Advent: means the arrival of a notable person or event.
We celebrate advent season because of the arrival of the incarnate God…there is no one more notable than him.
He came to bring us salvation…no event in history is more noteworthy than that.
But Advent season is a time between times…we celebrate the first arrival and we long for and look forward to the second arrival of Jesus.
I often hear people say, “I think we are living in the last days” because of some news or weather events or because it seems people are getting worse in their sins.
The biblical response is, “I know that we are living in the last days because Christ has come and he has yet to return.”
All time since the Lord’s first advent are called the “last days” in scripture.
Now, exactly where we are on that last day’s timeline remains to be seen, and we told specifically not to speculate…but only to anticipate.
Our anticipation is not to be revealed in building bomb shelters and stockpiling food…certainly not by in engaging in hostile rhetoric and disengaging from life.
Our anticipation is to be seen in how we live faithful lives in everyday fashion.
This week we finish our journey of reading through the Bible together in community.
You will read Revelation, a book that ties together the advents of Christ…his first and his second coming.
Revelation has often been a playground for the bizarre and the eccentric…and that is sad because…it was written to inspire hopeful anticipation not strange speculation.
The book of Revelation is a real letter, written to real churches in real historical circumstances.
It was written by John, exiled on a small Island off the coast of modern-day Turkey.
It was never meant to be some strange code to crack, but it was written to challenge and encourage believers to remain faithful no matter what their life setting.
So, the application stretches across time and space and applies to every believer in every situation until the Lord returns.
The title of the book comes from verse 1, “The revelation of Jesus” the Greek word translated “Revelation” is where we get our word Apocalypse, or Apocalyptic from.
“Apocalypse Now,” was a Vietnam war movie about the insane moral and psychological breakdown in what was a localized “end of the world” apocalypse.
Many times, in history there have been localized “apocalypse now”…these times felt like the end of the world to those involved in the terrible circumstances…but of course it was not THE end.
Apocalyptic in our language means a “destruction of the world”
But the original Greek word means unveiling or uncovering of secret things…a revealing…a revelation.
The word is not about the end of the world but of the second advent of Jesus…and of course what he will bring to the cosmos at his coming.
This will include an end of some things but also some beginnings.
Apocalyptic literature was a specific genre that included information given by God that allow his people to see the present from the larger perspective of his purposes…history with a view from eternity.
We are mentally and physically trapped in time and space, so we often fall prey to the perspective that sees random circumstances or evil human forces as being in charge of history.
We must continually turn our minds and hearts to Christ and to eternity, in order to see that God is in charge of both the larger human flow of history and of our own personal histories.
John’s revelation completes the Scripture by tying it all together.
His letter contains more Old Testament references than any other New Testament book.
Like the Old Testaments prophets, who did more “forth telling”…telling the truth about the present, than “fore telling,” predicting the future.
…so too John spoke to inspire faithfulness in the present by keeping the larger, eternal picture in mind.
John uses the number “seven” over fifty times.
Seven is a number that represents completion in the Bible.
There were seven days of creation, seven pairs of each clean animal on the ark, seven stems on the tabernacle’s lampstand, seven signs and seven “I am’s” in John’s gospel… this list could go on and on.
Though seven was often used as a symbol of perfection or completeness, sometimes it is a number that just means seven.
There wrote to seven actual churches, and John knew each one well enough to give them specific challenges and encouragements.
At the same time, these seven actual churches stand for “the Church” as a whole throughout human history.
John expertly ties together history, his own present situation, and the future into a book that points the church to the larger purposes of God.
He points us to Jesus, who alone is worthy to open the scroll of human destiny.
His worthiness is about not mere power, though he has that…it is about his character.
He could have conquered with an iron fist, but he chose to conquer through the cross.
He bought his people with his own blood.
This message was very important for the first readers of this book, who believed the gospel, but looked around and saw Roman kings and soldiers killing their friends and family.
They saw people who had no regard for God, living fully for the moment and seemingly prospering while they suffered and sacrificed…it didn’t seem like Jesus had actually won anything…it was apocalypse now.
But they needed to know, THE apocalypse, THE revealing would be of Jesus as King…but before that time, times may be very bad.
It is important now for believers suffering in Iran, or Nigeria, or for those who died in Stalin’s gulags…
It is important for us as we are tempted to believe that politicians, or technology, or wealth control human destiny.
Or when we suffer with illness or some relational, or vocational challenge.
Years again I met a man who had suffered a great deal in his life and before he died he wrote a book entitled, “God didn’t promise we would ahead at the half, but he did promise we would win the game.”
Long title, but good one.
That sports analogy would have made no sense to John, but if it did he would probably think it was a pretty good description of Revelation.
What his readers then needed was not some weird book that kept them guessing about contemporary headlines.
They needed a clear message of the past, present, and future victory of Christ to inspire daily, confident courage and faithfulness.
This is what John’s letter gave them, and it is what it gives us as well.
I’m not saying it is an easy book to understand, it is super difficult in the details…but not in the overall message.
So, Scripture begins and we began this year with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”
Scripture finishes and we finish with “In the end God will recreate the heavens and the earth.”
Let me read from Revelation chapter 21.
21: 1Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. (This “no more sea” is likely symbolism for there is no longer anything to fear. God created oceans and called them good. But from the human perspective at the time, the sea is a changing, dangerous, mysterious place. Full of fearful unknowns…the seas divide the world and keep people apart) So, the new heaven and earth will not be a place of fear and separation.
2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
So, the end is not really the end, is it?
As I said, when we think of Revelation we think of end times, but that’s not the way John would have wanted us to think about his book.
The Apocalypse is a revealing of Jesus…certainly he will bring an end to things…this present order, sin, death.
But we must think of the future in terms of new beginnings…this is true for the cosmos, and it is true for each of our lives individually.
If you are a Christian, your future is expansive.
As I have sat with people at the end of their lives…their world has often shrunk down to the size of a hospital room, sometimes just a bed…everything else in the world disappears.
If you spend much time in those rooms with loved ones, you feel the world shrink as well…it’s strange
The world of the fully living, seems to disappear.
But, at then at moment of death, the Christian’s world expands infinitely…to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.
It’s like when I would spend the night with my dad in his last days…and then, open the door of the hospital in the morning and suddenly… bright sun, the blue sky…would come crashing into my mind.
The world became large again…that small dark room was not all that was real.
But as I said last week…as non-believers near the end of their lives, their vision narrows…they do not have this expansive gospel hope.
The sum of their lives is mostly the past, their future appears to be finite, and there is very little left of it.
For believers, as the end of this life nears, their horizon broadens.
The past is finite, but the future is infinite.
How should this perspective change the way you live day to day?
How should this perspective change the way you prosper and the way you suffer?
How should it impact how you view governments, and people around you who turn against you or disappoint you?
That is the purpose of the book of Revelation: to give us an eternal perspective as we live in this present age…with all of its mess and confusion.
But why is this book so confusing and controversial?
Maybe because we try to turn a book of worship into a mere road map.
For instance, how are we to understand those mysterious thousand years (millennium) mentioned in John’s book?
Should we be premillennial, postmillennial, or amillennial?
Maybe you don’t even know what that means, and that is okay.
I can assure you that ignorance regarding the technical terms for the future reign of Christ will not keep you from his glorious kingdom.
It’s okay to have opinions about all this, and it’s okay if you don’t.
What is necessary is to have confessed with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and to have believed in your heart that God raised him from the dead.
If you are born again, you will be fully ready for the new beginning that lies in front of you.
This new beginning will include a new heaven, a new earth, and a resurrected body with which to enjoy it all.
Christ will reign overall the…the application is “argue over the details of thousand-year reign”, but make sure he reigns in your heart today.
Some believe that thinking a lot about heaven makes you less likely to live well in the present…that clearly is not true.
In case you haven’t noticed, your kids think a lot about heaven.
And no one lives more in the day or the moment that small kids…they have a very short time horizon.
Even still a pull towards thoughts of heaven is built into them by God.
God has put eternity in their hearts.
The fact that people often think less about heaven as they leave childhood is not because they are growing out of their childish ideas.
Rather they are losing sight of the reality of heaven because they have given so much of their attention to the stuff of earth.
Rich Mullins has a song, entitled growing young.
I’ve gone so far from my home I’ve seen the world and I have known
So many secrets I wish now I did not know’ Cause they have crept into my heart
They have left it cold and dark and bleeding, Bleeding and falling apart.
Then the chorus is simply…”growing young.”
Let me give you a short list of questions I’ve answered from our kids about heaven, and this is a very short list…there are many more.
When you go to heaven can you return to earth as an angel.
How old are we in heaven.
Will we need food, water, shelter in heaven
Will we have boy and girl/strong and handsome bodies in heaven
Will people have kids in heaven
Will we watch people on earth from heaven
Will we still have our parents in heaven
And my all-time favorite heaven question…
“What happens if you say a bad word in heaven.”
Heaven, for many unbelievers is seen as a human invention to avoid dealing with the finality of physical life…it is a kind of escapism from the world as it really is.
Modern science supposes to have enlightened us about the unreality of heaven, but of course science has nothing at all to say about the subject.
Science can tell us somethings about what things are and how they work…it can tell us nothing about why things are.
In fact, for someone to deny what is universally built into the human heart…is very…unscientific.
As you continue to read on in Revelation 21, you will see that the perfect symmetry of the golden New Jerusalem is modeled after the Most Holy place in the temple.
Think back to earlier in the year when we talked about the portable presence of God in the Tabernacle that traveled with Israel during the exodus.
This led to the Temple, a permanent place for the presence of God to dwell among his people.
But it was not really permanent was it?
Remember it was destroyed in 587BC by the Babylonians, then rebuilt and destroyed again by the Romans in AD70
Then in John 1, we find this… the Word (Jesus) became flesh and tabernacled among us.
He is Immanuel, God with us…he is the one through whom humans can dwell again with God.
Heaven is spoke of with lots of symbolism…gold, jewels, and the like…but the bottom line is …Christian will live forever in an immense Holy of Holies filled with the glory and presence of God.
There will be no temple because God’s presence will be everywhere when heaven and earth become one.
There is so much that we don’t understand about all this, but thankfully we don’t need exhaustive knowledge.
We only need adequate knowledge.
If you know this, you know plenty: “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Let’s finish our time through the Bible, God’s revealed word…with the verses that sum up the Bible and offer us our great hope as well as our great life purpose.
We exist to know and love Jesus and to make his love known to others.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son
John 3:16-18
You may live to see THE apocalypse…the revealing of the Lord and the end of this present age.
You may not, but if not…you will see your own end…this will most likely be a difficult process…physical death often is…but if you are a follower of Christ it will not merely be an end, but an expansive, eternal, new beginning.
You will break through the darkness of death and your world will suddenly become expansive and bright in the present of God.
Christ has come, Christ has risen, Christ will return.
How should this truth shape how you live today?
How should it impact how you deal with disappointments and disagreements and disease and disaster?
PRAY