by Mason Puckett (Page 6)

As we approach the end of Revelation, Babylon is fallen and the dragon is cast away forever. And now, with no obstacle remaining, “the marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready.” (19:7) Christ the Lamb will be finally and perfectly united to his people. And John sees the new heavens, the new earth, and the new Jerusalem descending from one to the other “prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.” (21:2) A voice…

Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! (Revelation 18:2) All of Revelation has been leading up to this moment – the fall of empire, the fall of every source of brokenness, division, hatred, war, poverty, greed, abuse and oppression. Perhaps you know Babylon all too well, what it’s like to be under the thumb of someone with more money, more greed, more status, more leverage than you. Perhaps you know first hand the horrors of war and poverty. Perhaps “Fallen, fall…

Revelation has a reputation for being strange and difficult, but it should have an even greater reputation for making us poets, making us people who sing and pray, people who desire above all to worship our God. In chapter 8, the prayers of God’s people are rising to him like incense. That’s what our prayers are to God – a fragrant, pleasant aroma. And in Revelation, this includes prayers like, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,” but also…

Isaiah 42 shows how God is active in the world through the one called the “servant.” The servant is described as quiet and gentle, which are not only character traits, but are nothing less than the means by which God’s justice makes its way into the world. This “servant” is originally meant to describe the nation of Israel, which is why God goes on to say a few verses later, “I have called you in righteousness… I have given you…

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…

In the letters we call 1 and 2 John, the apostle is combatting what he feels is a destructive heresy that has found its way into the Church. He calls it the “spirit of the antichrist,” (1 John 2:18-19, 4:2-3, 2 John 7) that is, any person who “does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.” This will rot the Church from the inside out, John is certain of it. It deserves our most serious attention and…

When we encounter everything that is colorful and bizarre in the book of Revelation (which would more appropriately be called a letter), it is the approach of some to “decode” its strange symbols, maybe even decode and interpret them as current or near future events we might see in the news. But when we read Revelation 1 and meet a Jesus whose eyes are on fire, whose feet are metal, whose voice roars like crashing waves, from whose mouth protrudes…

Life in God is not a matter of being knowledgeable enough or obedient enough. It’s a matter of being born of God, completely remade by God. The whole self, the entire existence brought into reality by our creator and made perfectly in his image. If you ask John, that’s what it means to be alive. “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” (1 John 5:10)…

“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” – 1 John 4:16 All things begin in love, flow from love, are perfected in love, and return to love. Any tendency we might have had to conceive of love as an object or tool (even a good one) is thrown right out the window. It might not occur to us to conceive of love as that which surrounds us at all times,…