Worship the Right King.

All right, I'm going to invite you to find your way back to your seats on this beautiful sunny morning. If you want to go ahead, find your way back to your seats today, we are going to dive into the Word. Who's excited for Revelations week two today?

Well, I am very excited to have a good pastor friend of mine in the house with us, ready to teach. Pastor Tyler and I have known each other many years. I think you moved here how many years ago? Ten, and I'm about ten as well. So we moved here around the same time, got connected through some mutual friends, and every conversation is always so uplifting. And he's one of those people where I'm like, he loves the Lord, he loves the Word of God, and is a total Bible nerd, which I love. Those types of people.

So two years ago, a year and a half ago, he was talking to me so much about Revelation and his love for this book. And so I knew that when we were diving in, he was the person to bring in. So he'll share a little bit more about himself and his family, who's here today as well. But will you guys join me in welcoming Pastor Tyler Nylen?

Thank you, Pastor Abbie. I so appreciate it. Hello, everybody. It is nice to see you all. I'm so thankful to be with you today. Like Abbie said, my name is Tyler. I'm one of the pastors at Fountain of Life Covenant Church on the south side. We're right at the Park Street exit of the Beltline there, so if you pass us there. You also may have seen we've got a really big building next to us called the Center for Black Excellence that's just gone up.

My senior pastor, Reverend Dr. Alex Gee, he's the one who helped found that. He has been the senior pastor of our church for, this upcoming year, it will be his 40th year being a senior pastor at our church, so a very long time in our community. And so I have been blessed today to bring greetings from him and to come preach today and next week here with you all instead of being at Fountain of Life. So I'm very excited to be here.

What you should know about me, just a couple things to be aware of. I have a family who I dearly love who is here today. Haley is my wife. She's over there. We've been married for three and a half years. And then our son Ira is 15 months, and he may shout out in tongues at some point. If he's shouting out, he's speaking in tongues. I'm sure of it. I'm sure of it. And so he's there. We've got a couple pictures of him. We did Wizard of Oz as a family for Halloween, so we had fun with that. There's a picture of him yesterday in the leaves, and he is just super excited.

The other thing you should know about me is I'm a huge Chicago sports fan. This is exciting. This is exciting. It's an exciting time to be a Chicago sports fan. As you can see in the picture there, I've got my Caleb Williams Bears jersey on at Lambeau. It was a bad game when I went earlier this year, but I know how to represent the good news in places of darkness, if there's anything I can say about that. That is a little bit about me, a little bit of who I am.

I just want to thank Pastor Abbie again. She's been a friend for a long time here, and I just have incredible, incredible respect for her leadership. I thought she did a phenomenal job introing this last week with this topic. It's been great. I didn't know she could sing, too. Like, she can sing, sing.

And the other thing I think should be said: my wife's been telling me all week long, I'll be like, oh, this is something that New Culture does, and it's really thoughtful, and it's really considerate, or it's really just great. And she'll be like, that's because there's a female pastor who's the lead pastor there. Kind of thoughtful, kind of helping make sure things are going. So I've been so appreciative of her friendship as well.

I'm honored to be with you all because your reputation goes before you, whether you know it or not. The community impact you have, the way that you all are good neighbors, from things like your community meals at Enso to your laundry nights, the things that you all do, they speak and they go before you. And so I am honored and I feel privileged to be able to share with you today a little bit about Revelation.

So I'm here to preach on that, and what got me interested in Revelation may be a question that you have. What made me someone who said, let me take a deeper dive into Revelation? I grew up a Christian, so I grew up in a very Christian household. And I don't know if any of you were like me or have been like me, but the book series Left Behind was very gripping to me. Particularly, they had this series called Left Behind for kids. And as a kid, I was so interested in this. I found it captivating. I found the narrative very interesting and exciting. And I was very, very captivated by it.

I was enthralled, but I was also very fearful and scared. Because I spent the next number of years just wondering, if my mom didn't answer a call from me very quickly, I was like, did my mom get raptured? Have I been left here? I put this picture here because literally for years I would see a cloud and the sun coming down as a kid. And I was convinced that was Jesus and he was coming. And I'd get these chills and I'd be like, oh my gosh, is Jesus coming at this point? And it was kind of scary and intense as a kid to be feeling that and working through all that.

And so I decided to start looking in the Scriptures so I could be more aware and see what I was missing, or be able to see where in the Bible this stuff was coming from, that would help me. And in my experience, I started to really search and search, and I kept searching, and there were a lot of things that I was just realizing, like, I don't know if that's actually in the Bible. Like, I don't know if that was something that was just used for fictional narrative. Was it used to create excitement? Was it used to bring a story along? But I started to just be like, I don't know if I see where these places are of some of the things that Left Behind would do.

And so I would start looking at the Scriptures and I'd look through them, and it piqued my interest and it would continue to pique my interest. So I got to college. When I was in college, I was a ministry major, and I took a class on the book of Revelation. And it blew my mind. It changed my life, because it introduced me to a few things that were really helpful. It unlocked a new understanding, because it introduced me to something called apocalyptic literature and the genre of apocalyptic literature. And I'm going to get more into that as we go.

But after having this revelation, I just have deep, deep love and heart and care for this book. I think it has one of the most beautiful and relevant gospel presentations that there is in the New Testament. I think it has just an incredible way of describing who God is and what he has called us to be and what he has brought us to. I think it's a message that the church needs now. I think it's a message that the church needs now as much as it needed it in the first century. And it has needed it every century since, and it's going to continue to need this message until the day Christ returns and brings about the restoration of all things.

And so I've been studying this and continuing this for about the last 10 to 15 years. I've consumed about every resource on it that I could find. At some point, I'd love to make sure I share that resource page so that you all can have it and look and see the different resources we've looked at. But with all that, I've been tasked with the incredibly difficult challenge of trying to preach on Revelation in two weeks, two Sunday mornings. I'm going to do my best. I'm going to try to get you out on time.

And I'm so happy that we'll have that lunch and learn next week, because I want to be able to engage with questions. I'm sure there are going to be plenty and plenty of questions. So I really look forward to that. I'm going to be able to talk about questions. This is going to be a little bit of a fire hose. So if you feel like it's a fire hose, it is. You're not slower or behind or anything like that. And this week in particular is going to be a little more teachy, and next week is going to be a little more preachy. It's a little more teachy this week. You can be prepared for that. So let's begin.

How many of you are familiar with the cartoon masterpiece known as Scooby-Doo? All right. We've got some Scooby-Doo fans in here. I believe, and trust me on this one, I believe that the Mystery Machine and Scooby-Doo do a fantastic job of what I hope to be able to do here in our time in Revelation, and what I think Revelation actually does for its audience. I think Scooby-Doo and the Mystery Machine and the Mystery Inc. group do it really well.

If you've watched an episode of Scooby-Doo, you know that the episode starts off with a mystery. It starts off with a mystery which people are often scared of or anxious about. They're confused by it, they're not sure how to understand what's going on, and maybe they even run away or avoid this mystery, this thing, this haunting thing that is coming for this community.

I've often found with the book of Revelation that there are three different approaches that are typically taken by folks when they come and approach this book. The first is that they find it scary, something very scary, something very anxious, something I'm afraid of when I think about this book. The second approach is that it's confusing or difficult to understand. It's like, I don't really get what's happening here, and I'm not sure how I'm supposed to be able to understand this. And the third is that we just avoid it. We just say, you know what, that is the last book, and I don't understand it, so I'm just not going to even mess with it. I'm going to set it over here. I don't know why it's in the canon of Scripture, but I'm just going to avoid it, and I think I'll be okay without it.

Now, in Scooby-Doo, the way that the Mystery Machine crew engages with things that are scary, with things that are confusing, or things that make other people want to avoid them, is they go straight to it. They might even still be afraid as they go into it. They might still be confused as they go into it. They might still even sometimes run away in the midst of the story, but they are choosing, and they choose to go after it and figure out what's going on.

And at the end of each episode, it crescendos. Oh, that's better. Up in the middle. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that, Abbie. Thank you. At the end of each episode of Scooby-Doo, it crescendos in this big reveal, typically. And in this big reveal, there is an unmasking that happens. The characters, as this picture shows you, they pull off the mask of this thing that looks interesting or scary or whatever it is. And when they unmask the person, it's almost always revealing someone like Mr. Jenkins, the janitor. Someone who was there the whole time, someone we were introduced to at the beginning, someone who isn't really that scary when you take off the mask. And when you think back on it, you go, oh, actually, this sort of made sense. This makes sense. I can understand how we got to this point. I can understand what this is.

And that's what I think an approach to Revelation can and should look like. And that's my hope for what we do in this time: that as we approach Revelation, as we lead you to it, we begin to take off the mask of scariness. We begin to take off the mask of confusion. We begin to take the mask of avoidance off, so that you're able to see what the true message is, something that maybe has been there the whole time, maybe that isn't actually that scary, and maybe it's something that you can actually approach. And so my goal today is, like the Scooby mystery gang, I want to help unmask a bit of Revelation so it's not so out there, but we can approach it and have our own revelation of the beautiful message that God has to share.

How can we approach Revelation?

So a question to start with: how can we actually do this? How can we approach Revelation minimizing fear, confusion, or avoidance? And today I want to share three keys with you in approaching Revelation that will help us take off the mask of fear, confusion, or avoidance.

Key one: an apocalyptic genre

And the first key is this: recognizing Revelation as part of an apocalyptic genre. Recognizing Revelation as part of an apocalyptic genre. I said I'd talk more about this. This comes right out of the title of the book of Revelation. And unlike most of our Midwestern ways of wanting to say go to the Woodman's or the Targets or wherever it might be, where we add S's onto things, this is one revelation. The title of the book is Revelation, starting with that, because we are receiving one revelation. And the title of the book literally translates to this: apocalypse. This is the apocalypse from Christ. This is the apocalypse that John has written. This is the apocalypse.

And when you hear the word apocalypse, in our 21st century minds we often immediately think of the words end of the world, destruction, something terrifying, something that's going to happen. But in this culture, at this time frame, they did not have zombie movies that were said to be apocalyptic. They did not have these sorts of things that already gave their imaginations an approach to what this word means. The word actually just means, literally, an unveiling, an uncovering, a revealing. An apocalypse is what's really happening when whatever is covering it up, whatever mask is covering something up, when it's taken back and revealed, you see what's true underneath it.

So when we hear the words apocalypse of John, or in our English word, revelation, revelation does not instantly mean scary, end of the world destruction. Revelation, in its essence, at that word, is just trying to say uncovering, revealing something going on behind the scenes. And for many of us, Revelation is the only book we have ever read that looks like this. It's the only book we've ever read that comes from apocalyptic literature.

But I want you to know that apocalyptic literature was a well-known genre at the time of Christ. For a couple hundred years before Christ and a couple hundred years after Christ, it was a well-known genre in both Jewish and Christian writing. It was not uncommon. It was not foreign. It was not something they'd never encountered before. It had a way that it worked.

And when I took my Revelation course in college, we were a quarter of the way through the course before we even started reading Revelation. Because for the first quarter of the course, my professor had us read all sorts of different books from that era to help us get a sense of what this looked like. So we read books like the Apocalypse of Peter, the Apocalypse of Paul, the Book of Watchers, First Enoch, and the Sibylline Oracles. I don't expect you to have heard of any of those at this point, but what I'm trying to help you understand is that it was common. There were multiples of these. There were hundreds of these types of apocalyptic writings.

So when we encounter Revelation, it's the only thing we've ever read like it. But it had its own way of functioning. It had its own styles of genre. So it drew upon symbols and fantastical cosmic images. That was something that would often happen in apocalyptic imagery. It's trying to create these big, larger-than-life cosmic images that it's putting up on display.

We see this in the chapter 12 of Revelation Christmas story that comes out. You may be like, Christmas story? There's a Christmas story, actually, in Revelation. It's in chapter 12, where Jesus, in some way, depending on how you interpret and depending on how things work, is born from the Virgin Mary or from Israel. It depends on how you look at it. But there's a Christmas story that comes out, and it's told through a big, huge blow-up of this ancient serpent who becomes a dragon. So it becomes this big cosmic image that is brought to the surface. There are ways in which Revelation brings deep, cosmic, fantastical images to the surface.

I like to compare it a little bit to political cartoons today. You and I understand how political cartoons work. We see a picture that has a commentary and a point, and I want to use one from this week to show symbols. And by the way, this is no political commentary in terms of supporting or denying anything that's going on. It's just that this is something that we understand because of what happened this week in our elections in the United States. What do you see here? Can anyone point out something that they see? You see a blue wave. Okay, how'd you know? Well, you see the colors and all of that, but what does that mean? Could mean anything. Great!

You're talking about 2,000 years from now, people will probably see a blue wave, and they'll be like, what the heck does that have to mean? But your mind may filter and bring up some specific things that have happened this week. You also may see the words "the deflecting pool," which has the Washington Monument near it, which, if you've been paying attention to the news, there are some presidential things that have been happening related to that. And so it's trying to bring these images from our current contemporary day, and you are able to translate and interpret what the purpose and message of a political cartoon like this looks like and what it means.

A second one I'll show you right here. This is a more evergreen type of political cartoon. We've got a donkey and we've got an elephant. They're not talking to each other. They're just sitting, looking the other way, hands on their faces, and as a result, this white building is being cracked through in the middle. Now, if you are someone 2,000 years from now who has not studied American history, you might at first look at this picture and say, there were donkeys and elephants in suits back then. 2,000 years ago, we had donkeys and elephants in suits, and they were as big as buildings. And, you know, they don't look happy with each other, but I wonder what the crack might be. And you can just fill in the blanks with all sorts of things.

But we do that because someone 2,000 years from now may not know that history in the same way you and I, as people of this age in this contemporary time, are able to understand. We're able to interpret things. We're able to see what these symbols and signs reference, because we understand how political cartoons work. It's the same sort of way with apocalyptic literature. If you begin to understand how apocalyptic literature works, you begin to become less surprised or less bewildered when things start showing up.

For example, there are other things, like angelic mediators, that are often taking place in almost all these apocalyptic stories or images. So when you see an angel showing up and telling John, follow me or do this, that's a very common thing in this genre.

Use of numbers. Oftentimes the use of numbers can feel really scary when we're approaching them. Oftentimes that's because we come at numbers from a more Western, arithmetic-oriented way. But in Hebrew culture, in Hebrew times, especially at this time, numbers often carried meaning more than they necessarily carried quantitative amounts. And so the use of a number like seven: seven carries this symbolic understanding that when we're talking about seven, we may or may not be talking about seven literal things, but we are talking about a wholeness, a completeness, a fullness.

When we see three and a half, or see the number three and a half, which we see all over the place, oftentimes in the way that apocalyptic literature works, or numbers work in this Hebrew culture, three and a half isn't meant to just be literally three and a half. It's meant to say, yes, there is a time, but being half of seven, it's not forever. It's not a wholeness of forever. So oftentimes we'll see in judgment pieces that three and a half, or a time, times and half a time, shows up. And we could be like, okay, let me figure out the exact date that this is supposed to be, based on all that. Or we could begin to recognize that it's probably saying, hey, this judgment is going to happen and it's going to take place, but it's not forever. Judgment is not going to last forever for those who have gone through it, or the endurance of suffering is not going to last forever.

Twelve, which we see in a lot of places, and multiples of it, often represent God's people in Scripture. So when we see 24 elders, and we see how that might be a multiple of an Old and New Testament idea of 12 tribes and 12 apostles, we begin to see, oh, okay, this makes sense. And then thousands are often trying to be this emphasizer. It's this bigger scale thing. When we see thousands, it's not necessarily always trying to be arithmetic. It's trying to communicate a great magnitude, enhanced symbols of what's going on.

The journey of Revelation and apocalyptic literature also doesn't have to unfold like a strict chronological narrative. So if you are an artist, or you're someone who loves to think outside the box or see how things can work, you might love the way Revelation works, because it's not necessarily an A to Z, exact step-through of how things work or what the point is trying to be. It can look a little bit more like a symphony. Some of you have music backgrounds. In a symphony, there might be a through line, a melody or a song or something that has the main core, the main theme, and then as the symphony is going on, it might dance over here a little bit, or bring in something that was earlier in the piece for a specific purpose or reason. Revelation operates a lot like that.

Another analogy for it is an art museum. You might go into an art museum and you may see a painting here, and it has its own story. It has its own story to tell and its own thing for you to interpret and learn from, but it's placed where it is for a specific reason. And you go to another thing, and yes, it has its own story too, but they're working together. And so one of the authors I read, J. Nelson Kraybill, talked a lot about this in his book Apocalypse and Allegiance, where it can look a little bit more like an art gallery when you're approaching Revelation.

So it can go back and forth. That's why sometimes it can get confusing, because we'll go through two rounds of judgment and suddenly we've got a woman and a dragon out of nowhere. And then we're going to end up with two witnesses who are dead, but then we've got a third round of judgment, and that third round of judgment is similar to the other two judgments, but instead of being a third and a quarter, now it's all. It's just playing off different scales. It's a beautiful artistic rendition of how the vision John has, revealed by Christ, is able to be shaped and formed into this work.

And what's the purpose of apocalyptic literature in general? The purpose of apocalyptic literature, and how this formed as a genre, is often that it exemplifies something Walter Brueggemann calls a prophetic imagination, which many Old Testament prophets and apocalyptic writers used. It was a way of communicating to critique oppressive and ruling systems and powers through indirect means, while also stimulating a creative energy, a vision for communities to imagine that despite whatever the circumstances looked like in their world, despite the oppressiveness that folks may have been going through, they were able to create a new reality that could be transcended, that could see beyond what was happening in the current reality. And so that's how this became a genre.

And what sometimes can be a little scary, or something that we have to wrestle with in Revelation, is that it truly is a book for oppressed folks. It's for a people who are enduring. It's not just to let you feel all the time like God is just going to give us everything we ever want at every moment in this current reality. But it is an enduring promise, because God is not telling us in this book that human suffering is removed in this life. And it is not telling us that God's going to prevent every single thing from going wrong, or from feeling that way. But it paints a bigger backdrop. It paints that, you know what, the circumstances that we endure here do not have the final say. They are not the thing that runs our life. They are not the thing that runs what's going on in the entire world.

And so when we pull the mask back, we're able to see that God is the one who actually has authority, that God is above and beyond, and that even in the midst of when we feel pressured or powerless or in despair, we can have an imagination that sees beyond, and that sees the good news of Jesus in the middle of it. So that's a first key as to how to approach Revelation in a way that maybe removes the confusion, maybe removes the fear, maybe removes the avoidance.

Key two: saturated with Scripture

A second key to unmask Revelation is this: it has a saturated, unbelievably saturated, use of Scripture, quotations and allusions. At first, we look at it and kind of set it aside from the biblical context, but John uses Scripture everywhere. It's hard to imagine a single verse in all of the book that doesn't have either a reference, a direct allusion, or something harmonizing with another place of Scripture. And so almost all the time he's drawing on this.

Eugene Peterson has this quote that we'll put up here. It says, John did not make up his visions of dragons, beasts, harlots, plagues, and horsemen out of his own imagination. The Spirit gave him the images out of the Scriptures that he knew so well. Then he saw their significance in a fresh way. Every line of Revelation is mined out of rich strata of Scripture laid down in the earlier ages.

If you want to become an expert in Revelation, become an expert in the Old Testament. Because the Old Testament is just chock full. You see it so many times. And one of the examples comes from Brian Blount. He's one of the authors who I reference a lot. He wrote a book, Can I Get a Witness?, which is an African American perspective on Revelation. And he notes that the use of the Old Testament is almost like sampling in hip-hop. So John recalls the past, or he brings samples from the Old Testament into the current reality to charge up the new reality, so that we can see how the past plays into it, but points to a future result.

Do we have any Rihanna fans in here? Okay, we've got some Rihanna fans. Great. I don't know much about Rihanna, I've got to be honest, but I know that when Please Don't Stop the Music starts playing, I start moving. And I try not to have the music stop. And she does an example of sampling in that song. When she does the, I always struggle to know exactly how it goes, but it's from Michael Jackson. I'm really white. And I'm trying my hardest to be able to go there. But Wanna Be Startin' Somethin' is where she's drawing from on that song.

I learned this week, I just found this out too, because that image came to my mind, I was like, oh, Michael Jackson actually sampled this from a Cameroonian saxophonist, his song Soul Makossa. I did not know that. That's interesting. It turned into a big legal battle, apparently, which may not be surprising. But for the purposes we have, we're finding that the author of Scripture, the author John, is sampling. He's sampling, he's pulling upon things, just in the same way that hip-hop often samples and pulls upon something from the past, pulls upon another song, pulls upon something else for a purpose, to remind you of it, to bring it into a new way too. That is often what John and the Scripture writers are doing.

And here are a few examples of how John does this. If you've ever heard of the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, and that image has been really scary, it may feel very odd and frightening until you remember that Zechariah talked of horsemen who roamed the earth many centuries earlier. In the book of Zechariah, which we don't usually look at, he's pulling upon these images of these horses which have different colors that come from Zechariah.

We see a lot of earthquakes and hail and locusts and darkness and the stars being rolled up like a scroll, and that all seems very peculiar until you remember the Exodus account. And you see lots of locusts and darkness, and you see hail, and you see earthquakes, or the mountains shaking as the people of God approach Sinai. And so this seems all very scary until you do that. And in the book of Psalms and in Isaiah, we see the sky being rolled up like a scroll, these exact wordings that things are coming from. So they feel very scary to us until we remember. Well, maybe we should go back and look at where they're coming from and see what the context of those was.

Armageddon sounds foreboding and could spiral us into, where's that going to be, and what's going to happen with that battle, until we remember that Armageddon literally translates into Mount of Megiddo, which is at the edge of the Jezreel Valley in the Old Testament, where there are a number of battles that happen. So that's where King Josiah died. That's where Deborah and Barak conquered in Judges. And the reason it became such a battle-concentrated area is because it was where all the highways intersected. And if you know where Israel is, you know that it's the key towards the north, toward Europe. It's the key towards Africa. It's the key towards Asia. It's going to be a key place where you want to go.

It reminds me, if we were talking here in Madison, it would be like if we were talking about the I-90 corridor, where you can go straight to Minneapolis, you can go to Milwaukee, you can go to Chicago, you can go whichever way you want. That's the type of place that we're looking at. So it makes perfect sense why we would draw upon that sort of place to bring about questions or wonderings about a big battle, or a place where good and evil face off. It makes sense why we're drawing on that.

And so throughout the Old Testament, we realize that imagery and symbolism and details are found, and we're just drawing upon references upon references from the Old Testament. And we're invited to meditate on these passages. We're invited to say, God, what are you doing here? Let me look at these places that this is drawing from, and let you continue to speak to me so I can understand what's happening here.

Key three: the surrounding cultural context

A third key to unmask Revelation is this: the surrounding cultural context. Remembering that this was written to a specific people in a specific time, who had cultural reference points, is a clear way to do this. John was writing to seven specific churches, as Pastor Abbie mentioned last week: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. And he makes specific connections and allusions and references. I heard that your reading plan has gone through chapter three this week, and so you may see some of these.

I'm going to go in depth on one of them, Laodicea. It's often one of the best examples to highlight, because in this letter, one of the most well-known images, or things that people talk about, is being lukewarm. So he calls out to them and he says, you all are lukewarm, and so I'll spit you out of my mouth. And usually we hear this and our ears go to Katy Perry's song Hot and Cold. And we have that idea that we input into it, which is like, you're hot and you're cold. I'd rather you be in or you be out. I would rather you hate me and be completely against me than you kind of be interested in me.

I don't know if that's actually what God wants, that God actually would rather have an antichrist than a person who's on their way, on their journey. I get what it's trying to say, but when you think about the context of what's happening in this church, you understand that Laodicea was known for having terrible, lukewarm water. It had a horrible water source in its city that made a person, when they were to drink it, sick, or want to spit it out of their mouth.

Because when we look at the surrounding context, there was a city named Hierapolis, which is over on one side, and there was a city named Colossae, same as Colossians, on another. It would be kind of like if we're thinking about Middleton and Verona, or Middleton and Sun Prairie. We've got these two different cities that surround us. Hierapolis was super well known for having hot springs. If you're a sauna person, or you're someone who wants to enjoy healing through really hot water, that was the place you would have loved to be. Hierapolis had these super mineral-dense hot springs that people would go to for healing, that they'd go to for those warm baths. Colossae was well known for its cold, refreshing springs. It was cold, refreshing springs that were often found there.

And so when Jesus is saying, I'd rather you be hot or cold, he's likely not saying, I'd rather you be all the way out than interested, as much as he's likely saying, you're useless. Your faith is useless. Now, let me say that again. Your faith is useless. We're not going to get into the shame of you're useless. That's not what I meant. Your faith is useless at this moment. It is not hot the way that healing waters would work. It is not cold the way that cold waters are refreshing and have a purpose. Your faith at this moment is not doing anything. It doesn't have a purpose. It doesn't have a function.

The reason why is because Laodicea was very self-sufficient. Their faith was in themselves. Historically, just a few decades before this book was written, there was a massive earthquake, which, by the way, there were earthquakes all over this region, and we see a lot of earthquakes in Revelation, that destroyed their city a few decades earlier. And the Roman Empire came to them and said, we will help you rebuild your city. And they said, no, we're good. They said, we have enough money on our own. We don't need your help, Roman Empire, to build our city. They said, we don't need anything.

They had lots of money. They were known for being a banking center. They had their own mint that would create coins. They were known for having this black wool textile clothing that would make them all sorts of money, and it was clothing that people would come around for. And they're also known for having a medical school that focused on ophthalmology, on eyes. There was an eye salve that they would make, that they would give to other people, that other people would come and pay money for to help fix their eyes. And so in light of all these cultural context points, I'm going to reread the letter to Laodicea real quick, and just see if you pick up on anything related to that.

“To the angel of the church in Laodicea write: These are the words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the ruler of God’s creation. I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth. You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. Those whom I love I rebuke and discipline. So be earnest and repent. Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me. To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne. Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”

Revelation 3:14-22 (NIV)

Do we see the cultural context coming out? Do you see that it's possible? And what I think is really beautiful too is in the introduction to these, often in many of these, Jesus talks about how he knows them. He knows who they are. He knows where they are. And so this is where it just gets me so excited. It gets me so pumped, that Jesus would be communicating and offering this vision that through this author would be able to be shared, to speak directly to the unique circumstances of each church. And also in so many of these things we see a Scripture that is combined with it, that is kind of playing off Scripture and cultural context to make a point.

One of the earlier things I referenced and saw was that in a different one of the churches, there was another sort of medical place where people would go for healing. But that medical place was a hospital that was devoted to a specific god. And so people would go to that specific place and they'd say, would you please help heal me? But they would have to offer sacrifices, and they'd have to potentially sleep with a temple priestess. They'd have to do different things that would go against their faith journey, in order to declare allegiance to this god for their healing. And what they would do then is, if you did receive healing, you would have a white stone, and you would write your name and the way you were healed on it. If you've been following along with your reading plan, you may recognize that there was a white stone with a name written on it by God, given to the people in this exact church.

God knew and knows those folks, and I believe he says the same thing to New Culture. I don't know what he's saying to you right now. I don't know what he's got on your heart, but God knows and sees all of you. He sees you as a church. He sees you as individuals, and God has something to say to you all. Christ has something to say to each and every one of you, to bring you out, to let you know that he knows you. He sees the exact situations you are each going through. He knows you, he sees you, and he has something to say. That wasn't in my notes, so I'll go back to there.

And in addition to these things from Laodicea, the churches and audience of the day were facing a whole slew of other pressures as well. These were real people with real families, real church dynamics, real jobs, as citizens within a real empire. And that empire was built on things like conquest and emperor worship. These rulers made political and economic decisions that affected their livelihood. If you've ever felt like your livelihood has been affected by political rulers or decisions made elsewhere, you can relate with the people here. These things created real-life pressures, which left them with fears and anxieties and uncertainties, confusion and dilemmas, and the temptation to become apathetic, their faith on a collision course with the surrounding context.

Let me just share a few other things about what these folks were going through. Each person in these churches was living within a non-Christian, pagan Roman Empire, and one of their main ways to demand allegiance, their main ways to make folks go along with them and their political agenda, was a cult of emperor worship. This historically has been shown very deeply: there was a need to display your loyalty to the empire, and to emperor worship, by in some way worshiping the empire and worshiping the emperor in particular. The emperor at this time, Domitian, enforced his divinity by law, and demanded to be addressed by the divine title, our Lord and God, Domitian. Something we see contrasted in Revelation, where we see something that says a little bit different. And denying the emperor's divinity was like not bowing to Nebuchadnezzar's image. Denying the emperor's divinity was like not bowing to Nebuchadnezzar's image.

And often participation and advancement in society in this time, in economics, in citizenship, in politics and civic engagement, were focused there, and you could advance if you accommodated the way of emperor worship. You were able to advance in life. You were able to advance in the ways that you could grow and participate by doing that. There was a specific thing that each of these cities would have been known as, which is being called neokoros cities. What that essentially just means is that if you were a neokoros city, you were given money and funding because you were setting up a temple to the emperor to be worshiped. And oftentimes you got to uplift that emperor worship cult in your city and sanctuary. And so if anybody in the community is not doing that, they are no longer good for the community.

Think about it that way. If we were all forced to honor or display worship to someone other than Christ here, and if we didn't do that, we were seen as a threat to the good of the community, because our funding depended on it, our status with the empire depended on it, our people might be hurt by a political authority if we all don't do this. It puts us in a really different position, to think as Christians, what do you do in that situation? How do we respond? Because the church and the state appeared to be on a collision course. And the state appeared to be winning. Christians were experiencing persecution. Christians were experiencing political pressure and community pressure to do what they were told they should do.

What is the apocalypse trying to unmask?

And that brings us to our second question to answer today. What's the core message of Revelation? What is the apocalypse trying to unmask? As we head towards wrapping up here, what is the apocalypse trying to unmask for this group of readers who face pressures, temptations, dilemmas, fears, and confusion? What is it that there needs to be a prophetic imagination to see, in the midst of the things that they are going through?

I'm going to read what we encounter right after him telling all the people, I know you, I see you, I see what you're going through, I know the difficulty that you're going through. And it says this in Revelation chapter 4:2 through 5:14:

At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and ruby. A rainbow that shone like an emerald encircled the throne. Surrounding the throne were twenty-four other thrones, and seated on them were twenty-four elders. They were dressed in white and had crowns of gold on their heads. From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder. In front of the throne, seven lamps were blazing. These are the seven spirits of God. Also in front of the throne there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal. In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle. Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night they never stop saying: “ ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,’ who was, and is, and is to come.” Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne and worship him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne and say: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.”

Revelation 4:2-11 (NIV)

At once I was in the Spirit, and there before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it. And the one who sat there had the appearance of jasper and ruby. A rainbow that shone like an emerald encircled the throne. Surrounding the throne were twenty-four other thrones, and seated on them were twenty-four elders. They were dressed in white and had crowns of gold on their heads. From the throne came flashes of lightning, rumblings and peals of thunder. In front of the throne, seven lamps were blazing. These are the seven spirits of God. Also in front of the throne there was what looked like a sea of glass, clear as crystal. In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying eagle. Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night they never stop saying: “ ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,’ who was, and is, and is to come.” Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne and worship him who lives for ever and ever. They lay their crowns before the throne and say: “You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being.”

Revelation 4:2-11 (NIV)

And then we see, right from there, that the Lion of Judah is called out, and they are asking who is worthy, and it is the Lamb, Jesus, the slaughtered Lamb, who steps forward. Not the one who has the authority in our earthly world, not the person who demands through violence, through conquest, not the one who demands our loyalty and our allegiance through ways of forcing economics on us, or through ways of making us into their own image. But we see a slaughtered Lamb is the one who has the authority, who is the one who is worthy, who is the one who has power. The way of the slaughtered Lamb. As we said last week, the Lamb is the one who has authority in this world.

If you are seeing a situation in which the powers and rulers of this world look like they have control, like they pull the strings, they are not the ones that pull the strings. What we see is the one who has authority in this world, the one who has authority over your situation right now, the one who has authority over the things that you have gone through, the one who has authority over the situations that have left you feeling despair and darkness, the places where you feel like you have to manipulate in order to receive love, in order to receive a way forward, where you think, I have to treat this god like I have to appease it, whether it's finances, whether it's anything like that. Those things do not have control over you, and they do not have control over this earth, and they do not have control over the destiny of where we are headed.

We are headed to a place where there is a slaughtered Lamb who died on a Friday and rose again on a Sunday, a slaughtered Lamb who has blood maybe dripping down, but has risen again and risen up and is freeing you and me from any place that would hold us down in despair and darkness. The authorities and the powers, the rulers of this world, when the curtain is pulled back, have no power. The throne room stands in contrast to the power that they would even claim to have.

Pull back the curtain

And so as you leave today, I want to encourage you in two ways. In the places where you have felt fearful, confused, or avoidant of Revelation, may the keys we've talked about help you approach it with fresh eyes, to see it as God's Word for you. And if there's something that has left you feeling pressured or overcome, fearful, confused, or avoidant in general in this life, the same way these churches felt, where they were wrestling with that, may you unmask and pull back the curtain to see that God's power and authority is found in the slaughtered Lamb, worthy of your worship and allegiance. Amen.

I would ask if Nathan would come up here. If you want to respond and have someone with you in prayer, Nathan will be available to pray with you. But can we just take a moment, and can we go into a time of just inviting the Lord to show us? Even as Tyler said, he's speaking to us. He has something for us as a church and as individuals. Just say that we welcome the Holy Spirit to speak to us in this moment as individuals, to show us what he wants to show us. And so we can just invite the Holy Spirit, and if you want someone to pray with you, to help you to just see Jesus.

So Holy Spirit, we just thank you for the Word that has been spoken to us and over us, and we receive it. And we continue to welcome you now, in this moment, to show us specifically how you want us to respond, how we need to receive you, how we need to receive you as King, as Lord, as Comforter, as the one who [inaudible]