Disciple Bible Study 28, Revelation Part III

But I do want to ask what's on your mind.

As you read this again, as we dialed down, I I know that there were some images they gave us to circle back to, like eating the scroll, they had it circle back to Ezekiel, for example, which may or may not have been meaningful for you, but I just as always want to see where the readings took you this week.

If there was new insight, if there were things that bothered you, if you're trying to crack a code and figure out the application of this, if the video did something for you, whether you agreed or disagreed.

So apocalyptic?

Apocalyptic.

Like Daniel.

Like Daniel.

What do you say?

The Bible uses women to legitimize disgusting evil.

Thank you for saying that.

Vice and virtue in the same bit, right?

Well I have that virtue.

You don't have that virtue.

You don't yeah, you can.

There is that split always, I guess.

Very, very extreme though, right?

Sedu seductress or or virgin.

The woman shows up in here that's good, right?

There's the pregnant lady.

Reminded me, actually, in Australia.

They uh they talked about that in their society.

You're either a virgin or a or.

Well that's absolutely, I don't care what um the sexual revolution, how bad or good we think that is, has not made that transition for us still.

Right?

Because men are completely considered by a different standard.

Right.

Completely.

And there is, for example, no such thing as a man whore.

In fact, that's like a a thing.

The word man whore is like a joke.

This will be I don't know if you've heard that phrase before.

It's a um a generational word.

I think maybe you would hear it from people like 45 and younger, but again, it's a joke.

Because men categorically cannot be whores.

Which is crazy.

What's the difference between a man whore and a gigolo?

Nothing.

They're both funny.

I mean, let's just be honest, right?

American gigolo is about a very attractive man who turns out to be a poor actor, who has loose scruples, and he's sowing his wild oats.

But women should know better, and they have to protect their chastity from man whores who get accepted, but the women who are the objects, frankly, of sexual harassment are the ones judged when they get raped.

What's crazy is a woman who is sexually active is a whore, and a man who is sexually active is celebrated.

Natural.

That's right.

In fact, a man who's not sexually active is to be pitied, right?

Whereas a woman who's sexually active is to be pitied.

So not only is a double standard, it's a bizarre double standard.

And I I'm suspicious that part of the cultural judgment against gay men has to do with them being sexually active with each other, which is not supposed, that somehow undermines masculinity.

Which is crazy.

Many people are much more bothered with gay men than they are with lesbians.

I don't know if you realize this, but I think it has to do with this bizarre bit about um masculine roles.

Is that because in general, throughout the world, probably it may not have always been the case, but it certainly has been in, I'll say, modern times, let's say from BC, uh from um um what would I say, C E and on.

You've been a patriarchal society worldwide.

Yeah, I think that's relatively fair to say, right, with the exception of elephants, that's still pretty much true.

Yeah.

But I think it's really helpful to say that there's quite a bit of patriarchy even in the animal world, uh, and it amounts to an animal's dominance, right?

Um well if they in many cases in the animal world, they are simply physically much bigger, much bigger.

I mean, in the in in our world, men physically are bigger, but they there's because of this, um, that doesn't necessarily play such a big role as it does, I think, in the animal world.

But this is why I think there's something really hard throughout the entire Bible of finding actually affirmative images of women.

I think it's really difficult.

Um and I I think when we preach scripture, there's a sacred story, but then because it's written in you know cultural terms, I I think it becomes really important for us to think about how do we use these scriptures.

I mean, how do we use them as we consider our daughters and wives and women in general?

And I would tell you honestly, the prayer book is written entirely in masculine terms.

If if you're looking, if you're a woman and you're looking for mention of women in the prayer book, you won't find yourself mentioned at all.

It's always mankind and he and his.

Now I know many women say, well, when I hear that, I just think that's everybody.

But it linguistically isn't.

See, I try to mess with the prayer book.

I do.

Like I print it like it's written, but I don't say it that way.

And if we're ever doing a psalm, I make it gender neutral even though it wasn't written that way, because we're praying the psalms.

I don't do that with the scriptures because we don't pray those, we listen to them.

But um it's it's it's an interesting thing, you know?

It's interesting.

My daughter, we we we try really hard to say boys can do most things girls can do, but she's starting to say they let girls blank.

They let girls blank.

Men don't need permission.

Women do.

This is crazy.

And I think that becomes an ongoing thing for us to circle back to.

Where do you think she gets it?

Because she's not getting it at home.

She's appears.

Yeah, how are you going to avoid that message in movies?

Oh, yeah.

So think about Disney movies.

It's always women in trouble and a man saves them.

The exception is frozen, where like the men are like relatively incompetent and evil.

Um, but those early types, cartoons, they also portray that violence solves problems.

I mean, this is what we've decided.

We raise our kids thinking there's a problem, you gotta fight it out, and women need men's help.

And then you know, you look at ads, and women are much more sexualized.

That's changing a little bit, but women are much more sexualized than men.

So how can you keep someone from that?

She also goes to, I listen, I think we're a good school.

But here we are, you know.

His thing about Christ is against culture, he's borrowing from a book that um Richard Nieber wrote called Christ and Culture.

And uh he sort of says, is Christ against culture?

Is Christ revealed through culture?

Does Christ transform culture?

These are some of the options in his book.

And he picks the latter, and I think he's wrong.

I I like to listen to different people, but I think he's wrong because I don't think the book says the world is going through the black hole of death and destruction.

I think the book concludes that the new Jerusalem is to be on earth, not in heaven, and that we're invited to live into the new Jerusalem now.

I mean, there's phrases in there, right?

Like I we read one this week that the earth belongs to the Lamb.

The Lamb will reign on earth, not up in the sky somewhere.

I think that's a very world affirmative phrase, and obviously we're wondering how that rain is going to play out because it hasn't been done yet, if that makes sense.

We're living in between um the ministry of Jesus and the completion of the ministry of Jesus.

We're somewhere in between.

I don't know that I said anything helpful.

I appreciate your observation.

And I think we just struggle with it in every single book.

When we read Proverbs and Ruth and Esther uh agreed with you then too.

And uh read uh Elaine Pagel's stuff, because she's always good.

But um the the the disciples that gave Mary and Magdalene a strong role in the relationship with Christ and relationship with the other apostles.

Um people who wrote the final Bible chose the final Bible with the command and read.

And uh Luke and um, I forgot who else.

And when I was a child, I loved reading history, but for some reason I remember that women were not held as men's equals.

And you could have you're a good friend without being a man because a woman could not uh match up.

And so it was Luke and Mark and somebody else that shows the verses that went into the apocalypse or that in the Bible, and they're the ones that did not give Mary Magdalene any uh equality with Christ, her relationship with Christ.

I didn't know about all that.

I I actually would kind of resist that interpretation.

I think the Gospels show that women are all around Jesus, especially Luke.

And in in every gospel, the first witnesses to the resurrection are women.

And I I may have tried to preach on this on Easter.

Um it's interesting that even in the Gospels, the women come back and the men consider their story an idle tale.

Young people liked what you said there.

I said when I sent your uh podcast to my son, I said there was one phrase in there that was really interesting.

So when you said that Jesus first appeared to a woman.

He's quite right.

I mean, again, that's how the story goes.

But the future books, like the book of Thomas, those books, well, Peter repudiated Mary, you know, in some of the books.

He said, Why was Christ speaking to you and you shouldn't do it?

Yeah, like in Thomas, and Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas that a woman can be saved if she becomes like a man.

Yeah, okay.

I just thought that was interesting because I didn't hadn't read that before.

I think this is why you know there's there are feminists who have tried to introduce, they've tried to say, no, the Bible does this for women, and then there are women like Mary Daly who calls herself post-Christian that says there is no saving women in this book.

So I'm no longer this.

I'm something other.

Um I don't know the answer to that.

I will tell you, I'm related to somebody who is probably post-Christian because she doesn't find herself in the scriptures in any affirmative way.

She doesn't.

And maybe I've stuck with it because I'm a man and not a woman.

I don't know the answer, um, but I think in some ways it becomes really important for us to sort of uh challenge the inherent, not just patriarchal bias, but the hierarchical bias that we find here.

It's an interesting discussion in view of the fact that on our on my way here, I was listening halfway listening to an interview, and they were discussing the fact that, and this is not political, this is, but they were discussing the fact that female candidates for president are judged entirely and discussed entirely differently from male.

I mean, there was just a discussion of the fact that if you're a woman and you run for president, how you're judged is entirely different from men.

And I didn't get too far with it because I'm not here, so I'd be interested in hearing the rest of their discussion.

But yeah, it's you know, I'll make a comment, and that's that I think as we move into a world where physical strength is of less importance when it comes to just life success, um the not only are is equality between men and women uh uh being achieved, but I think, you know, when you when you look at college these days, the majority of students in college are women, they're not men.

Um by by uh you know a certainly significant amount.

And I and I spent you know 36 years working as an engineer, and uh and if you look at the school I went to, if you look back at the graduation um pictures, and they took a graduation picture of every class all the way back to the 40s, if you look at them, you never see occasionally you saw a woman, but when you started in the 70s, uh gosh, in my class there were 140 of us, and I'll bet 40 anyway were women.

And I think that it's a lot more equal these days.

And so I think my point is when this is what counts, um I don't I I see equality and maybe even um um uh a uh a less equality uh for men, if you go.

That's not what I mean, but but stop talking now.

Before then, women weren't considered as smart as me.

They didn't take into account their brain, they're intellect.

And then they were too emotional, they couldn't handle things.

Yeah, but I'm gonna tell you, I don't think that's changed entirely.

I mean it's improved, but yeah, right.

And I think there's also this this deal again, like you can say, you know, I try really hard to raise my daughter to not internalize these messages, but how are you gonna do that?

I mean it's I I just I think it's really it's really difficult to think about this, because I would tell you my mother would say that you know she wasn't really discriminated against in her work because she's a woman, and I think like views like that is what allows it to continue, uh, quite honestly, because women are socialized, and so like there's this terminology that's been come back to my head recently, the difference between your authentic self and your adaptive self.

So we have to adapt our kids to function and to be safe.

We have to teach them rules like look both ways before you cross the street.

That's an adaptation, right?

We need them to learn that for their safety.

Of course, there's not just those rules, but there's how we teach those rules.

So we can say, like, exploring your body is something, you know, is great, let's do that in private.

Or we can say, oh my god, don't touch yourself there.

Right?

So we got the similar goal about safety and public thing.

I think that goal under undergirds both phrases, but the methodology of doing it is completely different and changes the way you relate to your body as you make this adaptation.

Um so I think that the the adapted self for women, I mean I don't I don't know how we change how we do that, but that seems to be really critical to me.

And part of it is I think this this recognition that our language is inherently biased, right?

In Spanish, if there's a hundred men and one woman, the group is referred to in the masculine.

I did I said that wrong.

If there's a hundred women and one man, it's an entirely masculine group.

Linguistically, we've sort of accepted that.

Again, we still say things like mankind and pretend like that includes women, and that's crazy.

Uh sorry, I just I think that's crazy because it's so much easier to say humankind.

It's an easy adaptation, right?

It it it is clearly much more inclusive.

Um, we have way different standards about you know um things like pregnancy and sexuality.

We've talked about that already.

So um I I I think while this is tangential to what we've read, I I think it is tangential, which means it touches what we've read and it's important.

And consider then in this book, the one the two women who show up are Jezebel the whore and a woman who gives birth to the baby.

Because that's what women do.

They have kids, which is virtuous, or they're whores, but they don't open scrolls, right?

They didn't do that, and they don't uh write down books and they don't see visions, not here.

We find that in some other places, right?

But this woman does a good thing because she has a good man baby, and I think it's worth challenging that, right?

Because again, this still exists today in our culture.

A woman is uh more important if she has a baby and boy babies are to be preferred.

Oh my god, is it true?

Yes, it is.

In China, in China as well, where where where where they had the the one child uh rule and and and girls are thrown in the river.

Well, what they were they were aborted to ensure that the next child would be aborted.

And I do now the problem is that there's so many boys, there are no women, and many of the women in China have no interest in these guys.

And so they're going outside of China to marry a woman.

We'll see the consequence of this play out, but I don't, but I don't, as much as things are changing, the truth is there's a long way to go.

A long way to go, uh, and and we gotta figure that out.

Um I want to come back to Lila's comment though, because I think there's a lot of things in this book that are easy to like throw our hands up at.

Remember that an apocalypse means to unveil.

So it's very tempting to read this and say, God, this is all veiled to me.

This makes things more confusing.

The point is to make things more clear.

And I think what we get weighed down on is our tendency to think really hard about literalism, and this matches that.

Oh, the abomination that causes desolation, that is this one specific moment in history.

I think whenever we read the Bible that way, we make a like a categorical mistake, right?

Gene Robinson says that we need to read the Bible so too seriously to take it literally.

And I think this is right.

So, this book, I think, is what it's trying to unveil, is not necessarily.

I think it's tied to historical events, but I didn't think it's Trying to make a historical commentary as much as it is trying to unveil what's going on beneath the surface of things.

Did you repeat what you said a second ago?

Take the Bible so take the Bible too seriously to take it literally.

Too seriously to take it literally.

So I want to talk about the slain lamb for a second, because we just came off a Passover in Easter.

Okay?

It's a weird symbol to imagine like this lamb walking around with like a mortal wind in its neck.

And it's very easy for us to think, oh, because Jesus is the Passover lamb offered for our sins.

And again, I think it's really important.

The Passover lamb has nothing to do with your sins.

Nothing.

Zero.

If you were here on Monday, Thursday, you heard what I'm getting ready to say already, but I want to unpack this symbol.

The only people who can kill animals are priests.

You take the animal to the priest, they say a prayer, like, God, we know killing's wrong, but uh we're going to do this so that we can be nourished by the animal.

The priest burns up the fat.

Um, there's nothing you can't eat.

I mean, you can't eat the genitals of any animal.

And then you pour the blood out onto the ground, right?

Because the blood has the life force or the qi, and you can't consume that and get the animal's powers.

You have to pour it into the earth because it's not yours.

I this might sound strange, but again, it's really important.

In England and Ireland and in Africa, people eat blood all the time, but in the ancient Near East, whether you're Muslim or Jewish, you don't.

And the prohibition against blood is it's got the chakra or the qi or the life force, and you can't have it.

So anytime there's a sin offering, I mean, by the way, the sin offering is on Yom Kippur.

That's when the priest does two things, kills a heifer, and sprinkles the blood on the people one time a year, but more importantly, lays their hands upon the scapegoat and drives it away and does not kill it.

Anytime you've got an animal you want to kill, you've got to take it to a priest, except on Passover.

On Passover, each family kills its own lamb.

What do they do with the blood?

They put it on the door post in the story to show they haven't consumed it.

They're showing they're being faithful to God's command, and that's how God knows who's listening and who's not.

It's a dreadful story, by the way, that God goes around murdering people who don't do this.

I think it's dreadful.

But I want to go back to the symbol, right?

The Passover lamb is not a sin offering because the priest didn't kill it.

The Passover lamb is a problem because you're getting ready to go on a big journey through the desert and you don't want to take a lot of sheep.

And B, you're getting ready to go on a big journey across the desert.

You're gonna need energy.

These people did not eat meat every day, they ate meat four or five times a year.

So this is the time that they're going to load up on calories.

They're all amateur slaughterers.

I mean, this the text makes it clear.

That's why you burn up everything that's left over.

Um, priests probably are good butchers.

You roast that lamb, you kill the lamb, you eat it, you go on the journey.

So, when Jesus on on Maundy Thursday takes the bread and the wine and says, This is my body and my blood, we could think he's making a cannibal image and we're supposed to consume the literal body and blood of Jesus.

Or we could say, We're on a faith journey.

God would like us to leave the slavery that we find ourselves in.

We will need energy for that.

And here comes the energy for your spirit.

It's in the life of Jesus, and this is really important.

It's not in the blood of Jesus or the death, it's in the life.

He says, every time you eat bread, remember me.

Well, they ate bread three times a day.

Every time you drink wine three times a day, at least twice, remember me.

And be nourished by my life, not my death.

This is really important.

We often think sacrifice means kill something, and it doesn't mean that.

Sacrifice means to make something holy.

A police officer or a firefighter does not have to die to go into a burning building and save somebody.

We would still say, what a sacrifice.

Just being an officer or being a teacher, we might say, is a sacrifice.

So I think it's helpful to think of it that way.

So when you hear the slain lamb, okay, he's the Passover lamb, but was he sacrificed for sin, or does he offer to nourish you on your journey?

It really I mean I've never I've always been bothered by this image.

I've always thought a sacrifice is something that you are you are you are either giving or is being taken, not taken away.

Um if somebody goes into a burning building and they die uh trying to save somebody, or they save somebody but they end up dying, that's a sacrifice.

I don't see them as being sacrificial if they make it out alive.

You don't?

How about when you give somebody a gift?

Is that a sacrifice?

It's a sacrifice if I needed part of that gift, or that gift causes me to be unfull.

So then I want I think we really need to redefine the word to mean what it means.

Uh a sacrifice is to make something holy, like to make something extraordinary.

And this is this is the way I've always I've interpreted it.

Yeah.

You know, if if if if if a soldier runs up a hill and saves uh a few people, he's wounded and dies, that's a sacrifice.

If he doesn't die, that's not a sacrifice.

He's a hero, but he didn't sacrifice.

But he is sacrificing his life to go.

And he was lucky enough to make it back.

I mean, just like he was willing to go.

The sacrifice is that he lost his life.

I I think I think you're right that that's how we use the word, and that's why I want us to redefine it, because I think that use is too constrictive to capture what the Bible is actually talking about.

Now, listen, I've got my own daughter.

I'm talking about my own daughter, but I sacrificed a lot of sleep to have a daughter.

I didn't die.

That wasn't a butt and I gave it up.

You gave up something.

And of course, implicit in having a child is you're going to make that transaction, but I still think it's a sacrifice.

I'm not arguing whether I'm right or wrong.

I'm just saying this is the way you've always thought of it.

I think you're you're saying the dominant use of the word, and that's why I want to push it, because I think if that's the only way we do it, we come to this text and we're reading it in a way it would not have been read.

Sacrifice, frankly, is when I share some of my life so someone else can have more.

That could be that I give a gift, it could be that I wake up in the middle of the night for a sleeping baby, it could be that I do something like public service.

But you are still whole afterwards.

Um, I may not be.

I mean, I would tell you.

I could be.

I could be, I could be.

But in but in some ways, I've shared some of my life.

And I think the quintessential image of this comes from Elizabethan, England, and it's the mother pelican poking herself in the breast to share her blood with her babies if there's no food.

She doesn't do it to death.

If the mother pelican kills herself, her children will all starve and be eaten.

But she does share her life so that they can live.

I think that is a really critical anchor for sacrifice, sharing our life so other people can have some more.

If that makes sense.

If no one's getting life, don't do it.

It's called masochism, not sacrifice.

I really think that's right.

So Jesus sacrifices his life by giving up some of it so we can have more.

Giving up some of it.

Like but not all.

I mean, could be all, but the criterion is it doesn't have to be all, could be some.

Right?

So it's basically kind of the transfer of life from point A to point B.

Yeah.

And it could be all or some.

I I think the fact that we've just talked about women's issue is a great thing to say.

When I'm around somebody who's makes a blonde joke and I say, I find that categorically offensive, I just gave something up.

What could you give up?

My male privilege I gave up.

I don't have to.

It probably ain't gonna kill me because as a man I've got lots of privilege I can give up.

You know?

But it's a sacrifice to confront a cultural norm and say that's not okay.

Which is why we often don't do it.

We often prefer to be silent because we feel like that way I didn't contribute to it.

And listen, I'm including myself.

I often just I don't want to make a scene, I don't want to make some uncomfortable, they didn't really mean it like their words meant.

These are the things we we we we do, and of course, you can't go around all the time.

I I really don't think you can do this.

Go all the wrong time correcting other people and standing up to everything.

I think if you start to do that, you kind of lose yourself.

And and I believe that uh because the well it's important for me to be a priest and not a deacon.

If I were a deacon, that's all I would ever do is think about social injustice and it would never be enough.

And I know this because I've lived that life a little bit.

The deacon's call is to represent the marginalized to the church and vice versa, and that's it.

The priest's job is to do reconciliation.

So we need to do both.

I need to do both.

Because if I only do the one thing, I I just tell you I lose I I can't, I can't, because it's never enough for me.

Like if I move somebody's house that needs, then I start thinking, oh my god, like what about the other people?

Instead of what a good thing we did, I think more, more, more, more.

So that that's not good for me.

That was maybe a strange aside.

I know it does, it's not part of this discussion, but I don't I don't understand reconciliation.

I don't think anybody does.

I'm not sure I do either.

I don't know what it means exactly.

I mean, I can read the definition, but in terms of what is it?

I think it actually is I think it is extremely germane biblically, and so I think the one thing to say is reconciliation biblically has very little to do with forgiveness.

They're completely different things.

Forgiveness is when I stop living in a past event so that I can be present.

It has nothing to do with anything my oppressor did to me, whether I forgive them, it really has very little to do with them.

It has to do with the way I orient my life.

I think Anne Lamont says it really well, and I continue to circle back.

She says, forgiveness is giving up all hope of having had a different past.

Which sort of really means I accept the past so I can be present.

One of my good therapists introduced the 90-10 rule, which says when I've got intense emotion, 90% of it is residual, and only 10% is from what actually happened.

Because I'm carrying all this baggage.

So forgiveness is about upping the 10%.

But what's reconciliation?

So reconciliation is this interesting thing.

I can I can forgive somebody who hurt me and not have a future with them because their forgiveness is about the present, right?

So I can come to terms, for example, with being abused by my uncle.

I was not abused by my uncle.

I can come to terms with that and never see my uncle again, and I've lived into forgiveness.

Reconciliation is where I pursue a future with my uncle.

And reconciliation takes two parties who are willing.

If one person says, I want a future with you, and the other is like, ah, it ain't gonna happen.

If the other one says, hell no, it's definitely not gonna happen, right?

So reconciliation, I think, is really the kind of justice God has in mind, where not only does the victim forgive the oppressor, but there's a future for them together.

It's the hardest one because you have to be mutually vulnerable.

I mean, you're gonna get hurt again, you could get hurt again, which is why I can't be reconciled with certain people.

I refuse to be vulnerable with them again.

And that means I can forgive them and be invulnerable.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

And so um I don't know.

I'm not going to tell people that they have to pursue reconciliation, but what I think is really important, at least to be open to, is if I can't do it, fine, but God's going to do it for me after I die.

And sometimes I don't like that, because I don't even want God to reconcile me with people in heaven.

I don't.

But I but I think that's what the people who really have the creative edge, be they this guy or Isaiah.

I mean, when when Isaiah talks about the bear lying down with the calf, he's talking about reconciliation of natural enemies.

And that's God's plan, and God's going to accomplish it in God's holy city, the new Jerusalem on earth.

Maybe not while I live, maybe I've got to be dead for God to do it.

I think that undergirds part of this book, though, you know, that that image about reconciliation.

Because again, notice the New Jerusalem is here, not in some other dimension.

And there's gonna be gates that are open all the time to people coming in.

We read about that a little bit.

And I I want to caution us against reading that Jesus is the slain lamb because he took our spanking.

Instead, I think we have this, I think, very biblically based opportunity here.

Jesus is a slain lamb because he shared his life with us for our journey.

I hope that makes sense.

So Lila, I think coming back to like why this is fitful is because I don't want to say we need you to be master decoders, but I think sometimes what we've done is we've got like really wooden holds on some of these poetic phrases that work against us.

Like super hard.

Like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, those are real people, and it's gonna happen that there's first there's gonna be this white rider who's gonna go around slaying people, then there'll be pestilence.

I mean, take a look at the news.

Sorry, the four horsemen of the apocalypse are represented every day in the news poverty and disease and war.

I mean, that's happening all the time.

So we could try to say, oh no, this is that one event.

This is like the Barcopa rebellion, or this is about the Jerusalem event.

And sure, I think it could be anchored in things like that, but isn't this unveiling a reality?

What's interesting when we read this book is there's all this like punishment, like whoa, whoa, whoa, that God's doing this stuff.

But I'm gonna tell you, I think one way to read this book, and and the phrase is really clear after the um sixth seal, or is it the sixth trumpet?

I think it's the sixth trumpet.

The sixth trumpet.

Uh a third of mankind's I just said that.

Well, it is it doesn't say mankind, maybe the women survive.

A third of humanity's killed, and there's these monstrous like 200 million horses and riders and stuff, and still people don't repent.

So I think one way to hear this book is that we're met, you can say God imposes them.

I would tell you, we're met with the natural consequences of our actions every single day, and we say how terrible we don't do anything different.

How terrible that children are starving.

And listen, as a world, we don't do anything different.

How terrible that women are raped, we don't do anything different.

I think the book is pretty descriptive, Lila, of what's actually happening instead of saying, here's this future and this bizarre code.

I think it describes us very, very well.

Really good.

Really good.

Really it's helpful?

Yeah, it really is helpful, yeah.

How many people in that era, because their lives were limited by what they could see and hear and everything.

Tell me about all those numbers.

Oh, I don't think those numbers are real numbers at all.

Somebody later on a letter?

No, I think there's a I think there's this thing, and it's called either gematria or numerology.

And you know, if you know anything about um Kabbalah, that's like mystical Judaism, it's all anchored on these numbers uh that like numbers have this repres representation because in Hebrew the number one is the same as the first letter of the alephbait.

So the number one is alef, the first letter of their alphabet, and the number two is bait.

So when you like take numbers, then you can spell new words, and this is like in documents called like the Bible code, and sure enough, there's symbolic numbers that show up all the time.

Like 12, right?

There's 12 tribes of Israel, and there's 12 disciples.

Now, really, there's more than 12, let's be honest, because there's all these women that are there, and then Judas dies, he's one of the 12, but they need a 12th guy, so they've got a pool of people they can pick from.

There's at least 14, because they can pick between Mattathias and Bar Sabbath, they can pick.

The way they pick is they cast lots, right?

But so so I mean, there's a there's a you've got your starting 12, but you've got a bench, you know.

I mean, but the importance is the number 12 is this a symbolic number.

And what the number seven, oh my gosh, like everything is in sevens here, is the symbol of completeness because it's actually two threes.

And in Hebrew, the number seven is the word Shabbat, which is the Sabbath.

Right?

So it's really, really um worn into the narrative.

Uh 144,000 happens to be 12 times 12 times a thousand.

Complete.

A thousand times complete.

Now, if you're a Jehovah's Witness, you believe that literally only 144,000 people are gonna make it into heaven.

Because heaven's that small.

And I don't derive them, but I think this book is not about heaven being small.

I think it's about being huge.

And so 144,000, if it's literal, I mean, you you gotta compete against your fellow Jehovah's Witnesses to get in because they could edge you out.

They could be a better witness than you.

And I'm pretty sure this book is actually discouraging us against competing with one another.

Because that just seems wrong.

I'm a better Christian than you, so I can make it into heaven.

Oh my god, Megfug the hungry the hungry this weekend.

I'd better go clothe a leper.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is when we do it exactly wrong.

So again, if instead of it being a literal number that's quite small, when you think about there being seven billion people in the world, 12 is complete, 12 times 12 is like complete square, and then put triple zeros behind you is huge.

When Jesus says, for example, Peter says, How many should I times such a spring of my brother?

Up to seven times, and Jesus says, No, like seven times seventy.

I don't think he's saying count that number of times.

I think he's saying way more than you thought you could.

Yeah.

Like limitlessly.

You've got to remember these people didn't have like an education of any kind and they only lived to be 30.

Most of these people are illiterate.

I don't mean illiterate people can't count, but they didn't have arithmetic skills like we're inculcated in us in the first grade, where we're having to learn multiplication tables and use abacuses and calculators.

I mean, again, the numbers show up over and over and over again, these particular number patterns.

So are they real or are they meant to tell us something about the inner nature of things?

24 thrones.

Well, you got 12 disciples and you got 12 um kids of Jacob.

So there you go.

Maybe.

I mean, again, there's there's I just think there's opportunities like that.

You do you notice why we use um incense in church?

It shows up in here.

It's the prayers of the saints.

Answers before God, and what rises before God are the prayers of the saints, and that's our justification for a pagan practice in church.

Our prayers rise like that, and they have this pleasing odor.

Lots of other things.

We talked about this last time, right?

But there's this war in heaven between Michael and God's angels, and the dragon, who's also called Satan and the devil, and those angels.

Reminder.

We can think about halo people, but they weren't thinking about halo people.

The halo thing comes way later, right?

The wing-end beautiful men or babies.

That's later than this.

Angel in Greek means messenger.

So you get to pick.

These are messengers of God.

And reminder, Satan means accuser, devil, diabolos means slanderer.

So these are messengers of God confronting messages of slander.

And I don't know if you notice, there's this interesting thing where the dragon flew into the earth and is now going to slander the saints.

And the text says that.

Slander the saints.

Because that's what the devil means.

Slander.

We've held on to this devil as this red thing so much that we've missed what devil even means.

The Bible doesn't make devil with a capital D, it makes Diabolos with a small D.

And that just means accusation.

Libel.

Gossip.

Accuser.

Accuser.

And I think again, just to go back to the language I used, accusation is that the adaptive self is more important than the authentic self.

And we give into that all the time.

I mean, think about how many people hate their bodies.

If you were asked what's one thing you could change about your body, and you've got an answer, you've got to work on yourself.

Does that make sense what I'm saying?

I've got an answer for that.

I doubt that there are very many people who don't have an answer.

Yeah, and you knew why?

It's because we've we've taught them to hate their bodies.

My daughter has nothing she despises about her body so far.

She knows not to do this publicly, but boy, she loves to take her shirt off and run around in her underwear around the house.

And boy, I hope that lasts a long time.

Because she's not ashamed.

We're starting to see a little of that with Nova.

I think I talked to you about it yesterday about the clothing issue.

Yeah.

Because she does not like to wear skirts and dresses.

And she has said, I hate that I have a girl's body because now I have to wear dresses.

So we're working with her on that.

And it's and sometimes it's required of her to wear a dress or a skirt.

We've apparently been breaking the rule about that.

No, you haven't.

You can wear the pants any day.

No, you can.

And I've double-checked that.

You would pants any day.

But see, that's the interesting thing, right?

When she said that it just crushed me because we had just had this big uh victory.

I felt like it was a big victory.

I I don't know how many of you know my granddaughter, but she's biracial and she has this gorgeous head of hair, curly hair that people are always touching and it drives her nuts.

And all the other girls in her class for the last two or three years have had long straight hair and they wear these big hair bones, which she has no interest in.

But they have pointed out to her, you'll she was told last year you'll never be cute because you don't wear hair bones, you know, that kind of thing.

So a couple of weeks ago, she was in the bathroom and she was shaking her head and she's like, look at what my hair does.

She's like, that's so cool.

You know, I really like my hair.

And I was like, yay, victory.

And then she's like, I don't know.

She's like, I think that I have this, you know, that my body requires me to wear certain things I don't want to wear.

So I was like, okay, we're gonna back up here and we're gonna talk about this.

And I think that's another thing to think about how deeply ingrained all of this is, right?

When you wear a dress, there are certain things you just can't do.

Yeah.

Because if you do, you're being immodest.

Right, right.

So you have to learn how to put your knees together when you're in a chair all the time.

Which I never have to do because I wear pants.

Right.

And you can't climb up the flagpole because people can see your underwear.

Right.

Right.

Now we have to pull girls off the monkey bars.

Yeah, and unless you live in Scotland, boys don't have this opportunity, you know.

And and what do you say?

We're gonna be countercultural at St.

Thomas.

Boys can wear kilts as long as they wear panty covers with them.

I mean, I think that's fine.

I think it's fine, but but in the wider culture it doesn't work.

You know what I mean?

Don't work.

And this is one of these things you can read this article in the Atlantic about women have to bring three sets of clothes to the courtroom depending on the judge they're seeing.

Because what's the what does the judge prefer?

This the pant suit, the skirt suit, or the other thing, the dress, right?

And can women have sleeveless blouses or not in court?

What's the most formal?

Oh, wait, this is there was an article in the Atlantic, it came out about like four months ago about what it means to be a female attorney.

And even there's this really successful firm that's completely run by women, and then whenever they do a deposition, they have to bring like a token man so that the person will talk to them.

This is what the owner of the firm says.

You you could again, you can read this in the Atlantic.

I mean, it's nuts.

But yet we have equality.

So we don't have racism anymore.

So I didn't think I don't think that um the revelation calls out that particular bit, but I think uh we I think those are tangential bits as we read the book.

I really do think that.

Um couple of things to highlight, right?

There's there's the saints who are underneath the altar.

Altar's an image of sacrifice, they have sacrificed their lives for something.

You know, again, we can read it as, oh, that means that like the best way to be a saint is to like go get killed for Jesus.

We could hold on to it really hard like that, or the saints are the people who have shared their lives with other people.

Altar is an image, an altar is where you put a sacrifice, right?

Interestingly enough, the way altars work in the ancient world, uh whether you're Hebrew or you're Greek, is that you sacrifice an animal on an altar.

Like you give the life to a god, and then you get to eat it.

You didn't burn up the whole animal, right?

That's why you keep hearing about this problem with people are eating meat sacrificed to idols.

That's the only meat there was.

All life is sacrificed to some god.

You give the god a portion, usually a part you wouldn't eat anyway, like you burn up the fat, or you burn up the genitals, or whatever it is, and then you get the shanks and the mutton chops, like you get to have that.

So what happens is every time you sacrifice an animal, unless you're burning the whole thing, which only happens on Yom Kippur, that's the Holocaust offering, you sacrifice and then the altar turns into the table.

Which is why we have this interesting duality here in church.

Although, curious enough, we almost only ever call that thing the altar, but really it's the table.

Right?

So you give a sacrifice, and then the God nourishes you from the God's own table.

And they would eat right from where they'll roast it, you know, and it's sort of been blessed by the God.

Okay.

And again, this is the idea that it's spiritual food.

Now we really try to dial that down in the Christian tradition.

Obviously, Jewish folk don't do this anymore.

I don't know if that's obvious.

Jewish folk don't do this anymore.

Um, we try to dial that down, and curiously enough, in the Church of England, it's the Lord's table.

We say altar because we didn't come from the Church of England, we came from the Church of Scotland.

We use the Scottish rite.

And that's heavy on sacrifice and altars instead of on nourishment and tables.

But both things are there, and in some ways they go together because again, if you've ever prepared a meal for other people, especially guests, it's a sacrifice.

No, that's just something you do.

Um, if you've ever prepared a meal for somebody else, it is a sacrifice.

You put yourself into that meal and you give up your time and you think about other people.

And again, it's important to broaden that word of sacrifice, not to aggrandize ourselves, but to understand what sacrifice means.

I have a couple of questions.

Yeah.

I had some what?

Um in uh 714.

Uh I'll just read this.

Then one of the elders addressed me, who are these robed in white and where have they come from?

I said, Sir, you are you are, I'm sorry, sir, you are the one that knows.

Then he said to me, These are they who come out of the great ordeal.

What's the great ordeal?

Okay, so we got a lot of options here.

Um, and please, I want to notice that what you've already done for us, and this is helpful, Lila, when the book introduces a symbol, it often unpacks the symbol if we pay attention.

So who are the saints?

Who are these people robed in white?

They're the saints, they've come out of the great ordeal.

Now, reminder to you resurrection is a new idea still.

And it wasn't like we've got this eternal soul and this cruddy body that comes later.

That's not a Hebrew idea, it's a Greek idea.

So, in when we talked when we read Maccabees, I told you that resurrection is for people, frankly, who are killed for their faith practices.

Their life is cut short, so they get their life back.

Really, instead of resurrection, you want to be thinking resuscitation, like people get to live the lives they can get to live.

The great ordeal is any kind of localized persecution in which people are being killed simply because they have these tenets of faith.

And what do they do?

They get their life back.

They don't go to heaven forever and get seven virgins and their own plant.

It's really important.

That stuff comes later.

This idea is your life is cut short, you deserve a full life, you get it back.

It's all on earth, though.

You see, heaven's on earth in the book.

Yeah.

It's all physical.

Most of us, see, again, we've we've really changed.

None of y'all, I think, believe that you get your body back in heaven.

You wouldn't want it.

I mean, which one would you want anyway?

Like your 15-year-old body or you know what I mean?

Like you in some ways, we try to picture stuff.

So we've got pictures of like angels who look a lot like us, right?

Except they've got halos and they play harp and they got wings, and it's all pretty.

That's all physical.

And heaven's like what?

Like some really nice apartments that you live in.

I mean, that just sounds like this life, doesn't it?

Is is is is it like that or is it something totally different?

I I don't have a good answer because I haven't visited.

But um, in general, we think in physical terms.

And we sort of think our spirit's not physical, but it kind of is.

Even if we say it isn't, we really think it kind of is, because the heavenly beings have kind of bodies.

Even if they're weird bodies, like in the book that we read, the godlike bodies.

So again, the great ordeal.

Um could be a localized persecution that's happening, and John's writing the book to people who are persecuted.

Hey, keep your faith and give it up.

Because it's you know, it seems the world seems unfair.

He goes on to say, they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

Yeah.

Sure enough, right?

They're they are living the journey that Jesus intends for them to do.

No, I don't get that part.

The blood of the land, that sounds like atonement theology.

Except the blood means the life.

You just remember, we could read it with our atonement theology didn't really come to pass until the 11th century.

Atonement meaning penal substitutionary, like someone took our place.

Right?

So just remember, blood is a symbol for the life or the qi or the spirit of the thing.

Right?

So they've they've again, this is really important.

We I think we've got this all wrong.

It's not about the death of Jesus, it's about the life of Jesus.

What can wash away my sin?

Nothing but the life of Jesus.

I mean, don't you think?

Really?

But when we hear blood, we associate that with death.

But the whole point of the resurrection is not about death, it's about life, isn't it?

It's about life overcoming death.

And I don't think I can even say that too much, because in some ways I'm so ingrained in like the blood of Jesus washing away my sins, like this sort of sacrifice, and I'm dirty and flawed, and it's gonna take that away.

We're so inured with that linguistically, that we probably spend the rest of our lives recovering from it.

I do think it's worth recovering from.

I really do.

In the Baptist Church, there are there's hymns they just call, they're not called blood hymns, but they're something like that.

And uh they're nice to sing, actually.

They I mean they're catchy, and we grew up singing them.

I mean the truth is if we grew up singing other ones, we'd prefer them to those.

We'd hear those and think like, what on earth is that about?

Another what?

Please.

What is the seal of the living God?

I have no idea.

Good.

I mean, is it a real thing?

You know, or again, or is this like poetic language?

I mean, you know what, you know what seals are.

Seals are the the your signature in the ancient world.

And you had two different kinds.

Well, there's actually two, you there's emblems, right?

Like the seal of your um genealogy is like your family crest.

You know, the church seal is shaped like an eye.

I don't know if you if you know these.

The diocese of Texas, every diocese really should have an eyeball-shaped seal.

That's to distinguish them from knights who had shield-shaped ones.

Right?

So it's distinguishing classes of people in the Middle Ages.

So seals.

One way you seal things is with a ring, and our bishop has a seal ring.

It's the emblem of the diocese, and if you get ordained or something's important, the bishop still will put hot wax on a document and stamp it.

That's the seal.

Totally, totally anachronistic, right?

Useless today.

We don't need to do that, but it harkens from our past.

That's how people sign documents back in the day, too, either with wax or with wet clay, right?

And they had a signet ring.

Another way is that um you can take a clay like spinner, and you might have done this when when you were like in the seventh grade learning about Mesopotamia, and you can carve it and you can roll that through play-doh, and it'll dry, and that's your seal, right?

So um I don't know.

I mean, I I I'm sort of making this up, but I'm not making it up.

These are the signatures of God.

Well, these are the only reason I bring that up is at one point in here they mentioned that that people will either have the seal of God or or not, and that those who have the seal, I can't remember now.

Yeah, see, let's think about this one.

It's a great mark of the beast.

I'm sure you've heard that.

The mark of the beast.

The mark of the beast.

Oh my god, is that like a microchip or like a credit card that you could swipe or something like that?

We've been trying to figure out the mark of the beast.

So, what if we just thought, okay, the mark is the signature and the seal?

So whose name do you bear?

Do you bear the name of the living God in what you say and do and think?

Or do you represent something beastly?

I mean, actually, it's not that complicated to think about this in a different way.

It's hard for us because we've been taught to make it really complicated and to think that this is, again, like credit cards or tattoos or something, and if we don't have that, we can't do business.

Well, it's quite true.

If you really are representing the living God ethically and believing, it is really hard to do business.

I think my investment portfolio did really well last year.

I mean, I think I did like 13% gains in most of my 403b, which is like a 401k.

I'm pretty sure the business, that business, had like beastly names written all over it.

I mean, I don't think you get returns like that through ethical investing.

I just I don't think you do.

At the end of the day, I live into it and I don't really know about it.

I don't know if I will put my money where my mouth is on my 403B.

I I'd love to have a social values plan, but even that is coming at somebody's expense, you know, which I'm not really sure God is real excited about.

And I've settled into it.

Because that's what it takes to do business.

So I think Lyle of this book describes this really darn well.

I mean, really well.

Because you meet these people who only buy, you know, ethical source stuff, and they're crazy.

Because that's all that all they do with their time is try to find that stuff.

I I used to try to find that stuff and I couldn't even find some of it.

So you do without.

Okay, it's fine.

Um ultimately we all settle into this stuff, and I and again, I think we can rail against capitalism or communism, whatever the government is, but that's the mark it takes to do business.

I'm just kind of making this up.

But I think it's right.

I hope you're hearing what I'm saying.

You can read commentaries that try to decode all these symbols, but most of them are going to say stuff about microchips.

Which is why I think they're wrong.

And I already know all that wrong stuff, and it's not life-giving to me.

All that code stuff, like in the Left Behind series, it just makes people, you know, like ratchets them up and they're afraid.

And I'm pretty sure this book is actually written to tell people not to be so worried.

What else you got?

Well, well uh in in, I don't remember whether it was four or five, but it it said um it talked about the seven spirits of God.

Yeah.

In the seven spirits of God.

So remember that spirit means moving air.

Seven's a perfect number, and uh, it is in fact the breath of God, spirit of God, that allows creation to exist, or especially humanity, right?

So I don't know about the seven breaths of God.

I don't know.

Um, there's seven lampstands, right?

The seven spirits of God, the book says, are the lamps.

And the lamps are the churches.

So it's really interesting to think that God would like to breathe life into the world through church.

And the question is whether our practices breathe life or are breathless, or breathe something worse.

I mean again, that makes sense.

I I I I I'm not a revelation scholar, but I but but I get symbols in the Bible.

I'm like, I've read scripture enough to get some symbols, so if we just sat on that a little bit, you know, it takes a little bit of decoding, and then the question is, right, what does it unveil for us?

If we read it and things get harder, I think we've read it the wrong way.

Because the whole point is to unveil.

You did notice about angels, right?

When it talks about heavenly beings, you get a really good description of what ancient people thought heavenly beings were like.

They weren't humans with wings that were like, you know, adolescents with long blonde hair.

They're covered with eyeballs.

They have faces like an ox and a lion and an eagle and a human being all at the same time, and they've got three pairs of wings.

You don't want to find that in the Sistine Chapel because it's like gruesome and crazy, right?

We want like pretty angels, but they didn't believe in pretty ones.

And do they literally believe they look like that, or is that trying to tell us the traits that they have?

So that they can be supernatural.

There's a lot of research, you know, if you know anything about the Egyptian gods, there's like Anubis, who's like the jackal headed god, and he's just got a jackal in like a human body, you know, and like there's Seth as a crocodile, and he's the god of the Nile, and sure enough, he's got a crocodile head on a human body.

So, in some ways, they're human, but they're superhuman.

I and a lot of research doesn't think that Egyptians believed it was a crocodile head on a human body that.

An emblematic representation of something that's beyond human.

And that's the way that they express how do you relate to this deity or how do you consume you know conceive?

And the same when you read about the beast here, it's in animal parts, right?

So do they really believe in this leopard-armed, you know, lion-headed thing, or is that trying to tell you that there's almost something superhuman and monstrous to these powers?

I think it's the latter personally, because the first thing is nuts.

Like it's just crazy.

Well, there's an awful lot of uh it appears to me all the way, an awful lot of of uh speaking um about Rome and the um negative aspects of being under Roman rule.

Yeah, and I think you I think what's interesting is that the the the the the the linguistic cipher, and I don't think it's code speak, I think Rome is the fulfillment of like, you know, this ancient terrible experience of Babylon, which continues to get repeated, is that this really isn't just about Rome, this is about empires.

You could kind of rewrite Revelation at any time in history and it would be descriptive, don't you think?

What's going on?

I think it could be really descriptive.

I mean, I just want to I just want to consider this point.

I'm not trying to introduce politics, but if you live in Pakistan, which is like a quote unquote sovereign country, and a drone comes in and blows up your family, how are you going to experience that other than like this?

Yeah.

That's empire.

I mean, whether you did something wrong or not, let's pretend you're terrible and you get blown up within a trial along with your family and kids.

I'm sorry, that's this.

Yeah.

It sounds like I'm being political.

I guess, but everything is.

And everything has been.

I think the book is saying that.

Yeah, yeah.

So again, I didn't think this is, in some ways, it's future oriented because I think the book is saying, listen, frankly, all of this stuff is happening.

Like there's hail and fire on the earth, and there's, you know, poison water, and there's these signs that we're even affecting the cosmos, and people still don't repent.

Like, what's wrong with us?

And I think people have wondered that for a long, long, long time.

What is wrong with us?

Because we don't gotta live like this.

And I think the world level is maybe too much for us to affect, which is why it comes back to why why do we gotta be on our phones when somebody's right in front of us?

I can affect that.

You know, I can't.

I have the power to affect that in my own life.

So sometimes I think when we when we just think about the macro scale, we say, oh, I give up, I can't do that.

I mean, I think the macro scale is important, but but certainly, you know, this is connected to to micro practices.

Well, you know, in a way, when you come back, it comes back to the old story of uh I'm sure you've heard this before.

Uh uh this fella is walking on the beach and he sees uh the starfish throwing the starfish in, and he says, What are you doing that they're all gonna die?

And she says, Well, you know, not this one.

Yeah.

Or it matters to this one.

And in a way, all you can do sometimes is those little things.

And it's very easy to get overwhelmed by what kind of what you touched on earlier about it's not enough, it's not enough, it's not enough.

You know.

Um, I I read this, I'm reading this book, it's called The Ladies' Number One Detective Agency.

It's a really good series.

And she talks in this book, it's about a woman from Botswana, and she talks about getting that overwhelming feeling and saying to herself, okay, my purpose is to help those that I encounter and not necessarily worry about those I don't.

Other people who encounter them can help them because she was finding herself not being able to help at all.

It it froze her from being able to help at all.

And I think sometimes we get this kind of like because who do I think I am that I can save the whole world?

You know what I'm saying?

But I can help, you know, people around me and accept help from people around me too.

So it's, you know, um, but I I know for me it's really hard.

If I want to help in one area, then I want to help in more and in more and in more until it's not really feasible for me to do that.

Yeah.

You know.

Um, not because I'm like a wonderful person, but because I get kind of panicky, and sometimes I will be like, what if this isn't enough for God?

Yeah.

What if me just giving this isn't enough for God?

You know.

And I think just to if it's okay to mirror that back in the book, the book sort of says, it seems like what you're doing isn't working, but it is.

Stu don't quit.

It seems like the dominating power is getting stronger and worse.

Don't quit.

And I think the other thing you say there's an angel who's got one foot on land and the other in the sea, right?

The sea is an image of chaos, but notice the angel's not completely standing in the sea.

Right?

So grounded here, but I think the other thing is, right, mindful, mindful of the chaos.

And I I had this really good friend who who um introduced me to this guy called Paul Farmer who says, you know, um it's important to be aware of problems.

It doesn't mean I have to solve them because I can't always solve problems, but to be aware and to try to make connections to solve them is a pretty good thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I don't have to do it, but it's still a problem.

And is there a role I can play in connecting a solution to the problem?

I think that's what he suggests.

So yes, like live locally, but also be aware globally.

I mean, I think that's sort of the phraseology.

I cannot do everything.

Yeah.

Yep.

I hope this was helpful time.

I I ended up talking way too much, like I always do.

Um we got two more weeks with this book and we'll see how it goes.

See you next week for number thirty.