Disciple Bible Study 26, Revelation part I

Well, welcome to I think probably the most neglected, um misunderstood, um avoided book, I think, in our canon, more so than Leviticus.

Um and as always, awful question is thoughts, responses, um abrasions as you as you read.

But this is kind of helpful.

Anybody else?

It's like trying to understand James Joyce's Ulysses?

No, it's like okay.

Maybe even worse than Ulysses is James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake.

Oh, yeah.

And there's like ten people who can read the book, you know, because it's a slurry of ten different languages, and Joyce is made up words as well.

Do you know about Finnegan's Wake?

It's a bizarre thing, right?

That James Joyce, difficult to read in English when he's writing in English, uh, made again made this book that's like slurry of whatever language he wanted.

Not necessarily linearly, like a sentence in English and a sentence in Gaelic.

Uh compound words between English and Gaelic and Spanish, you know, just all over the place.

It's uh it's sort of bizarre.

Hard to know if he uh was writing some code he wanted other people to crack, or frankly, stream of consciousness from his own brain.

I mean, who who who knows?

I think it was probably the stream of consciousness.

Yeah.

But there's people who dedicate their scholastic career to like cracking the Finnegan's Wake code, you know?

And how interesting to think about Revelation could be very similar.

There's people who have staked not only their career, but also their like theological hope in cracking the Bible code.

There's tons of books with that name.

So maybe to read this because my my grandfather was a Baptist minister, and apparently, maybe at the end of his life, he spent a lot of time writing and working on revelations.

Unfortunately, the papers have all gone somewhere, but I would have liked to know what he said.

Yeah, and and maybe it's good to say first off, depending on what tradition you grew up in, you probably have a very different orientation to this book.

I would say, and it's helpful to know, you probably know this already, the best selling fiction series of all time is not Harry Potter.

It's the Left Behind series.

That's written by Tim LaHay and Jerry Jenkins.

It turns out Tim LaHay probably had a conversation with Jerry at dinner, and that was his contribution, and Jerry wrote the whole book.

Or maybe Tim wrote some ideas on a napkin.

I mean, literally something like that.

But Tim LaHay is sort of a famousy um Baptisty preacher.

He actually started the church in San Diego that I ended up teaching math at and got fired from for being an Episcopalian.

Um he he moved on from there, but but Tim Lahaye is sort of like one of these famous people like Jerry Falwell.

I don't mean like he's just like him, but you know, famous in the in the in the Baptist world.

And he was convinced of this idea that revelation in much of the Bible offers to us prophecy in the sense that Nostradamus did foretells the future.

So that you have an idea what God's going to do and when, so you'll be prepared for it.

So all these cataclysmic events, godly, they're so cataclysmic that couldn't have happened yet, or there'd be no earth, right?

So this must be something about the future.

And um, Le Haye, along with a bunch of other people, I mean, the premise of the Left Behind book is that there are people left behind at this rapture.

Rapture is an idea about 150 years young.

You heard that right.

It was came up with this guy named Something Something Darby in the late 1700s who was reading this.

Martin Luther didn't think about it.

Uh Thomas Aquinas didn't think about it.

No one thought of a rapture until this Darby guy wrote it in a pamphlet.

And what's interesting is if you're evangelical, you just take it for granted.

I grew up evangelical.

And our approach to this book was it's full of terrible things that happen to people who aren't saved.

That is, they haven't prayed the sinner's prayer or they didn't yet have proper faith in Jesus, and it's meant to sort of tell Christians when to be ready for God to remove them from this terrible, wicked, sinful earth, which is going to hell in a handbasket.

It's interesting to think about that there's only 66 books in the Bible that made it, right?

And that people would have dedicated an entire book to events that aren't happening in their own lifetime and they don't understand.

That's strange.

Don't you think?

Not many made it, so why would Christians keep a book that didn't speak to them?

So one way to approach it is this is a roadmap, this is everything that God's gonna do, and we could read the news, we could read that with the newspaper in the other hand and try to line them up.

So what do you know?

Lots of people have thought the end of the world was happening at the first millennium, like in the year 1000.

People thought the world was gonna end.

Y2K.

People get real crazy when zeros are in years, you know?

Um, Joseph Stalin was the Antichrist.

No, it was Vladimir Lenin.

No, it was Richard Nixon, no, it's Donald Trump.

I mean, it's Barack Obama.

I've heard all of that stuff, right?

People are trying to translate one to the other.

That is one way we could read the book, but I want to suggest it's very fear-based, and everybody's been wrong because it hasn't happened.

You know, eventually, if we read the book that way, someone probably will be right, because apparently the sun is eventually going to consume the planet.

Not for several million years, but eventually somebody will be right.

Well, I guess one of the things that that, having listened to this, I didn't have that perspective.

Good.

Well, now the reason that's important in a way, I think, is because an awful lot of people who read it today don't have that perspective.

And my question would be in reading this, this was written 80, 70, or 80 years ago.

Probably like a hundred.

And and so, and it was written really to Christians at the time.

I'm wondering if they would have understood it much better than we who aren't of that time.

We're trying to read something current today into it, uh, or or something that is going to supposedly going to happen.

Or as what these folks were reading was this is happening now.

I think I think that's another approach, and it's the one I would ask us to take, which is A, everything in the book has already happened.

So when it talks about future events, starting at the present.

B, everything in the book was much more readily understandable to people who were reading it, and because we've sort of not living in that history or culture, we're often confused.

And side note on that, right?

That's true of much of the Bible.

It's written in general and read to people who are subsistence-level farmers.

None of us are that.

So when we hear stories about the Good Shepherd, we think, yeah, of course you'd leave 99 sheep.

You would never do that.

But we don't know that, because we've never kept sheep.

Especially, we've never kept sheep in nomadic places where there's no pins and there's no guns to shoot wolves.

You I mean, so much difference.

We hear Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey or David doing that, and that's just what people did, and we don't realize it's because they didn't know how to ride horses, and donkeys are useless.

You wouldn't, you're better off on foot in a battle than you are on a donkey.

But we don't know that because we don't have donkeys.

Now, our great-grandparents probably knew the bit about donkeys.

Like you would never, I mean, they're called asses for a reason, you know, so you didn't want to be riding one of those.

Um, but again, that's lost on it.

So part of our job, I think, to understand this is to dive into the context.

One of the interesting things that maybe you've heard, I certainly heard, is that Christianity was oppressed, persecuted.

And so if they were going to say anything about the emperor, they had to use code speak so that they weren't found out.

But but I just want to like really question that because the book decodes itself.

There's a seven-headed dragon, each head is actually a hill.

Like a literal physical hill.

Well, which ones?

I mean, what city was built on seven hills?

If you've studied Rome uh ancient history at all, you know the answer.

That's Rome.

Amon was also built on seven hills, but I don't think this is a book critiquing Jordan.

I mean, we even get the city on seven hills is Rome now.

I mean, the book tells you that.

It tells you who the dragon is.

It's who's the dragon?

What says it's Satan?

It's the accuser.

See, and we read that, we hear, oh, the dragon is that red guy with the pitchfork.

No, it isn't.

The dragon is unbridled accusation.

That's the meaning of the word Satan.

But if we read this from their perspective, would they think that's Caesar?

Maybe.

Did he write it as did he write it more philosophically or did he write it directly?

This is another word, this is a specific person as opposed to, as you said, I think the Caesars.

The Caesars are the beasts.

I mean, I think that's the clearer bit, but I think, you know, more insidious than the beast is sort of the spirit behind the beast, which is unbridled accusation.

I know that sounds really weird, right?

But remember, Satan means accuser.

We met him in Job.

Devil means diabolos means slanderer, which is like accusation, right?

It's like saying stuff without knowing it's true, which is like accusation, right?

And these are the forces, slander and accusation.

The number one accusation against Christians by any Roman was that they were antisocial.

That is, they were against the success of society because they didn't observe social practice.

They didn't offer sacrifices to the gods, or more importantly, at this time, I think, the genius of the emperor.

The genius of the emperor is not like the brilliant mind.

It's sort of like the universal ordering principle, like the logos that's in everything, but manifest in the emperor.

And the guy said something interesting, that's a little bit off base, which is about emperors proclaiming themselves to be deities.

A little bit of history in the ancient world, if you know anything about Egypt, the pyramids are for the pharaohs, right?

And the pharaohs after they die become gods.

Not until after they die.

There's a change in that tradition that happens with this guy called Alexander.

Right?

And if you've seen a picture of Alexander, John's wife Chris has a coin.

Alexander, like the pharaohs, always looks the same.

Always.

He's got this crazy curly hair, and he's wearing a lion's skin.

But of course, that's actually the picture of Hercules.

Alexander was sort of proclaiming himself to be semi-divine during his life, not after his death.

That's really critical.

Semi-divine.

There's a few other people that say that they are divinity made manifest, and one of them, when we read the Maccabees, is Antiochus Epiphanes.

Epiphanes means God made manifest.

He's seeing in a person, in his physical person now, he's a manifestation of God.

And this really happens in Rome with Julius' nephew, you know, Julius Caesar gets killed by Brutus.

We knew the play, and there's a war between Mark Anthony, his general, and his adopted nephew Octavian.

Octavian wins, right?

Anthony Cleopatra killed himself.

Resistance gone.

Octavian wins, and then he changes his name.

He's the first emperor.

The Senate killed Caesar because he was going to be the emperor, right?

Killed Julius, but Octavian becomes the first emperor, changes his name.

Do you know what's the name change?

Augustus, which is the August one.

It's a God made manifest.

Octavian proclaims himself to be a god in this lifetime.

So when you sacrifice to Zeus, you also burn incense and sacrifice to visages of the living emperor, not the dead ones.

Tiberius does that too.

He's the next one.

I come back to um.

Would he do this because he actually believed that, or did he or did he do it because, if you will, for political reasons, it raises him above the emperor into a new realm of authority and power?

Correct.

Well, probably both.

Right?

Yeah.

Probably yeah.

And we never know whether when we see somebody we're seeing their image or we're seeing their political image, which can be manipulated.

You know, some people are very suspicious about Constantine calling the Nicene Creed.

Was he doing that because he really wanted to figure it out, or because Christianity was a way to unify the empire that was fragmented literally into four kingdoms?

Constantine was the first Caesar in, you know, like 50, 60 years that was one person over everything.

It had been split into four different people, each with regional hegemony.

So if you knew all of that, and now you do, then the symbols in some ways are easier to decode.

And maybe this is less of a like I need to decode a ring.

Again, the manuscript often interprets itself.

If you're familiar, the heads are the hills, the horns are the rulers.

There's ten horns, and then one breaks off and comes up, right?

Well, there's ten Caesars in a row getting to Domitian.

There's Augustus and Tiberius and Caligula and Claudius and Nero and Galba and Otha and Vitellius and Vespasian and Titus.

Those are ten, and then it's Domitian.

The little horn, number 11.

You know, I mean, again, if you know, we know how many presidents we've had, people would have known the lineage of the Caesars as well.

Very reasonable to suspect.

Um looking at it Robin, the first uh few, um one through three or four, I can't remember, he's talking to the tribes, the churches, yeah, to churches.

Um and I'm wondering, is that is these do you think all of these came out as at one time, or were they were they were they did they come out at at different times?

So so in other words, you know, the first three is okay, churches, I'm going to be delivering more to you, stab up.

Yeah.

Well, you know, interestingly enough, the the study guide seems to think he's talking both literally and figuratively at the same time.

And that seems fair to me.

And then in that sense, the book is one coherent bit that you know, the book, our study manual goes to some pains to say to be read aloud.

And notice what he he takes each congregation to task out loud, and he's not just talking about those physical places, in some ways, he's offering a commentary for everybody else.

So maybe it's both in.

Now remember, there's not one church in Ephesus, and churches in general are including meetings of people that meet in a home.

They don't have public buildings.

Period.

How big are homes?

Well, it depends how rich you are, how big your home is, but not real big.

Churches have maybe 30 people meeting together, maybe.

And there might have been several of them in a city like Ephesus, which had, you know, a wonder of the ancient world.

The temple of Artemis in Ephesus was one of the seven wonders.

Big city.

Probably had more than one little group.

Um, so reading it out loud is is both to a specific people, but in some ways.

Is also to all people in this sort of warning against specific practices.

Now, who are the Nicolaitans?

I'll tell you, nobody exactly knows because they've kind of faded out.

But you look at the critiques, they appear to be people who took grace as license.

Oh, like since we're forgiven, we can do whatever we want.

Instead of, hey, um, grace is there so that we can actually live in the joy, which is not to be confused with happiness.

So the churches perhaps were not necessarily physical locations as much as they were belief systems.

I think they could have been both end.

You know, and notice there's a correction, like the Laodiceans are wealthy, so much so that they didn't need anything.

And the people in Smyrna are poor, but they have really rich faith.

And that's interesting, right?

Because sometimes you think about that as a critique that could be specific, could be true, but also in general, it it could be that we mistake the point of faith to be luxury when really it's about a different kind of wealth, a wealth of spirit and community and etc.

And that could apply to anybody.

Hey, be careful that you don't confuse where faith and spiritual living is supposed to take you.

It's not supposed to be like Creswell dollar.

God wants you to be rich.

It's supposed to be where your treasure is, there your heart is also, right?

And you can't take it with you unless you literally are taking people with you into God's family.

I mean, that's the kind of stuff Jesus talks about.

We continue to struggle with that.

Like, hey, I'm a good guy, I worship God, why'd I get a speeding ticket?

Why'd I get cancer?

Well, these are these are stuff happens every day.

And in some ways, the book addresses that.

This isn't some kind of spiritual swap meet that we do.

I mean, he he's writing to people who, you know, are on the front lines suffering.

Now, a little differently than you think.

Um, there's been a lot of work by a couple scholars, you know.

I heard growing up that the church has always been persecuted.

And that's not exactly right.

We we sort of know of two persecutions that were localized throughout the empire.

Like Nero persecuted Christians, but really he persecuted, he didn't persecute, he charged Christians in Rome with arson that he likely did himself.

And that's different from persecution, that's just scapegoating.

Why would he have picked them?

Because they had the least social standing.

See, Romans tolerated Jewish people not serving, sacrificing to the gods and the emperor, because they were old.

They've been around a long time.

Old faith, like older than the Roman faith.

So, you know, old faith gets more credence than new age spirituality than is now.

Calling something new age is a way of diminishing it, I think, right?

So Christians initially fought really hard to say, no, we're Jews.

And we have this ancient faith, and and there's some adjustments to that we're embodying.

But you know, after the Jewish rebellion in 70, when Jews were the villains, in Rome's eyes, right?

They were the ones resisting and having this armed rebellion, there's some distancing between Jews and Christians.

Big time.

Christians are like, no, we're not like those, we're not like those Jewish people.

And since they didn't fight the Jews, they're like, no, you're not.

And in fact, right, because Christians accepted uncircumcised people, Jews have said, no, that's not us, right?

So there's been distancing.

And so then the Christians appear to have this new agey kind of thing.

And and that makes them really rife for persecution because they don't have the Jewish label to protect them from not following social customs, which is why Nero picked them in Malta.

Anytime something goes wrong, it's probably the Libyans.

I used to live in Malta.

Car crash, probably a Libyan.

I mean, that was like in the paper.

In in present-day Slovakia, something goes wrong, probably a gypsy did it.

I mean, this is because they don't have any power base.

You know, they're like nomadic people and they have strange ways to blame them.

Right?

In Middle Ages, something went wrong, probably a Jew.

So that's what's happening with Nero.

Um, other scholarship says, hey, uh, the other one happened under Marcus Aurelius in the province of Gaul, which is like modern-day France.

There was some kind of localized persecution of Christians, like people were looking for them.

But when you hear that letter uh from Pliny to Emperor Trajan, and hey, like what do we do with these Christian people?

The advice is don't go looking for them.

Like, don't go house to house making people worship.

But if you get one, here's the littman's test, right?

If they offer something to the genius of the emperor, let them go.

If they don't, then okay, you gotta deal with that.

So hear how that's different between seeking out and destroying.

Which is like what the Inquisition did.

And is it empire-wide?

We don't think so.

We think it's localized.

Is it happening in Ephesus and Sardis and Laodicea like that at this time?

Don't know, but probably those people were getting the litmus test that we just heard about.

Will you sacrifice to the genius of the emperor or not?

Some Christians do so they can live and then they go repent.

That creates a problem later called um make sure I get this right.

Donatism.

The Donatists say if you do that, if you sacrifice to the emperor and you come back, you can't be a clergy person.

And you can't baptize, and you can't do the Eucharist because you've compromised yourself.

This is like a real big problem in the 300s when Constantine becomes emperor.

He actually weighs in on this and says, No, y'all are wrong.

Anybody can be forgiven, and the sacraments didn't work because of the person, they were because of God.

But this big there's a big controversy about Donatus in 318, and actually, Constantine ends up persecuting the Donatus.

Even at the cost of their lives, because they want people to have fidelity in all matters, and Constantine sees that as divisive.

And that date is what?

318.

318.

So that's about 200 years after this gets written.

Yeah, and in that way, I'm only mentioning that, not because that's in mind of the book, but what do you know, another application to the book?

In some ways, this book, if we'll uh if we'll understand what it meant for the people who read it, will be full of meaning for us in similar trajectories, not in bizarre, scary ones.

I hope that made sense and was like coherent.

Could they still, or they couldn't be priests or they couldn't be, you know, but could they still call themselves Christians?

Uh you know, it depends.

I mean, Donatus had a real problem with people who did this.

And actually, the persecution of Christians happened not under Donitian, it happened under um, oh man.

Who's that guy?

You ever like I remember my brain working well, you know, like four years ago?

I was like sharp and I knew stuff.

Anyway, um, this emperor who is reigning in the year 298 starts something called the Great Persecution, and for the next 10 years, they're actively, like the Inquisition, testing people and killing Christians who won't sacrifice to the genius of the emperor.

Uh, interestingly enough, his palace is in Dubrovnik.

Um, because I can't remember his name.

Anyway, that's the Great Persecution.

And sure enough, during that time, lots of people thought, well, God, you know, if they kill all of us, there'll be no faith.

So I'll just do this and then repent.

And the Donatists are like, hell no, you won't.

We lost our lives for this stuff.

You don't get to just come back and be a bishop or priest or whatever anymore.

You can understand that argument, right?

I mean, real people are really dying.

Um, that's$2.98, not 98.

Right.

And that's the important thing, is sometimes we're fed this bill of goods that Christians have always been persecuted and always had this hard time.

Not so much.

I still can't remember that guy's name.

Oh, that's still happening today.

And that was happening again with the Donatists, right?

They were telling other people, no way, and the other people were saying the hell with Eudonatus.

I mean, that's ultimately where um, you know, Constantine himself stepped in.

He was like, no, Eudonatists are wrong, and you'll shut up about it, or you can you you can lose, I mean, you can lose your life.

So I I hope that's a helpful frame, and I and I hope it's not um I hope I didn't meander too much.

Um I'm kind of interested in how the the discussion.

I guess there's no record of of discussions uh in in in in in Constantine's time concerning how books got in the Bible and how this particular book got in the Bible.

Well, this one didn't make it in squeakily.

You know, um the squeaky book was James.

In the the other squeaky books that didn't get in there, um, you know, were like Shepherd of Harmas and one Enoch.

They they um this one wasn't on the edge.

This is an important thing to remember.

People didn't say like moving now, Revelation.

This one was in.

And so again, I think that's helpful because even then, when people um were familiar with these events, and you know, think about when the Bible's made, it's 385.

And hey, that's only 80 years, by the way, the guy's name is Diocletian.

I had to look at it.

Um, they had a real memory of Diocletian in Dodonitus.

Godly listen, like we still find that argument compelling today.

I want to be really clear about that.

If you knew that I had sexually abused some kid, you would not want me baptizing your kids.

Let's just be clear about it.

We know the sacrament works regardless of the person, but come on.

So they thought that that was equivalent to what we would think a modern-day um um event performed by a priest-like uh pedophilia.

I mean, it's it has that same cultural stigma of disqualifying you.

Yeah.

I mean, I'll tell you, somebody just got disqualified from ministry last week in the Diocese of Texas, and an email went out to every rector and every senior warden saying so-and-so is not a priest who's able to serve in Texas anymore.

And part of it's like, oh, is that public shaming?

Another part of it is so that we know so-and-so can't serve at their place anymore, but we can't hire them either.

And we gotta know that, because if we hired them, we'd be opposing our bishop without even knowing it.

Does it go out to all the other diocese in the United States?

Goes to all the bishops.

All the bishops, okay, so they will know.

Because here's the funny bit a bishop in Texas can inhibit a priest in their diocese.

So Andy Doyle can inhibit me, which means I can't do any sacraments here, which means you can't hire me.

I can't do the Eucharist, I can't baptize, I can't marry, I could get up and preach, but I can't do that other stuff.

Y'all don't need that.

You need someone who can do all that stuff.

I could go over to West Texas, and that bishop can decide whether or not to honor the inhibition.

Because every bishop is autonomous in their own diocese.

Of course, though, if the bishop of West Texas knowingly did that, it would undercut the whole Episcopal Church.

Which is why all the bishops hear about this, so that they can prohibit me being uninhibited in any other diocese.

I hope that wasn't too weird, and I hope that's germane to this.

Um, maybe we better get a little more directly into this.

And and and um Tim said something really interesting that I hope is helpful.

Um, reminder in Daniel, Daniel's got some apocalypticism in it.

Now, apocalypse apocalypse means to unveil, it literally means to reveal.

And when we talked about Daniel, we talked about how there's all these imagery which is not there to confuse or encode, we don't think so much, is to reveal the inner nature of physical things.

So, listen, I mean, is the is the book trying to encode that emperors are a beast who are an amalgam of different wild, feral, ferocious animals, or is that combination of animals there to show us how beastly those in authority are?

How much they forfeited their humanity and are like predators.

You know, are those descriptions meant to confuse or encode, or are they meant to be caricatures of individuals so that we understand their true inner nature?

The best lecture I've ever heard says these are caricatures.

And that if we press too hard, like who's the leopard?

The leopard is the Persians, and the eagle's wings represent such and such empire, and blah blah blah, we might be missing the point, which is that you know, leopards are vicious and ferocious things.

And so is this kingdom, and it's not just like a leopard, it's like a leopard that could fly.

We get now, when you look at Donesbury and there's a donkey, you know that's the Democratic Party.

And when there's an elephant, you know that's the Republican Party.

We still use animals today.

Now, I don't think anybody in general knows why we use a donkey for Democrat and why we use an elephant for Republicans, the history of that, but we understand what it means.

In some ways, it may not matter why they picked those animals.

What's important is that we understand what they mean.

And that they understood, and they understood what they mean.

And they understood, and I think the easy understanding is they represent monstrosities.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But but specific monstrosities in that DNA.

Yeah, and again, so it's it's they're really, in a way, there's specific individuals, and then there's also the the uh uh more um universal meaning, I guess.

I'm not saying that well, but no, you're just kind of there's there's two, it's twofold.

And we and again, another common one that Revelation uses is images of water and the sea.

For us, water's great, no problem, but in the Bible throughout, the sea is an image of chaos, not necessarily evil, could be, but there's chaos.

So what do you know?

The dragon comes up out of the sea.

Out of chaos comes this force of accusation, um, and ultimately that ends up getting defeated and put down.

Is there a battle at the end?

I'm trying to I'm trying to wrap my head around what the ending is going to be because he's not badly evil.

Yeah.

Well, I think the book, I mean, and and let's think about this.

One of the roots of most wars, probably anywhere we can ever think about, is essentially unbridled accusation and slander.

Okay.

And so when that's defeated, then the root causes, not the symptoms, are ultimately defeated.

Um that's my own thinking.

But I I've told you historically that there's really no emergence of the figure, the devil as we picture until later than this.

That red, that red guy who's opposed to God and is like the epitome of evil, who was an angel in heaven and charge of music and resisted God.

None of that's in here.

None of that.

Right, yeah.

And that's what I'm trying to kind of get my head around.

Yeah, I and and I I think it's really worth dwelling on, really worth dwelling on, that this is a different worldview in theology from our own, and it I think it invites us to have, frankly, a more healthy one.

Because again, there's this weird thing, right?

Which is that, hey, if the devil is this red guy with the pitchfork, I mean, that's a created being.

So how on earth could any created being actually oppose the creator?

I mean, that doesn't even make sense.

But we bought that bullcrap, hook line, and sinker.

So, you know, again, scripture uses words like unclean spirit, that in Greek is the word demon, and we think of the red guys.

But you know, scripture uses another word that we get so crazy, and that's the word angel.

Angel means messenger.

That's what it means.

So when the accuser, the Satan, and his messengers fight against Michael and the heavenly angels, heavenly messengers, that could be describing some battle up in the sky, or it could be describing literally what we do every day.

We decide which messenger we will listen to.

The message of accusation, of slander, of frankly demonizing one another, or we choose to listen to God's messages, to God's messengers.

You know, there's a description, and I've told you this a couple of times, and you're not gonna buy it, but I want you to.

Um there's in the in the Hebrew Bible, there's messengers, and then there's seraphim, and there's cherubim.

That's all there are.

Messengers are messengers.

You make up what that means to you, but it's usually somebody who tells a message.

Um, cherubim are these things described as sitting around the throne that are covered with eyeballs, and they've got four faces on them, and all they do is say holy, holy.

You can read about them in Ezekiel.

Those are cherubs, they're not fat babies.

Fat babies come from Raphael in the 1500s.

In the Bible, cherubs are monstrous-looking things.

Is are they literally that, or is it meant to say they have all of these different powers combined?

The Egyptians didn't think Anubis was some kind of jackal mixed with a human being.

They have that representation to say there's something extra-human about Anubis.

Right?

It's just a way, it's a symbol, not a literal bit.

Seraphim are flying snakes, they've got wings and they're on fire.

Michael and Satan, Michael means something else, but when their angels collide, it doesn't mean the halo things.

The halo hadn't been invented.

The halo comes from art, it doesn't come from the Bible.

The halo is there in art to show you who a saint is.

These people didn't have halos.

Again, and the thing is, we're so used to that iconography, we assume it's always been there and hasn't.

And that's the thing we have to get our heads around.

Right?

We look at art, which is giving us a depiction of what things might mean, and we forget A hadn't always looked like that, and didn't have to look like that.

There was gonna be a B, but I forgot it.

Like I told you, when we see pictures of the cross, Jesus is way up in the air.

His cross is taller than the other two.

That's a theological picture, it's not a historical one.

But we've seen it so much we assume that's how it was, because that's what we've seen.

We've accepted the image as historical when really the image was meant to convey meaning.

There's images in here meant to be convey meaning, doesn't mean they're historical.

I hope that's helpful.

Yeah, of course it is.

And it's all about this reorientation.

Remember, the messenger tells John, don't worship me like twice.

I'm just a messenger.

I'm just a messenger.

Is that an angel with wings and a halo?

Or is that someone who speaks on behalf of God?

Don't worship Martin Luther King Jr., he's a messenger.

He's not God.

Don't worship Gandhi.

Don't worship your bishop or your priest.

Listen to the message.

Don't worship the person.

I mean, that's pretty easy to swallow, don't you think?

We're like, oh yeah, I'm on board with that.

What if that's the deal here?

What if the revelation is given to John by another messenger?

Who could be a person or could be the flying thing?

But the Bible isn't clear which one it is.

And it doesn't have to be a winged thing in the jig with a halo.

Because angel just means messenger.

Don't you think, again, that there are satanic messengers all around us?

If you don't think so, turn on CNN.

And listen to how people talk about and talk to one another.

It is satanic.

I think in the worst possible sense.

Not the demonic spiritual sense, but because it's real, we do that.

And those messages are satanic.

I think the book's about that.

Not about red little things on one shoulder and white halo things on the other shoulder.

Those are symbols that say we live in competing messages and which one we listen to.

In that sense, it's very true, right?

But it's not about these demons that are, you know, characters and spirits and possess people.

It's about something much more real than all of that.

Sometimes we worry so much about the wrong thing that we don't realize we've been doing the wrong thing all the time.

We're worried about these little spirits without realizing what our word that our words are embodying those spirits all the time.

That sense, this is a powerful book.

Right?

And notice what happens at the end, right, is that the the dragon gets thrown in in into this lake of fire, which is not a place where uh they're tortured.

It's a place where they're incinerated.

Unbridled accusation is incinerated, along with death that's with a capital D.

People are always gonna die.

God made that a reality, so it's not bad.

But death with a capital D is real bad.

So God's gonna just take that off the table.

And along with um, what is else that gets incinerated?

Death and is it hell or is it Hades?

It's one of those, right?

Those big powers are gonna get burned up.

They're not gonna get tortured, they're gonna disappear from reality.

That means something, don't you think?

To me, it means something a lot more important than people getting ironic punishments for eternity.

It means that God is going to not treat symptoms, God is going to heal disease.

Maybe I've missed some things, and I know it's I've probably talked way too much.

I I understand revelation is also supposed to be a hopeful to provide hope for the people there that whatever they are experiencing that there will be a time when things will be put right.

Yeah, I mean, you know, there's this opening of like the fifth seal, and there's all of the saints down there and they're saying, How long, O Lord?

And the answer is not long.

It's helpful to know, not long, when you're wondering, right?

I mean, I I've mentioned this a million times, but in general, if we knew that eventually doing behavior X would save our children, we'd do it forever.

The fact is we don't know, and that's the paralyzing bit.

We don't know if it's going to accomplish this larger life we want to bring about.

The book is saying, yes, it will.

Keep abbot.

The outcome is certain, even though it seems like it's taking a long time.

Keep abbot.

That's pretty hopeful.

Yes.

Um, and then, of course, right in chapter 21 is the thing the left behind looks totally miss, is that God doesn't yank us off the earth into some spiritual realm.

The new Jerusalem arrives here.

God doesn't want to pull us off the earth, God wants to pull the earth up into heaven.

That's the goal, right?

And the book is real clear about that.

It's not going to be some other thing later in some other dimension.

It's going to be right here.

In that sense, this book is not about heaven after you die in any way.

It's about living into heaven.

That is a way that is above us.

Again, if heaven, we think about it literally as where our spirit goes after we die, I think we're missing the point of the book.

Heaven is up, it's the sky.

It means something above us.

God's ways, which are above us, are going to be manifest on earth.

And we get to be a part of that.

In fact, that's what the saints do, is they make manifest those heavenly, that is, codes speak for higher living.

They live higher here.

Well, I think so anyway.

Otherwise, the book doesn't make a lot of sense for what you're supposed to be doing now.

I mean, if we sort of say all of our Christian hope happens after we die, what's the point of living?

Once you become a Christian, die, and then you get it.

But but what if again, I mean, the ancient people understood that heaven was the sky.

Like the literal sky.

And you know, the cosmonaut, the first cosmonaut, said, you know, we left the earth and God wasn't there.

So God ain't real.

I mean, that's taking this stuff so literally, we don't even take it seriously.

It's not a scientific claim.

It's based on a three-tiered universe claim that we live here and heavens here, and then there's the underworld.

So live up in the heavenly ways.

The ways that are above our ways.

Well, I think so.

It's so simple.

Really?

The hard thing is it it it requires us to, I mean, to really just hold that, requires us to kind of resist a years of church teaching, b these images that have been put into us, not just in art, but in cartoons.

Yeah.

Devils and angels.

Uh, they enshroud us so much that you know it's really hard to say to an image we've had our whole life, well, like, no, I'm not want to take that image seriously anymore.

Uh it's it's just really darn hard.

Yeah.

Well, that, and I think a lot of things that are simple are really at the same time difficult.

You know, um, and I think sometimes, at least for me, I make them more difficult than I need to.

You know, it's interesting you say that because I I was just listening to this continuing ed lecture about death and grief.

And um somebody said, What about for children?

It's so hard for them.

And the presenter was like, No, it's not hard for children at all.

We make it hard for children.

Like for a kid, you're there or you're not there.

That that's what that means.

But but we have such a hard time with it that we push that on our kids, like, oh, you should be really sad and you want this or that.

Um, and in some ways, the question is, what if we didn't do that?

I I mean, I don't know the answer.

I guess I'll find out with my daughter when it happens.

You know, it's I remember learning how to ski, and and the kids, like three and under, got it so easily because they believed everything the instructor did.

And us adults would be like, but wait, what if I what what if what if I don't put my feet out that way, I'm gonna fall?

And the instructor said, children can learn like that because they believe what you tell them is gonna happen.

So they don't question it.

They stick their feet out and they stop.

Whereas adults tend to get a little more complicated and panicky, and what if, what if, what if, what if.

And I think this is one of these things about grief, right?

If you've ever lost somebody's even semi-significant in your life, I wonder if you've had the thought like, am I supposed to cry?

Am I crying enough?

Those kinds of questions, which are not natural questions.

Have you ever wondered about like how you should grieve somebody?

It's not a natural question.

Naturally we we do it.

However, we do it, but we load that up with the shoulds.

So that's learned behavior.

Is that where like paid mourners came from?

Um that's a weird bit.

Is that more like a like a social status thing?

It's a social status thing and it can also affect like your afterlife, maybe.

Okay.

Because the truth is when you stop mourning your ancestors, they disappear.

That's how people understood it.

So when when you didn't visit your ancestors' graves and offer food, they're all down in shale, but when you quit, they evaporate.

And that's the ancient Mesopotamian culture.

They don't live forever unless they're remembered.

Okay, I know this is like super weird.

Uh we remember, we're gonna read this for four more weeks, bit by bit, so we'll have time to hop into anything else, but are there other general or specific things that showed up today for y'all?

We're not gonna be here for the next couple of weeks.

We're gonna be down in the Amazon.

Well, that sounds lovely.

And if you're having trouble sleeping, we do record these and put them online so you can always listen and sort of do your penance.

We will meet next week, even though it's holy week.

I mean, I think that's great to do.

What's interesting about being on the Amazon is that whole thing of living is down there because it's so different physically.

Um it's looked at in a very different way.

Okay, well, I'm gonna call us early today because the symphony's here and they expect me to show up for that.

The symphony's here in Moody Gardens and Symphony.

We've got a lot of show going on here.

Yeah.

Well, thank you for putting up with like maybe a very off topic thing, and I'm looking forward to.