Trying to Keep Your Balance: Preaching the Revelation–Some Reflections (Part 1 of 5)
“Critics are madder than poets…And even though St. John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creatures so wild as one of his own commentators.”
G.K. Chesterton
How in the world does one preach the Revelation responsibly?
When we read this book we may, at various points, think we have picked up a demented copy of the National Geographic Magazine filled with grotesque creatures—a slaughtered Lamb standing, a dragon with its tail sweeping stars out of the sky, or a beast with seven heads and ten horns. Or we may think that we have been surfing with our remote controls and we have come upon the weather channel revealing a world gone amuck with lightning and thunderstorms and hundred pound hailstones and raging seas and fierce tsunami-like conditions. Or perhaps we may think we have picked up a jigsaw puzzle with 5000 pieces and we have no picture of what it is we are trying to piece together or a puzzle book with crossword puzzles and page after page of scrambled letters where we are supposed to circle hidden words or phrases. Or perhaps we may think that we have picked up a college level higher mathematics book with incomprehensible numbers and equations, with threes, fours, twelves and multiples of twelve, and tens and multiples of tens and times, time and half a time. Or perhaps upon reading through the book in one sitting we conclude that it reads like a poorly directed film whose director and editor did not know when and how to end the movie. Or perhaps we think someone has typed in the words “The End” on some apocalyptic search engine and we have come up with web sites never dreamed of.
Indeed, when we open this last book of the Bible we experience a collision of sounds, smells, and sights. The book assaults our senses. We see a funeral procession, a wedding celebration, a brothel, a homecoming, a banquet, a dance; we smell incense and we see falling stars; we taste bitter waters; we see storms on the horizon and a childbirth; and we feel the winds of judgment; and we hear beautiful praise choruses or dire warnings too horrible to contemplate.
We can’t believe what we see or what we hear. And we are tempted to close the book and think: Never again. Never again will I read this book. There is not a chance that I’ll preach this one.
No wonder many preachers never make it past the third chapter. Is it worth the trouble to read this book let alone preach the Revelation? I am convinced that it must be preached. It must be because it is as inspired as Romans or Jude. It must be preached because of its profound message about the nature of the Christian life and the nature of Church life and the nature of the world in which we live and hope to hold out a witness to the Gospel. It is a book that appeals to a postmodern world with all of its sights, sounds, and smells. It is a book that speaks to the eternal struggle that God’s people have experienced, always living on the edge, and always living under the shadow of threats to destroy the Church or threats to domesticate the Church.
But how does one preach this book? Many of us are intimidated. Why? “Imbalance” is the word that comes to my mind. “Imbalance”–An obsession with Antichrist and Armageddon, one word never found in the book and the other only once. An obsession with tribulation and timetables, with rapture and resurrection, with speculation and sensationalism, with the millennium and the Middle East and an obsession of being afraid of “being left behind.” “Imbalance.”
We either ignore the book in preaching or become obsessed and think that all clear passages of Scripture can be shaped by a handful of obscure passages. Or perhaps we are tempted to focus on the easiest to understand sections or those passages that produce the most fireworks, lighting up the sky with marvelous and frightening scenes.
If God has given us this book to be heard, read, prayed over, and obeyed, how in this world does one preach Revelation responsibly?
We can do so only if we work hard at keeping our balance.
In the coming weeks I want to explore with you five categories to keep in mind that will assist you in keeping your balance so that God will be honored in the study and in the pulpit. Please feel free to post any of your thoughts on how to preach this amazing book. Remember: For if God is not honored in the study, he will not be honored on Sunday.
I. CONSIDER THE SETTING OF THE BOOK
I refer to the book’s Scriptural and historical environments.
There are three areas where we need to try to keep the balance.
A. We need to keep the balance between the Old Testament and the New Testament. We must place Revelation in its scriptural (or canonical) setting, seeing it in light of the Bible as a whole. Let me illustrate the importance of this in two ways.
First, there are more than 500 allusions to the writings of the OT, from Genesis to Malachi—references drawn from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Kings and Joshua and Judges and the major and minor prophets. One of the major reasons why Christians fail to understand Revelation is that they lack an awareness of the use of the Old Testament that permeates the book.
John used familiar language and imagery, sometimes modified, at other times unchanged. He communicated marvelous truths revealed to him by God through word pictures which were thoroughly familiar to his first readers. If we would realize this, perhaps there would be less of a tendency to read current events back into a first century text. It is the first century setting and Old Testament images that help us interpret the book, not today’s headlines.
Second, the message of John complements the message found in the other NT writings. Taken together, all of the NT writings emphasize that eschatology has to do with Christ’s first coming and all that happens until his final coming. All of the authors proclaim that whenever and wherever the Bible speaks about Christ’s final coming, its purpose is always to challenge Christians’ beliefs and behavior and remind us of our message and mission. Christians are to live lives that reflect that Christ has come and that Christ is coming. Whereas Paul speaks in generalities about the principalities and powers we fight (Eph. 6:10f.), John gives us the details in spectacular images. But their message is the same. We fight not against flesh and blood, not against Roman tyranny or terrorism but against the Prince of Tyranny, Temptation and Terror. We are called upon to liberate prisoners of war.
B. We need to keep the balance between the Macro and the Micro. We must work hard at seeing the forest rather than get lost by looking at the trees and their trunks, branches, and even leaves. There are times when you will look at a passage and you will be tempted to throw up your hands in despair and wonder who in the world are the twenty-four elders in Revelation four or who are these living creatures and why does God look like jasper and carnelian rather than an old man with white robe, hair and beard. And we may well miss the heartbeat of that vision: the ongoing worship of God in heaven—a worship service which gets at the heart of worship, that is celebrating in God and showing loyalty to God. The ceaseless worship of God in heaven is to be matched by Christians worshipping 24-7-365.
C. We need to keep the balance between the Cultural and the Cross-Cultural. This perhaps is one of the biggest mistakes made in today’s popular studies of this book. There is a failure to bridge the gap. I am guided by a fundamental truth about all of the books in the Bible: All writings must have had a meaning for their first readers. But something happens when many preachers approach the Book of Revelation. Many don’t pay a bit of attention to what this book said to the people at the end of the first century. Rather we are self-centered and we want to know only how it speaks to us today. We cannot do this with any other book of the Bible; we dare not do it with this one. Again, every book of the NT must have had a meaning for their first readers.
Why did God give John this revelation? How did it speak to John and his comrades in the faith? Only when we make the journey back to the first century do we dare try to build a bridge to the twenty-first century. I am convinced that most of today’s popular literature from Lindsay to LaHaye, if it could be transported back via a time machine to first century Ephesus, such literature would be viewed as nonsense, bogus, irrelevant. John’s readers wouldn’t have a clue concerning the message of “The Left Behind” series. Again, if we do not know what it meant to Christians back then, it is impossible to know what it means to us today.
Conflict describes the situation in John’s day. There is conflict when two forces or ideas or individuals are trying to occupy the same space at the same time for opposite reasons. The Kingdom of God versus the Kingdom of the Dragon. And the terms “suffering” and “seduction” describe the situations the Christians were facing in those days. The greatest menace facing the Christians was not in the form of direct persecution, even though there was some of that and there would, no doubt, be more. No, the greatest menace facing the churches was the temptation to compromise with culture.
Like Babylon of old, Rome acted as seductress, using all of its moral, social, economic, religious, political and military might to lure Christians into compromising relationships and complacency. And if that would not work, Rome would force itself upon the Christians. Resisting the power of cultural seduction is sounded repeatedly in the book. Some Christians had clearly capitulated while others had remained loyal to Christ. Many needed to be shaken from their spiritual lethargy and challenged to accept the cost of discipleship.
Or in Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words: “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” And I have no doubt that John would say “Amen. There is no other way than to follow the Lamb wherever he goes, and where he goes may involve incredible suffering but incredible blessing.”
When the church refuses to be seduced by culture, it should not be surprised to experience rejection. On the other hand, when seduction is successful, the church will be ignored and or tolerated.
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