Reversed Thunder
Notes
Transcript
Intro:
Intro:
So we have been in the book of revelation for months now and we took a little mother’s day break
But before we get into this really long scripture today I want to just give you a little recap because maybe your brand new here and all of the sudden we are in the deep end of the wave pool.
We are way into the hard parts of revelation right now
So I have what I think is a very easy recap:
Chapters 4-5 are this heavenly throne room scene…And that is God’s courtroom where he pronounces judgement
Now before the throne room scene are these letters to churches. and to follow our courtroom scene in heaven…These are like lawsuits…Hey church, here is what I have against you…You better shape up or else I am going to pass judgment on you
Then there is the heavenly scene where the central figure is a lamb that looks as if it had been slain
This is Jesus! The one who has died and rose again!
The lamb is the only one out of the thousands and thousands of creatures in heaven who is worthy to take this document called the scroll…And the scroll is God’s plan for the world
God’s judgment
And it has seven seals…So when the lamb starts opening the seven seals and God’s ultimate plan of heaven meeting earth is coming to a crescendo…All the forces of evil and chaos go wild
They go wild because evil knows it has no future…Evil has a final destination, the victory has already been won
The demonic forces and powers of this world know that they can not stand when it comes to God’s judgment
So you have these seven seals get opened….And evil goes wild…The four horsemen…martyred christians etc
and then in the midst of that there is a huge number of people from all nations, all tribes all languages who have their faith in Jesus and these people get sealed
But then when the seventh seal gets opened its like Russian nesting dolls and another set of seven trumpet judgments gets announced.
Last time we were in revelation there was this 30 minutes of silence in heaven…This sort of heavenly anticipation of what is about to happen next…
And what happens next is that the evil nations of the world get judged. And just like Paul tells us…There is some dark power behind the nations
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
What Paul reminds us of is that there are dark powers behind the empire….Why does the empire do so much evil…Well who is behind all of that evil?
And you have to remember at the point when Paul is living in the church there is the Roman empire, and what Paul sees himself as is this ambassador of the Kingdom of God.
Paul’s message is to put your allegiance in the Kingdom of God..Why? Well behind the church, the one who is the head of it is Jesus! The one who died and rose again…
And what is his view of the Roman empire? Well Ephesians 6:12….That behind that are cosmic powers of darkness
So kind of core to Pauline theology is that the supernatural world exists…
Behind the church you have the trinity (And the church is God’s kingdom on earth)
And behind the nations you have cosmic powers of darkness. And this is not a new idea to Paul…Paul is not making this up. There is a litany of scriptures that talk about this in the old testament….
But the reason why I am even mentioning this today is because when we get to this section of Revelation…It exposes those dark powers that are behind the nations…
And we have a very creative way to read the next section of scripture…And before we do, you’re going to see…
1. Its totally wild
2. I was on a long bike ride yesterday and I was like…Ok Lord…I feel like I get the point of this scripture…But what is the point of reading all of this in church? Really…Lord why am I preaching this sermon tomorrow
because when your hope is pinned to one of the nations, when you find your identity in the “nations”…God wants to expose that there is a supernatural reality behind the nations…there are some powers behind those nations that are not of God
So I wanted you to see this scripture as a whole…SO I had Pastor Ruth record a reading of Revelation 8-9 and I went to one of the AI apps and just started copying and pasting scripture into it to see what it comes up with…
VIDEO 5:11
I know…You listen to that scripture and watch the video and your like…what on earth are we talking about in church today:
So, before we get through each section of this…Jon is not addressing us. 21st century americans
He is writing to these 7 churches in 96AD who would have had a particular set of memories…
See any good Jew went to school as a kid and by age 5 they had the Torah memorized.
Age 5! I can barely remember what I ate for breakfast.
But See John has a rich Old Testament symbolism to draw from … This is what John does!
So, before we even get into all of this…is there any particular Old Testament story where 7 trumpet blasts are important?
Jericho, right?
Here the Israelites escape Egypt and for 40 years of long waiting in the Dessert they approach the first city after crossing the Jordan….Jericho It was this city that no weapon could penetrate…
So what was
The lesson of Jericho:
No human weapon could bring Jericho down, only prayer and the hand of the Lord.
No human weapon could bring Jericho down, only prayer and the hand of the Lord.
Now the lessons of these old testament stories are all going to come back with significance
so what happened in the story, they had to march around the fortress for seven days and on the 7th day, 7 priest who held 7 horns would blow them 7 times…
Do you think John is borrowing from this story?
And John is borrowing from 2 more stories the plagues of Egypt and Locust in the book of Joel and Let’s see how they all fit in
And Folks, I am going to go through these quickly because , we’d easily be here for hours…
Now the seven angels who had the seven trumpets prepared to blow them.
The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, and these were thrown upon the earth. And a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up.
With the sounding of the 1st trumpet the judgments begin, and this language is reminiscent of the seventh Egyptian Plague…
two weeks ago I preached on the 7th seal….When there is silence in heaven for half an hour and God begins answering the prayers of the saints…This is all part of answering the prayers of the saints…
It is reversing the thunderous sound of God’s voice and pouring God’s will back on the earth…
When God started answering the prayers of God’s people, this is how John portrays it.
Because trumpets are sounded in the bible for Battle, for victory and most importantly the coming of God!
So what we read here and see as this crazy destruction of the earth… is really an old testament a way of God saying see I am the lord of all of the land
The second angel blew his trumpet, and something like a great mountain, burning with fire, was thrown into the sea, and a third of the sea became blood. A third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed.
In the same way that the first plague scorched a third of the land, the second brought destruction to a third of the sea. A huge mountain with fire was thrown into the sea and it became blood.
Here we are reminded of the first Egyptian plague, in which the rivers were turned to blood.
This is a way of saying I am the Lord of the sea
The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many people died from the water, because it had been made bitter.
This is not a reference to an Egyptian plague…. It is the reverse of the miracle and Marah where Moses threw a tree into the bitter waters, and they were made sweet (Exodus 15:25)
So, in Exodus God’s people are given clean water from bitter water and in Revelation Clean water is made bitter for those who don’t believe
The fourth angel blew his trumpet, and a third of the sun was struck, and a third of the moon, and a third of the stars, so that a third of their light might be darkened, and a third of the day might be kept from shining, and likewise a third of the night.
At the sounding of the fourth trumpet, a third of the sun, moon and stars were struck so that they became completely dark. This judgment recalls the ninth Egyptian plague.
It’s another way for God to take the legs out from under the Roman authorities…
Because remember they look to the stars for their source of wisdom and power…
And especially the Romans, the Stars signified their gods…they were the real powers and principalities that Paul is talking about
And this is a way of telling the church, see Cesar doesn’t have real power…the real power comes from the one who made the stars!
Then I looked, and I heard an eagle crying with a loud voice as it flew directly overhead, “Woe, woe, woe to those who dwell on the earth, at the blasts of the other trumpets that the three angels are about to blow!”
So in ancient times, the Eagle is the messenger of the God’s…and they are crying Woe! Woe! Woe! Now one of the things to see here is that everything that we are seeing in chapters 8-9 is kind of an inverse to the heavenly throne room scene
So this eagle shouting WOE, WOE, WOE is sort of the Obverse side of the angels shouting HOLY, HOLY, HOLY in chapters 4-5
The was a familiar cry from the prophets and even Jesus …and what does it mean?
How bad is it for you when your life is crumbling with the empire you cling to!
See when you hang on tightly your life crumbles with the empire…
It is an illusion to think that you can find security apart from the lamb!
And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit. He opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.
So a month ago we looked at chapters 4-5
That is the heavenly vision and wherever you see the heavenly vision you see the real thing…real reality, real heaven, real power…
and this section is contrasted with false power of the empire
Just as in chapter 4 we see heaven opened up… we see a door opened in heaven in all its majesty and glory… now we see the opposite…the Abyss is opened up and a door opens, and smoke rises from it…
And this could open a whole pandora’s box for you but who is coming out of the pit of hell…
If you’ve been here for a while you’ve heard me talk about Genesis 6, the fallen angels who had children with women who were called the Nephilim…This is what 2 Peter 2:4 tells us…The the evil angels were not spared and thrown into the pit…
Really there are a bunch of people who go so many directions on this verse but what I think is happening is that John is reminding us, who will you worship?
The God who sits on the throne, the lamb or the one who dwells in the Abyss
Everything that comes from the evil one is a parody of God’s originality.
Everything that comes from the evil one is a parody of God’s originality.
Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given power like the power of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to harm the grass of the earth or any green plant or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torment them for five months, but not to kill them, and their torment was like the torment of a scorpion when it stings someone. And in those days people will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them.
Again, we see a reminder from the plagues of the exodus, and the locust of Joel. And here there is this great reversal….
The church had been suffering, those with the mark of the lamb were suffering, now it is people who do not have the mark who are subjected to suffering…Those who have shown no mercy to the suffering saints will be judged
It reminds the reader of the Exodus story…Whoever was marked by the blood of the lamb was saved! They were passed over!
In appearance the locusts were like horses prepared for battle: on their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth; they had breastplates like breastplates of iron, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. They have tails and stings like scorpions, and their power to hurt people for five months is in their tails. They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit. His name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.
And here is where imaginations go wild…Some of the left behind books talk about how these could be attack helicopters coming out from the anti-Christ…
But see that is just fun fiction, to say that would be to assume that John had no idea what he was writing about…
I think it is an intellectual sin to say that these characters would be things we would recognize today as helicopters and tanks…why…Because if that is true, then that would change everything, revelation wouldn’t be for the early church anymore! It wouldn’t even apply…
In addition to that, these evil locust were given power to harm and not kill…
Do you know of any tanks or helicopters that just have the power to hurt real bad but not kill?
When really, what is actually happening here is…this is a parody of the heavenly vision of chapters 4-5
In Craig Koester’s words:
“The vision of the heavenly throne room in Revelation 4-5 showed a rightly ordered universe, in which creatures offered praise to their Creator and to the Lamb, who are worthy of power. But in Revelation 9, grotesque figures create a demonic parody of the created order, showing what conditions are like under the lordship of the king of the underworld, whose names Abaddon and Apollyon mean Destruction and Destroyer.”
Abaddon and Apollyon would have been refrences to the Roman Emperors…Why? Emperors had to claimed divine authority, and when they did, it is well known that they usually claimed the authority and Kinship of the god of Apollo…And Abbadan in greek is the word Destroyer and in the Old Testement this is another name for Hades or the underworld …
So this complex interweaving of symbols is asking…What will you put your hope in? The empire? Of the Kingdom of the Lamb?
So what John is saying…is see…Under the authority of the empire you see all of this stuff happening…
1sttrumpet: God’s creation gets ruined! Do we see that under empire? Yes!
2ndtrumpet: The sea gets ruined…
3rdtrumpet: Drinking water goes bad
4thtrumpet: We live in darkness
See when we let the empire and the Cesar be lord…this is the kind of world we should expect!
The first woe has passed; behold, two woes are still to come.
Then the sixth angel blew his trumpet, and I heard a voice from the four horns of the golden altar before God, saying to the sixth angel who had the trumpet, “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.” So the four angels, who had been prepared for the hour, the day, the month, and the year, were released to kill a third of mankind. The number of mounted troops was twice ten thousand times ten thousand; I heard their number. And this is how I saw the horses in my vision and those who rode them: they wore breastplates the color of fire and of sapphire and of sulfur, and the heads of the horses were like lions’ heads, and fire and smoke and sulfur came out of their mouths. By these three plagues a third of mankind was killed, by the fire and smoke and sulfur coming out of their mouths. For the power of the horses is in their mouths and in their tails, for their tails are like serpents with heads, and by means of them they wound.
When the sixth trumpet is blown…
This would have brought to mind the last plague in Egypt, the angel of death…
But this time is isn’t just one angel it is 4 angels
And they bring all this might and military power with them, arousing all of the fears of Rome…The forces of the east…the Parthinians
And they bring death…I’ll save this for the podcast but this is heavily tied into 1 Enoch 56:6-57:3
The picture here is when Empire expands and is centered around its own power and its own might will always collapse on itself.
These retelling of the plagues of Egypt…or the now super plagues are a reminder that we are not secure when we trust in the empire…
That we are not secure when we trust in the Pharaoh
The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.
When we look back to the chief story that this entire passage is based on, the plagues of Exodus...
What were they all about?
The Plagues were all about There is this phrase that goes through the plagues of exodus…”So that they will know that I am the Lord”
It’s what scholars call God’s Severe Grace….Like this is the last straw of God getting the attention of the world…Ok…you want evil…here is what it really looks like!
No matter how many trumpets blow
No matter what percentage of the earth gets destroyed
The people don’t repent
Part of the point of this text is that it is not threat, there is no scare tactic, there is no plague that will bring people to repentance…
It is unfortunate that we have even used the book of Revelation to do the very thing that Revelation says doesn’t work
Now not everyone will repent in the book of Revelation, but a huge portion will…people from every tribe and nation will repent….But what is going to make them repent is not a threat of destruction or hell…It is people who embody the life of the lamb
Here is what I want you to hear this morning
It’s just like us, to think we can fix the mess were in by making a bigger mess…
and it is so hard for us to get to a place where we say, I repent of everything I repent of it all.
And even as John Wesley has said, I repent of my own attempts at righteousness….I give it up to you!
The entrance into the life that God has for you is your allegiance…with hands wide open…
And if I can continue to use this exodus metaphor for a minute
At one point in our lives we will all enter the red sea!
We will all have to look at the waters of Chaos and walk in!
The question is how will we enter?
Like the early church when they entered the waters of baptism, they left all of their clothes behind as a way of saying I die to everything in my old life, everything I have I count as loss for the sake of Jesus.
Just like the Israelites…when they entered the red sea, they left their entire old life behind…They had nothing, no security no food, no shelter…they just had to walk in with nothing!
And don’t forget, in the story Pharaoh went in too….He went in grabbing the reigns of his chariots and horses….He went in clutching on to power….
See what John is trying to tell the church is that when you go in the waters with Apollyon when you follow the leaders into the water and you’re gripping on to all that stuff, you don’t come out!
Your last two fill in’s are this:
Israel went into the water with nothing and they came out with everything
Israel went into the water with nothing and they came out with everything
They went in as slaves and emerged as priests
Egypt went into the waters with everything and they came out with nothing
Egypt went into the waters with everything and they came out with nothing
They went in as rulers clinging to false power and they lost everything
What I am convinced that this passage is trying to get through to the early church is that the weight of living the empire kind of life collapses on itself…
So, what are you holding on to today?
What do you cling to?
I think these two chapters are working together to say….where do you find your allegiance? The lamb or the empire…
