Posts from October 2023

By the end of Revelation 5, the Lamb has been revealed to take the scroll from the hand of God and open it. As the scroll unfolds, so does God’s will for human history, toward the inevitable end of the new heavens and the new earth (chapter 21). So as Revelation 6 begins and the first four seals are peeled back, we are introduced to characters we’ve at least heard of in passing: the four horsemen. We’re not meant to…

Through three chapters of the book of Revelation, things are tame enough (although the vision of the apocalyptic Christ in chapter 1 is a nice dousing of cold water). Most of our time has been spent with messages sent to seven churches, messages for the churches to endure suffering and rediscover the love that made them the Church in the first place. But in chapter 4, Revelation begins to earn its reputation for being colorful and bizarre. And I don’t…

“O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth.” Thus Psalm 8 both begins and ends, with a sudden burst of praise. Our job here in Psalm 8 is simply to praise. Not to analyze or debate, but to marvel and adore. God’s majesty, God’s beauty, everything that makes God wonderful – our whole world is saturated in it. We couldn’t escape if we wanted to. And we don’t want to. God is to be enjoyed,…

When we read the book of Revelation, we’re reading apocalypse (which is Greek for “revelation”). And when we read apocalypse, we’re reading a certain genre of storytelling, one that uses colorful, bizarre, even frightening imagery to tell an otherwise familiar kind of story. But apocalyptic storytelling is also employed where suffering is taking place. The Old Testament book of Daniel uses apocalyptic language to describe God’s ongoing activity during Israel’s ongoing life under Babylonian and Persian domination. When Jesus in…