of his palace and he saw a beautiful woman taking a bath in her own private garden. Her name was Bathsheba, and she was the wife of one of his officers; Uriah the Hittite, who was away fighting for the nation (fighting for David) in a war against their enemies.

In his forgetfulness, David suddenly forgot that there was no distance between him and God. He sent for the woman and got her pregnant. He tried to conceal his involvement in her pregnancy by getting the husband Uriah home on leave.

The plan didn’t work. David got Uriah killed in battle, and then he married Bathsheba. The prophet Nathan confronted David about this, reminding him that there was no distance between him and God.

The sentence that Nathan passed on David, in the name of the Lord, was that David was still loved by God, but that he must live through the consequences of what he had done. Part of those consequences was that “the sword would not depart from his house” (NRSV); which means that “killing and murder would continually plague his family.” (“The Message”; 2 Samuel 12:10)

Around this time, something happened to David. Of course things were always happening to David, but this thing happened inside him. David seemed to become afraid, or paralyzed.

A couple of his sons start doing terrible things. David’s oldest son Amnon, raped his half sister Tamar, and David didn’t do anything about it. He did nothing, and we don’t even read of him saying anything. We read that he got really mad. But he let his anger be a substitute for doing something about this.

Tamar’s whole brother, Amnon’s younger half-brother, Absalom, took his sister in, and plotted against his brother for years. He ended up throwing a party, and inviting Amnon to it, and having his friends kill Amnon in his presence. This was cold blooded brutality.

Once again David did nothing and said nothing. Absalom ran away to a neighboring country. Eventually David let Absalom come back to Jerusalem, but he wouldn’t see him.

Absalom had to plot and scheme again for years to see his father again. When they did come together once again, it is not recorded that any words were said between them.

Absalom began to say that there was no justice to be found by people going to the king, and that he would be a better judge and bring better justice. Well, Absalom certainly saw no justice done by David in their own family, did he? He began to gather people to his side.

Even at this point David did nothing with Absalom, and said nothing to him. And during these long years of violence, and estrangement, and isolation we see nothing in David to indicate any freedom, any sense of the presence of God. There was no “God-impacted” life there.

Then there was war. Thousands of people died as a result. We see violence, atrocities, festering anger, and resentment, and bloody ambition in the sons of David. We see paralysis, and fear, and injustice in David.

Is there any other explanation for the evils in the world? These are God’s punishment of David; evil falling upon David and those who are on David’s side; evil falling on the whole little world of Israel.

There was a plan at work, and it was God’s plan. And God had his way. But God was not in any of the evil. And God did not approve of anything that was done to make all this evil happen. It was the doing of David, and his sons, and their friends and helpers. Everyone in Israel somehow played a part, in it either by taking sides or by staying silent.

Perhaps because David was indeed a man after God’s own heart, his life was like a laboratory in which we can see where sin, and evil, and suffering come from, in this world we live in. They come from us. We are involved, ourselves. It is true that sin, and evil, and suffering, and injustice, and conflict happen out there; but that is only because they happen in here.

I think that David (during his more innocent years) was used to thinking that it all happened “out there”. Because of what he had done with Bathsheba and her husband Uriah, when he realized that the evil happened “in here”, I think this paralyzed him. I think it made him afraid (warrior though he was), and unable to do justice and to love mercy; in his own family, and as his people’s king. (Micah 6:8)
When David and his followers left Jerusalem, to escape from the army of Absalom, they had no place to go except the desert, the wilderness. This concept of the desert, the wilderness, is very important in the Bible. The desert is the place where you find your life simplified, and boiled down to the basics; and you find it possible to reunite with the presence of the living God.

There is a special reason why the desert, or the wilderness, would be the effective place for David to be restored and renewed. The wilderness was the place where David began. It was where he herded sheep, when he was only the eighth son of a poor family and nothing but the spare boy. It was where David spent so many of the years of the prime his life, where so many years seemed to be wasted, when he was on the run from the insanity of King Saul who was trying to kill him.

All the trappings of success fell away. Everything he had worked for, everything that made him feel successful in life, everything that made him think he was smart or in control was gone.

David seemed to lose everything, even though he left the capital with a huge following of the people who were loyal to him. He was just, simply taking them all with him into the wilderness to die, unless God planned otherwise. But David didn’t know what to think about that.

All David knew was that he was right back where he started from, or worse, running away in the desert from those who were trying to destroy him. When you seem to find yourself back where you started from, as if you had never accomplished a single thing of lasting value; when you know that this is your fault, it is a very humbling thing. Some people call it “hitting bottom”.

A man named Shimei saw David walking away from Jerusalem. Shimei had heard the news of what had gone wrong, and he started taunting and cursing the king, and even throwing rocks at him (an insane thing to do).

One of David’s officers offered to take off Shimei’s head, if it would please the king. But the king would not let him. David said, “My own son seeks my life. Let him alone, and let him curse; for the Lord has bidden him.” (2 Samuel 16:11)

When you go for years, as David did, in a kind of spiritual, emotional paralysis; when you let things pass, and let things pass, and do nothing, and do nothing, and say nothing, and say nothing; it becomes a sort of strange, involuntary pride. You become unable to say and do what you know is absolutely and desperately required of you.

But if you are given the grace of finding yourself all the way back to where you started from, as if you had accomplished absolutely nothing; if you are given the grace of hitting bottom, then you can face all kinds of things.

You can break the paralysis. You can say and do what you should have said and done long ago.

David began to be able to think about what the Lord might think about him. He remembered that he had had a relationship with God as his greatest friend. He had no idea what God would do with him now. He had no certainty that the Lord was for him, or if the Lord would give him another chance. But David was able to break the paralysis that had frozen his communication with God, the fear that had frozen the God-impacted life he had once enjoyed.

David began to understand what he had done to his children and he wanted to make up for it all to Absalom. David spoke these instructions in the hearing of the whole army, “Deal gently, for my sake, with the young man Absalom.” (2 Samuel 18:5)
Everything and everyone was against that plan of gentleness, but David was coming to life again. David was coming back to the God-impacted life.

Absalom died. He was brutally killed; and David wept and wailed words of agony, and compassion, and suffering; words not very different from the words that many sorrowing parents have also wept. But his words are not very different from another set of words of sorrow that Jesus spoke on the cross.

Jesus is God among us, God in the flesh. And on the cross the Lord has carried all the history of conflict, all the festering anger, and all the paralysis that isolates us and seems so much like pride. He has carried the long and complicated history of the sins, and evils, and losses of the world.

He carries on the cross the complicated histories of the patterns and actions that separate us from the people who should be closest and dearest to us. He carried the pain of the deepest cuts in the ties that bind. He felt them on the cross and cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)

Jesus has given his life for us in order to give us this gift of knowing that he has carried this grief and pain on the cross, so that the new life he gives to us can give us freedom. His carrying of the world’s sins and evils can have the power of breaking our fear, our paralysis, and our pride, that breaks down our relationships with others.

In Christ, crucified for us, we hit our own bottom, and we have nothing to keep us from beginning a new life, born in the wilderness, born in the desert. Then we can live like David, like people after God’s own heart. We can become spiritually and emotionally alive to the people around us, and to the people who should be closest to us. Jesus makes this possible.

"God-Impacted Life: Sin & Repentance"

Based on Scripture Readings: 2 Samuel 11:1 through12:25; and John 8:2-11

There was a famous classical guitarist named Andre Segovia. Once, after a concert, he was asked why he played one particular piece so fast. His answer was: “Because I can.”

There was a lot to like about David the underdog; in the years before he became king. He was almost innocent. He was loyal and compassionate. He gave people chances even when he knew that they had failed him before. He didn’t use people. He lived his faith.

There was a lot to dislike about David the over-dog, David the king; especially in this case of the beautiful Bathsheba and her husband Uriah. We see how he could do anything to get what he wanted. He manipulated others and told lies. He saw the honesty and integrity of others as an obstacle to getting what he wanted and needed. The most basic human bonds meant nothing to him. The lives of those who served him were dispensable.

Where did this new David come from? The new David was there all along; only waiting for an opportunity to come out, and play, and show itself. If you could have asked this new David, “Why are you doing these things?” the new David could have said, “Because I can. I am the King.” And this would be the truth.

But there was a greater, deeper truth; and David was able to get in touch with this truth. David saw the truth and he said, “I have sinned against God. I have sinned against the Lord.” (2 Samuel 12:13)

David was able to see this truth because, as far off the path as he had gotten, as self-blinded as he had made himself, David still possessed a God-impacted life. He was not living his faith, but his faith had not died.

David was lucky that his faith had not died. No, David was not lucky at all. He was blessed. He was held by the hand of God at the very brink.

I had a friend in seminary, named Paul, who, when he was about ten years old was playing ball with friends in his yard, and the ball went out into the street, and he went after it, and a car zipped by, and Paul froze in fear, and the car came right by him, so close that it ran over his feet: just his feet. It is almost as if God held him on the brink, protecting him from an evil that could have been so much worse.

His feet were broken; but otherwise he was unhurt. And his feet did heal, but the accident had an odd result. The car, crushing Paul’s feet, did something to the sweat glands in his feet, so that his feet stank horribly from then on. In the dormitory at seminary, people did not go into Paul’s room because it stank so badly, because he did not always wear his shoes in his room. He didn’t sleep in his shoes. But as long as his feet were inside his shoes, he was OK.

Like my seminary friend, David went right to the dangerous and stinky brink of an evil that could have been so much worse. Instead of running into the path of a car, David ran another path. First he surrounded himself with people who would let him do what ever he wanted. And they would even help him do whatever he wanted.

Then he used them to get him a woman he wanted, even though he knew she was married to someone who was loyal to him. Then he did what he wanted with her.

Then he pretended to be Uriah’s friend to cover up what he had done, and tried to get Uriah to compromise his sense of duty, to cover up what David had done. David tried to make Uriah a disloyal man.

Then he had Uriah killed because he would not be disloyal. David used others to kill Uriah for him. He got blood on other people’s hands.

Then Nathan the prophet confronted David with the truth, and David could have had Nathan killed for this. David had already killed to keep this secret. He could kill again.

But he was held back and, like a hiker walking through fog in unknown territory, finds the fog break just in time to keep him from walking off a cliff; David sees the cliff, and stops short, and says: “I have sinned against the Lord.” Perhaps this is one way in which David demonstrates why God considered him “a man after his own heart.” (1 Samuel 13:14)

The difference between the old David, whom we like, and the new David, whom we often don’t like, is not that the old David was not a king, and the new David was the king. The difference rested in the ability to say, “I will do this thing because I can.”

David was only a good king when he did not play king. When the people of Israel begged the prophet Samuel to give them a king, Samuel warned them of the dangers. They wanted a king because they thought a king would give them the status and power that other nations had, but Samuel told them that kings were prone to be takers and not givers. (1 Samuel 8:1-18) David was a good king when he was a giver, when he was a servant; but never when he was playing king.

We are all this way. In the Garden of Eden, Eve and Adam were tempted to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and part of that temptation was the temptation to be like God, who knows everything. If they knew everything, then they could be in charge of their lives. They would not need God any longer; or so they thought. (Genesis 3:4-6)

Playing king or playing God: it’s all the same. We do this thing because we can. We can lie. We can misrepresent the truth. We can make ourselves seem, to others, to be something other than what we really are. We can deceive ourselves and pretend that we aren’t the person others see that we are. We can use other people for our pleasure, or our profit, or our influence and power.

This doesn’t mean that we will succeed, at least not for long, or not forever. But we can avoid thinking about that yet, too: as long as we are having fun, or having our own way, or looking out for ourselves.

In the God-impacted life you live in the presence of God. You cannot escape. You will be caught and exposed. And this is the first step in the best thing that can ever happen to you.

When you can’t play king, or play God, anymore, then God becomes the king again, and that is a great relief. Other people stop being things to use or things to protect yourself from. They become creations of God. They become human souls of real value. And that is a sight worth seeing. And, then, you see yourself.

In a sense, David didn’t really know himself until he saw the so-called “new David”. He would always have thought of himself as the noble and innocent victim of others.
And he was, in so many ways. But to see what was in his heart by the process of seeing what he was capable of doing when he could do anything he wanted, was also a sight worth seeing. Once David saw that sight of his true self it would be hard for him to deceive himself ever again.

There are things we can never know about God until we can say with all our heart: “I have sinned against the Lord.” We can never really know how much he loves us. We can never really know what love and mercy mean.

When religious people do not truly know themselves well enough so that they can say, from their heart of hearts, “I have sinned against the Lord,” they become the self-righteous. They become the Pharisee, the hypocrite. They become the people who like catching someone else in their sin, and exposing and shaming them, just as the teachers of the law and the Pharisees did, when they brought the sinful woman to Jesus, and wanted him to condemn her.

By saying, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone,” (John 8:7) Jesus gave them a true vision of their own hearts. They snuck off, one by one, and not one of them stopped to thank Jesus for the gift he had given them: the gift of seeing themselves.

In both of these stories, we can see what sin is like, what sin does to others, what sin does to the heart of the person who cherishes sin in their heart as a means to get what they want.

We see the ugliness of it. It led David to kill an innocent man. In the gospels it led the teachers of God’s law to seek, first, to kill a guilty woman in order to shame Jesus and, when that failed, they would go on to kill Jesus for exposing their own self-righteousness. We can see that sin stinks.

We also see grace. We see what grace is, and what it is not.

We can see that the grace of God is the love, within God, that causes him to restore people to fellowship with him. God, in his grace, makes himself known to people who do not know him; and to people who mistakenly think they do know him; and to people who do know him but fail to be true to what they know.

The woman caught in the act of adultery knew that, although she was guilty, she was not condemned by Jesus, and Jesus told her that, as a result of his acceptance of her, she could live a new life, a new way of life. She knew that her life would always be lived under two marks: one, that she would always be known for her sin; two, that she would always be known as one who was forgiven and loved by Jesus.

It is important to realize that she would live with the consequences of what she had done. But she could and would be a different person, a new person, even so.

Because of Jesus, she would always be a child of God. His saving her life that day made her a child of God. But, even more than that, his dying soon a few days later, on the cross, partly as a result of the love he had shown for her that day also made her, truly and completely, even more, a child of God.

With David and Bathsheba, too, there were consequences that could not be escaped. Nathan said, “The sword will never depart from your house.” (2 Samuel 12:10) This meant that the whole future history of David’s family would be marked by violence and conflict.

The story of the house of David, the descendants of David, is a sad story. That is the rest of the history of Israel, in the Old Testament. But we will talk more about that next Sunday.

The son of David and Bathsheba died and then they had another son, whom they named Solomon. Solomon was the son who would fulfill the beginning of the promises that God made to David. Solomon would build the Temple that David had wanted to build.
And the Bible tells us that the Lord had a special love for this Solomon, this son of David and Bathsheba. The prophet Nathan sent them a message telling them to call Solomon by the name Jedidiah, which means “Loved by the Lord.” (2 Samuel 12:25) But not even Solomon could take away the punishment of the sword that would not leave their family in peace.

The birth of that Solomon, out of that awful, awful chain of events (plotting, adultery, lying, and murder) was a sign that David himself was still loved love by God with a love that would never end.

Grace never means getting away with things. There will be, there must be, consequences. But grace is the infinite love of God that will not stop loving you in the middle of all those consequences. That love will give you a new life every day.

Solomon was the next link in a story of grace that is still going on to this day, but the center of the story is Jesus, who is the love of God in the flesh. Jesus is the son of David, after many generations, who dies on the cross in order to say to you, “Has no one condemned you? Neither do I condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin.” (John 8:11) In other words: live a new life, live a new way of life, because of the fact that my love has set you free.

The Lord’s Supper is a place where we meet the Lord who knows us, invites us just as we are, and dies for us to give us a new life where we live a new way. The life, and the death, and the resurrection of Jesus are like food for us.

Ordinary food we eat, and we change it into ourselves: blood, tissues, organs, bones. When we receive the nourishment that Jesus gives, as it is promised to us here, he enters and changes us into himself, and we become like him. Here, he makes us his children who live a God-impacted life.

"God-Impacted Life: Golden Hours, Golden Promises"

Scripture Readings: 2 Samuel 7:1-29; Matthew 16:13-20

Once there was a golden hour of a golden day, and David the king felt good. He felt really good; and happy and thankful. It was such a golden hour of a golden day that he was simply, physically incapable of unhappiness. And in his happiness he wanted only one thing: he wanted to do something for God. What an hour, what a day!

We read it like this: ‘After the king was settled in his palace, and the Lord had given him rest from all his enemies around him, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a palace of cedar, while the ark of God remains in a tent.” Nathan replied to the king, “Whatever you have in mind, go ahead and do it, for the Lord is with you.”’ (2 Samuel 7:1-3)

The funny thing about understanding this particular story of David’s life is that some scholars think that this story is out of sequence. They think that it must have happened later, because David didn’t really have rest from all his enemies, yet.

There were still more enemies to face, and still more battles to fight. This story should come later, they say, because it was too soon for David to be so happy.

But I think that the scholars who say it was too soon for David to be happy and at rest don’t real understand how life works, or how God works in our life. Besides, if you read the Bible’s story of David’s life (unless it is leaving out something important), there was never a time in David’s life when he was at rest for long.

David never had an easy life. When David was a kid, he was the eighth son in a poor family. He was the spare boy, the one who stayed out with the sheep when the older brothers were at home being important.

As a young man he was called to serve King Saul, and play the harp and sing for him, because Saul was troubled by an evil spirit. Darkness would fall upon Saul’s mind. He would become obsessed by fears, and suspicions, and murderous rages. Saul was a danger to others. David was called to relieve Saul’s madness. It was not a pleasant thing to do, living a life centered upon another person’s insanity.

More than once, Saul tried to kill David. David became a fugitive, and the leader of a band of men who earned their living by protecting the settlers on the frontier, where the law and order of the kingdom was weak. David was a fugitive, with a price on his head, for years and years.

Then Saul was killed in battle. The tribe of Judah anointed David as its king. The other tribes anointed one of Saul’s surviving sons (Ishbosheth) to be their king, and the tribes fought over the kingship. The other little nations surrounding Israel used this conflict as an opportunity to raid and occupy parts of the land of Israel.
David’s rival for the kingship was betrayed and killed by his own people. And David became the king of a kingdom that had been the whipping boy of every other tribe and nation around them for centuries.

David fought some battles, and he was winning. He conquered the city of Jerusalem, and fortified it. He pulled his people together. He gave them more and more security, and they began to prosper. He built a house of cedar, for his palace; which meant that it had big cedar beams and pillars that could make big rooms, and big doors, and big windows where the evening breezes could blow; and wide porches to keep the rooms cool during the day.

All this was so good. It was so different from the way the rest of David’s life had been. And, yet, David’s job was (at best) only half done, and it was never really done. There were always battles, and rebellions. A couple of his own children would try to take control of the country away from him. He would have to fight and plot desperately, for his own survival, and the survival of his supporters, against his own family till the end of his life.

We have to remember the kind of life that David lived, as a whole, in order to understand the secret of David’s happiness during the golden hours of his golden days. The truth is that, if David had been a different kind of person, or, if David had had a different way of relating to God, he would never have noticed his golden hours and his golden days.

There were probably not many of those hours and days of his life, when David had nothing to worry about, when he had nothing to be unhappy about. And that’s just the truth.

But there is also another truth. David lived a God-impacted life. David lived his whole life in the presence of God. He sometimes lived in the presence of God very poorly, in ways that even he was ashamed of. But he often lived well, in the presence of God, and he enjoyed living in that presence.

The presence of God gave David rest. There were many narrow escapes from death. There were friends who stuck up for him, and stuck with him, at great risk to their own safety, because David’s own life was dangerous. That was how things were.

But the presence of God brought him many experiences of the gifts and the faithfulness of God. This knowledge of the presence of God gave David many golden hours and golden days.

Thinking about the happiness that David found in his new house makes me think about other houses that I have known.

When I was a child, my parents’ golden dream was to escape from southern California, where we lived, and move to a small town and build a house out in the country. We kids were infected with our parents’ dream. I know I was.

It was a good dream; a good plan. The way that it unfolded brought good things to my own life.

The big move happened when I was twelve. That was the first part of the unfolding plan. The other part was the house that my parents would design for themselves; the house that would be a home for all of us to grow up in. But we didn’t build that house and move into it until about six months before I went away to college. So, for my life, that part of the plan didn’t turn out as we had planned.

The completion of the golden dream did not serve its intended purpose, at least not in my life. In a sense, the day we moved into that house was the equivalent of the day when David was happy, and the Lord gave him rest from all his enemies. Only, for me, it didn’t last for long.

The good thing was that God gave to us, and to me, other golden hours and days along the way.

God seldom gives us a lot of time to rest. Even when we achieve a great dream, things change really fast. This is the way that time and the world work.

There were other golden hours and days in the years before the dream was achieved, and there were others after.

There were the years in the old farmhouse on the north end of town, where I could put a marble outside my bedroom door and it would roll clear across the floor of the living room, all the way to the front door. Or I could put the marble on the inside of my bedroom door and it would roll all the way across my room to the opposite side of the house. What kind of house was that? That old place was not our dream house.

That was a house we dreamed of escaping from. But, it had a big yard surrounded by orchards; and my sisters and I would play target practice with our BB gun. Or I would pick a ripe peach from the tree in our yard and play fetch with our dog; who would eat it after she had caught it a few times, and tenderized it with her teeth. Or we would play badminton with our parents on summer evenings when it was almost too dark to see, when the hot Sacramento valley summer days would finally cool off just a little. Those were golden hours of golden days, even though those days were not the objects of our dreams and plans.

In a way, our dreams and plans (that took so long to fulfill) were just our fumbling way of reaching out for something we wanted but didn’t understand very well. Whereas God’s plan for our happiness and rest consisted of other things: how we played, how we were as a family, at those times in our lives when we were good at being a family. I think one of the mysteries of happiness is that we don’t always realize how happy we are.

There are stories in the life of David that tell us the happiness of simply being supremely happy. And, when we look at the whole of his life, we see that these golden hours are a gift of God, they are rest and renewal that come from God and not from ourselves; from God’s plan and not from our own plan.

David’s happiness made him think about God. It pointed him beyond the world of all the worries and struggles that could have darkened his life. Sometimes it seems as though it is only our experiences of unhappiness and discontent that point us beyond our world, beyond ourselves, to God.

But David lived a truly God-impacted life, so that it was not only his unhappiness and discontent that pointed him to God. By the grace of God he had the gift of recognizing when he was happy, and so his golden hours also pointed him to God.

I love this story of David’s happiness so well. In the context of his life as a whole, it should teach us to look at ourselves, for evidence that we are actually happy: that God is giving us rest and happiness, but (perhaps) without the benefit of knowing it and enjoying it for ourselves.
And that is all I have time to say.

I would say that Jesus is the golden promise that guarantees the purpose of our golden hours. He guarantees that they have a lasting purpose. I would say that Jesus guarantees and preserves the lasting value of all our golden times, by sharing his life with us. He shares his life with us, and makes himself a part of us through his simply living a humble, human life, and through his dying on the cross, and through his resurrection.

Jesus shows us, through the way he has faced the joys and struggles of human life, the faithfulness of God, the trustworthiness of God, through all our times of waiting, and all our times of postponement and impatience. Jesus is the faithfulness of God, to give meaning and weight to all our dreams and to the hours of our happiness.