“Will it ever end?“ a seventh grader asks his mother half way through the sermon. ”Will it ever end?“ the exasperated woman says to her companion who insisted that she go to the concert. ”Will it ever end?" a husband and father sobs to his son as wife and mother lies helpless on the bed on which she will die after a long and painful illness.
“Will it ever end?” We all ask that question when lost or bereft or tortured or trapped or bored or lonely. Someone once said, “We can stand anything if we know that it will end.” [1]
It’s a question that our fathers and mothers of faith about the end of the first century were asking…about 96 AD. It was not a good time to be publicly known as a Christian. For Christians in that part of the world, (most of them had moved out of Palestine, out of Jerusalem, up north toward what is now Turkey) had problems to face which most others in the population did not.
They were considered adherents to a sect, a suspect group. They met for cultic practices in private homes, not on official religious holidays established by the Roman Empire. They were widely suspect of being unpatriotic. There were wild stories told about them. Word was out that they were eating flesh and drmk’ing blood (Cannibalism). They met for private love feasts (incest, orgies it was rumored). Had not their leader been crucified by the government as a rebel and enemy of the public welfare? They were unpatriotic. [2]
Not only were they suspect, they were made scapegoats. Nero, you remember, who was emperor when Rome burned, accused the Christians of being arsonists and setting the fire. As a result there was no public outcry when he went on his vengeful attack against the Christians.
Now, in the latter part of the first century, the 90’s, Domitian was emperor. He, too, chose to persecute the Christians because they could not be brought under control; they were unwilling to give a pinch of incense signifying their worship of the emperor as God. Concerned about the threat to the stability of the empire, he persecuted them.
It was a time of unrest, and this persecution was seen by the general population as just punishment. There were famines in the early 90’s which had taken their toll on the empire. The earth itself seemed unstable… earthquakes had devastated Asia in the 60’s. In 79 Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii and neighboring towns, and leaving a foreboding cloud over all the area. It was a time of unrest and uncertainty.
As a matter of fact, many Christians at the end of the first century believed that the end would come soon…even in their lifetime. The time was up. The end was coming. By that they meant the end of the world. Some thought the world would soon be transformed by the return of Christ to earth. The wicked were to be judged and condemned and the righteous were to be blessed.
Others thought that what these folks believed would come soon, in the near future, had already happened. Christian theologians of the second and following generation taught that the promised end came in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the beginning of the Church. This was the sign that the end was present, that God was fulfilling all that had been promised. After all, had not Christ been raised from the dead? [3]
The Antichrist was assumed to be false teachers in the church. The defeat of Satan had happened in Jesus’ resurrection. Christ’s coming was fulfilled with the coming of the Holy Spirit.
The writer of the gospel of John, and the first, second and third letters of John take the position that we don’t need to really to look for more. God has fulfilled what God has promised.
John, the writer of Revelation, belongs to the first group of people. He thought that the end would be soon. At the very beginning of this letter, in the first chapter first verse, John says the revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show his servant must soon take place. John believed that Christ would soon return. Evil would be destroyed and a new world in everlasting glory would be established by God. By soon, John meant s_oon…within his lifetime…or within the lifetime, certainly, of those who were his children. John, when he said soon, didn’t mean 1645, 1843, 1939, 2000, 2001 …that’s not soon for John. John’s soon meant right then.
But, of course, it didn’t happen when John thought, or we wouldn’t today be reading the story or talking about it or wondering what John really had in mind. His timetable may have been wrong, and yet the faith that he taught the women and men who believed in Jesus, and are a part of his church, is as important to us as it was to John. What John taught about God’s presence in tough times is as relevant for us today as it ever was, and that’s why we study this letter.
It’s important to understand the kind of faith needed for tough times which we face and will face. Natural disasters which occurred in the first century, are still devastating our world. We are losing friends, and Christians in various parts of the world are being persecuted now for their faith. So it is important to know what John had to say to Christians under the gun so that we may be strengthened in our life by hope and faith.
We’re going to dive into it in greater detail next week, but there are two ideas I want to lay out as premises which I believe are important in understanding what John teaches through all of the symbols, all of the strange, bizarre things that he talks about.
The first thing we see in John’s teaching is that there is an urgency to ones faith commitment. That’s why John said soon. Something important has happened, is happening soon, and we have to be ready.
We live with human tendency to procrastinate. You may have a student in your home who prepares for a test by laying out all the material neatly on the desk, papers just right, a book open, sharpens all the pencils that can be found in the house and spends about thirty minutes to an hour getting ready to do the important study for the test.
Is there anyone here who’s not put off a visit to the dentist until the pain gets so great it keeps you awake at night?
We are a generation, many of us, of procrastinators. It has been estimated that 70 to 90 percent of the people in the United States do not have a will. That seems high to me, and I expect that probably it’s not that way with this crowd because this is an especially intelligent group. Imagine 70 to 90 percent of the people don’t have wills in spite of the fact that 100 percent of them are going to need a will. Sometimes, tragically, sooner than they hope.
In the same spirit we honestly plan to get serious about our faith sometime.
It’s kind of like learning Spanish…someday I’m going to learn Spanish. We even have some records that turned up at home on how to learn Spanish; I’m going to listen to them someday. I bought a book once on how to learn Spanish, and some day I’m going to learn Spanish. Someday we’re going to think about discipleship. Of course, without urgency, there’s no action, is there?
Talk to someone who’s come to faith late in their life and he or she will tell you of the regret in all those years that they were without a clear sense and experience of the love of Jesus Christ which now has touched their life and brought them hope.
George Skeet, of Water Valley, Texas, a rancher in that vast wasteland out there, once told me his story of coming to understand what the Christian faith was about as an adult, “and the regret of all the years I wasted.” The time for belief is now; the circumstance may never be better. In fact it may be worse than it is now for one to trust anew.
There’s an element of urgency in the good news. If you have experienced something really good, you want to share it. A bargain at the store or a good movie or television program or song, if it really touches you urges to be shared. You want other people to be touched too. There’s an urgency in the good news. If you experience something in the love that God has given us you cannot wait to share it. The source of love which nothing can diminish must be shared with friends in bondage to fear, confused by the circumstances that swirl about them, by the competing claims. They want to know something they can build their life on which will be solid and substantial the week after next and in the years ahead. If you know something about that, pass the word along. There are people waiting to hear what you have experienced which will bring hope.
John also speaks early on in this book about confidence in God who will triumph in adversity. Look at the 8’h verse of that first chapter. This vision that John has comes from the one who says “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” Alpha is the first letter in the Greek alphabet and Omega is the last letter. John was writing in Greek; it was the language of literature ofthat day. “I am the beginning and the end says the Lord God, who is, who was, and who is to come, the Almighty.”
There is no time when God will not be. In all that vast expanse, as long as the imagination can go, this one who speaks through John is the Almighty, the one who is the source of our hope and our strength, whom we can trust. No matter how difficult life is going to be, and it can be very difficult, the recreating love of God will never be snuffed out… never… never… never. The recreating spirit of God’s love which brings life will never be lost.
Paula D’Arcy lost a baby daughter and her husband in a tragic automobile accident in which she too was injured. Out of the experience of her grief, and healing through that grief, she wrote a book called “Song for Sarah.” I’ve spoken of it before. It is a diary which she kept through the days and weeks and months and years after her loss in which she reflects upon her emptiness and her healing.
One of the entries, four years after the accident, is written the cemetery. She writes to her daughter who is now gone. "I look at what I wrote on your grave marker, ‘The Lord is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want.’ How well I realize now that that is true. Even though, through our free wills taken, we do all our choosing - allowing life and controlling it, overall is the Hand of the Shepherd. Always, for me, at every moment, he was there - there when I felt his presence and equally there when it seemed I was all alone. His presence didn’t depend upon my ‘feeling it,’ or even upon the extent of my belief. God was simply there. God did not move as I realized that first Christmas after losing you.
"Also, ironically, neither pain nor happiness were true indicators that he was or was not there, though often I mistakenly thought that too. His purposes work together in all conditions of life, if we could only see. Maybe you know all that now. You know much more than I. For even in affliction was love, love even in my tears.
“I ached and sorrowed so at losing you. But the pain, in the end, did not have the final say. And so it was all much less a loss than a victory. For Love has the final say — ‘The Lord is My Shepherd, I Shall Not Want.’ And we are all quite safe.”
We need to find ways of building confidence in God. One of the best ways I know is to take time to give thanks each day for the simple, ordinary things and events in our lives - the texture of cereal, the cool breeze, the warmth of sun on the earth, someone who cares about us so much they don’t leave us when we act up, a bed for rest, the color of flowers. Include a difficult time or confrontation or failure, but each day give thanks… give thanks… give thanks and your confidence will grow.
None of us knows what tomorrow will bring. It may be more of the same. It may be the end of something that gives life meaning, or maybe life itself.
So John writes to people like us to live this day with urgency and face tomorrow with confidence.
Let us pray…
[1] Carl Michaelson
[2] This and the following three paragraphs from Interpretation Commentary on Revelation
by M. Eugene Boring, p. 10–11
[3] Boring, op. cit. Pp. 70–71