"Revelation: Babylon Imperium" Pastor Nick Quient First Baptist Church of PV August 23, 2026

All right.

Good morning again.

I have the privilege of introducing our guest speaker this morning.

Pastor Nick Quint is here from First Baptist Church.

I know many of you know him.

One of the things I appreciate about Reverend Quint is how committed he is to raising his kids as co-equals with his his wife.

And so Reverend Quint stays up at night, does changings, feedings.

You've probably often seen him carrying his baby daughter Jane.

And I think, yeah, that's there's something really special about that.

And so if Pastor Quint's a little bit tired today, it's because he was up all night with his baby daughter, trying to bless his wife and allow her to get some sleep.

So yeah, I appreciate Pastor Nick being here and bringing some of his scholarship.

He has studied uh New Testament theology extensively.

So there's a much deeper well that he draws from than I do uh when it comes to the biblical languages, some of the theological frameworks.

And so I asked him for the second time to come and teach as part of our series through the book of Revelation.

So I hope that you're blessed by it.

Uh if you're anywhere near where I'm at, if you retain 20% of what he says, uh you get an A.

So uh would you join me in welcoming Pastor Quentin?

20%, huh?

There will be a quiz afterwards.

Uh before I get going, I've I've been enjoying just kind of coming and being part of worship on Sundays as able as much as I'm able to get here.

Don't worry, Dean's working on the feedback right there.

Um and just listening to the sermons and feasting upon them with you and just seeing how God is at work in the first century as much as he is in the 21st century.

And there was a book I found that I had on my shelf called Jesus and the Powers by N.

T.

Wright and Michael Byrd.

It's short, it's under 200 pages, and I think on Amazon it's under$20, which these days is a steal.

So if you want, just to take a picture, I will leave it.

I'll leave it here to make sure this doesn't blow away.

But if after the service you're interested, feel free to come up and peruse it, take a look at it.

It's about Christian political witness in an age of totalitarian terrors and dysfunctional democracies.

Only slightly relevant.

And in case you think it's a certain way, this was written in 2024.

So at the bridge of all the things we are seeing in the news.

Uh and they are New Testament scholars by trade, but they are engaged in political theory and theology and Christian history and all of that.

So if you're interested in just kind of diving a little deeper, this book I think is a well-seen guide.

Would you stand if you are able for the reading of God's Word?

I chose uh a majority of chapter 18 to go through.

It won't be on the screen.

And don't worry, when I preach, I recapitulate the text and say it again and again.

Um I'm reading from the NRSV, the updated edition to the new revised standard edition.

And it's also got some of my translational quirks, because I just didn't like some of the way they translated certain things.

So, here now the word of the Lord for us, and all of its grandeur, complexity, and terror.

After I saw after this, I saw another angel coming down from heaven, having immense authority, and the earth was illuminated by his glory.

He called out with a mighty voice, Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great.

It has become a dwelling place of demons, a haunt of every foul spirit, a haunt of every foul bird, a haunt of every foul and hateful beast.

For all the nations have fallen from the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality, and the kings of the earth have engaged in sexual perversity with her, and the merchants of the earth have grown opulent from the wealth of her indulgences.

And then I heard another voice from heaven saying, Come out of her, my people, so that you do not take part in her sins, and so that you do not share in her plagues.

For her sins are heaped as high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.

Render to her as she herself has rendered, and repay her double for her deeds, mix a double dose for her in the cup she mixed.

As she glorified herself and lived lavishly, so give her a like measure of agony and mourning, since in her heart she says, I rule as a queen, I am no widow, and I will never see grief.

Therefore, her plagues will come in a single day, pestilence and mourning and famine, and she will be utterly consumed with fire.

For mighty is the Lord God who brings judgment to her.

And the kings of the earth who engage in sexual immorality and live in ex and lived in extravagance with her will weep and wail over her as they see the smoke of her burning.

They will stand far off in fear of her torment and say, Alas, alas, the great city, Babylon, the mighty city, for on one hour your judgment has come.

And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo any more.

Cargo of gold, silver, jewels, and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk, and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, every article of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron, marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, olive oil, choice flour and wheat, and cattle and sheep, horses and chariots and slaves, that is, human lives.

Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, With such violence, Babylon, the great city, will be thrown down and will be found no more.

And the sound of harpists and entertainers and afflutists and trumpeteers will be heard in you no more, and an artisan of any trade will be found in you no more, and the sound of the millstone will be heard in you no more, and the light of a lamp will shine in you no more, and the voice of bridegroom and bride will be heard in you no more.

For your merchants were the magnates of the earth, and all nations were deceived by your sorcery, and in you was found the blood of prophets and of saints, and of all who have been slaughtered on earth.

The word of the Lord for us this morning.

You may be seated.

And so I have the burden of breaking down that for you this morning.

And just something to think about.

These three chapters, Revelation 17, 18, and 19, are kind of their own self-contained vignette or episode.

And time in the book of Revelation isn't a linear kind of A to Z timeline.

It is far more cyclical.

Think of it as a recapitulation of themes that while going forward creates kind of an echo chamber of events and ideas and symbols and images.

All of these kind of build upon one another.

The use of the number seven, the use of lampstands, the use of angels, the use of all these sorts of terms recapitulate and create what we might call a sanctuary where the sound echoes again and again.

And we hear the same words again and again from different angles and in different ways.

And so, in essence, what God is doing here is saying, Welcome to holy war.

And last time I was here, we talked about the great heavenly liturgy in chapters four and five, where the Lamb slaughtered with great violence was worshipped and honored and glorified as the sole righteous sovereign over the cosmic order.

Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, is Lord over all things, cosmic and domestic.

And the heavenly liturgy of holy, holy, holy continues onward from chapters four and five until the close of the book in chapter 22.

But here specifically, in chapters 17 through 19, we get the ultimate confrontation between a holy God and an unholy regime.

And the intensity grows and grows, and it's cyclical and it's compulsive, and it is a interest, a very interesting set of chapters.

And something just to be thinking about as well.

These regimes, these figureheads, these tyrants, these murderers, in essence aren't bound by what we see on the news today or worse have experienced throughout time and history, although they do point to that.

There is something more deep and more malevolent going on here.

Sometimes human empires, human regimes are not just fueled by human sin.

Sometimes the rot goes a lot deeper.

Sometimes the rot is far worse than what you see on the surface.

And John the Seer, the writer of Revelation, the recipient of this grand vision, is wrestling with this key theme.

He is grappling with immense concepts and grand ideas and terrifying images.

Remember, he's experiencing this almost all at once, being witness to stuff that needs to be interpreted.

And that is why when the few times you see John actually explain what he sees, that's when you go, Oh, we know lots of things in Revelation, but we know this is literal because he tells us what he means.

And in here, he's trying to discern all the great images.

Pastor Nick Tawa talked about the beasts rising and this amalgamation of forces, these grotesque statues of gold and bronze and all sorts of things.

And here he drills down somewhere to a place that I think is all too familiar to us.

We see the face of demonic-fueled human evil.

We see Epstein on steroids.

We see the true amalgamation of corrupt political power.

This didn't just happen in the last election cycle, or the one before that, or the one before that.

This has been going on for a long, long time.

And so in that sense, Revelation 17 through 19 is an absolute condemnation, not just of the easiness of the present evil realm we find ourselves in, but about all of human history that is anti-God.

That seeks to supplant, subvert, and subordinate righteousness to injustice.

So here, Revelation 17 posits a new figure, although this figure's kind of been in the background, but John gives her kind of primacy in this.

And it's just as disturbing as it is potent.

The angel tells John who sees a personified feminine form or figure described as traditionally the great whore or the great harlot.

It's a term that is used sparingly in the Bible to describe people who are actually perverse and corrupt.

Although you could argue that it should be translated as the great idolatress, the one who is the amalgamation of political power, which leads to sexual immorality.

Because those two images in Scripture, idolatry and sexual immorality, usually are kind of tied hand to hand here.

And here she is the entity that is worshipped as the supreme economic hub of unrighteousness.

And a city, in essence, that is polluted, corrupt, degenerate, abusive, violent, blasphemous, and above all cruel to the poor.

The angel says, the woman that you saw in chapter 17, so going back just a few verses, is the great city that rules over the kings of the earth.

So when we see rulers and tyrants and merchants and slave traders, it is never about them.

There's always something bigger and worse behind them.

To use the example I already did, there are worse people on this planet than Jeffrey Epstein.

There are worse things that go bump in the night than Jeffrey Epstein.

He's just the one we could see.

And Revelation and John and the demonic figures are all assuming that sort of reality.

There's always something worse behind the mask.

There's always something worse moving on behind the scenes.

And he tells us here what we might call her Mystery Babylon or Babylon imperium.

Babylon kind of undisclosed.

The mask is pulled.

Often we are shown the true face of economic evil and political power.

And it's interesting that often commentators will point out that the feminized form, you know, she, you know, the great Babylon is used as depicted as sort of a feminine image.

And often uh feminist critics of Christianity have rightly criticized that, but also patriarchal supporters of Christianity have said, see, this is what happens when you put women in power.

The problem is the church, the body of Christ, is the bride of Christ, which includes guys like me as part of the bride of Christ.

But also, Jerusalem in righteousness is depicted in feminine form too.

So Scripture depicts male and female when we're in righteousness and in justice and in faithfulness to Jesus Christ as co-participants in the mission of God.

You don't get a pass because you're a man or a woman in unrighteousness.

As Babylon is condemned, Jerusalem as a figure in feminine form is righteous.

The head city of righteousness.

And so, lest we get moored in the weeds there, Babylon is the antithesis of everything that is good in Christianity, everything that is good in Scripture.

And the hope is when God instantiates his kingdom and the heavenly Jerusalem comes down, there will be no more conflict and there will be true biblical equality.

Until then, we have to settle for what the world offers to us, unfortunately.

And so here, the Bride of Christ, the new Jerusalem, the ones who are faithful unto Jesus are seen as the warrior church, but not the militant church.

The Christian finds his or her place within Babylon as a separate sphere that we engage and we live in the regime.

There is no getting out of this.

But the point is not to get away.

The point is to be faithful, to live as Jesus Christ lived.

And so John pushes forward with this figural city, this face of evil, and it's generated ultimately by the satanic realm, the demonic entities that go bump in the night.

It is a city devoid of God, devoid of righteousness, devoid of care for the poor, a stranglehold upon the land, an imperium, a sovereign excuse of human power.

And thus, 17 through 19 represents God's absolute condemnation of the human race that is allied with the satanic realm.

God stands against our imperiums, just as he stood against the Tower of Babel.

And here, there's two things that John wants us to be mindful of.

One, God's judgment is grounded in his patience.

The fact that human beings are still alive today and have not gone extinct, thank you, Lord, is because of the patience and the faithfulness of God.

Nothing we could do.

You look at what we've created over the past 50 years with tech and military power.

I'm shocked we are still alive.

And I pray, by God's grace, that we will continue to still be alive.

God is willing to tolerate a lot of what we might call abuse and blasphemy for the sake not for us, but that those who blaspheme, those who abuse, might repent.

That God is willing to tolerate a lot in patience so that redemption might be produced from it.

And so God's patience is key to understanding his judgment.

God did not just destroy Egypt, He sent Moses to Egypt to tell Pharaoh to his face to let my people go.

And he did it again and again and again.

He sent plagues escalating again and again until Pharaoh finally broke.

But all of that could have been avoided if we repented.

And we see that in the great story of Jonah and Nineveh.

Just a word.

Jonah wanting condemnation upon Nineveh.

And Nineveh repented and sackcloth and ashes, burned their idols and destroyed them, and repented, and went to the God of Israel and said, We are in sin, forgive us.

And Jonah was like, Oh, I bet he's not going to do it.

You're too far gone.

You're too vile.

You're too bad.

And yet God's mercy, God's grace, God's provision for a city as evil as Nineveh was shown.

Much to the chagrin of the prophets.

And that is why God is patient, because he'd rather redeem than bring the whole thing down.

Which tells us that God's mode of judgment is based on patience.

That God would rather wait than bring it down.

And so the cry for the church of how long, O Lord, is answered by the cry in chapter 6 of rest.

This is not your fight.

And thank God for that, because the last time the church got in the fight, we produced a lot of violence.

You can see it in the crusades, you can see it all over the place.

And so God's patience is the first paradigm, that God has waited a long time for judgment.

The second is our understanding of God's justice, what we often call eschatology, the study of the last things.

Often people think of that in terms of heaven or hell or the millennium or what have you, but it's much more deep than that.

How does God respond to sin?

And we're not talking mistakes, we're not talking a life lived in unrighteousness from which there is repentance and forgiveness and grace and mercy, a new life transformed.

If anyone is in Christ's new creation, you're not bound by the old things, you're set free.

God's justice is a proclamation of reconciliation.

So that when the church goes forward in mercy and in grace, we go forward as reconciled people, loving others as we have been loved.

And that is a declaration the church must offer.

That God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting trespasses against them.

God wiped the slate clean in patience and in justice to show us that he would rather take the burden of forgiving us.

That God cares deeply about our fates and where we go as a human race.

And then John continues with those two paradigms in mind.

He talks about the other angel coming out of heaven having immense authority, and the whole earth is illuminated by his glory.

And then he talks about how all the nations have fallen from the wine of the wrath of her sexual immorality or the language of prostitution, that the Babylon and these merchants, these kings, these figureheads, these magnates have in essence created economic perversion.

Wall Street and the big banks know nothing of this image.

That's a drop in the bucket of injustice.

And so here you see this really interesting parasitic relationship between Babylon as the supreme economic hub and those who profiteer off that.

You might think of it as a parasite hanging on the side of a great white shark.

That is what the magnates and the kings of the earth are like.

They have attached themselves to Babylon as their source of opulence and might.

And we actually have an interesting word here, the language of opulence or affluence or wealthy.

We're not talking about people who worked for a living.

We're not talking about people who invested rightly.

We're talking about another means of production of wealth.

And then you have this specifically as it follows.

He tells the people to escape, to flee the city.

Tells the righteous to basically get out because God has remembered her sins.

But we also get a glimpse of the mindset of Babylon Imperium.

The language of, I rule as a queen, I am no widow, and I will never see grief.

Exemplified in the language of the fool says in his or her heart, there is no God.

Not about atheism, but that God will not act.

There is no God to judge me.

Here, God is waiting to judge.

God is patient.

But there will come a time where God will bring the hammer down.

And then he continues on, and she is utterly consumed with fire, for mighty is the Lord God who brings judgment to her.

And the kings of the earth who engaged in sexual immorality and lived in extravagance with her will wail and weep over her when they see the smoke of her burning.

And so notice this flee from the center of destruction, get away, for the plagues she encounters are not for you.

So when we see the judgment of God or the justice of God at work, know this.

God cares about collateral damage.

God cares about the innocent.

That is why he's patient.

And you have this great image in the Gospels about the parable of the weeds and the wheat being grown together and they kind of mingle together.

So if you pull up the wheat, you pull up the weeds.

And they're talking to Jesus and they ask him, just straight up, Lord, shouldn't we just pull them apart?

No, if you pull up the weeds, you'll pull up the wheat and it'll all be uprooted and you'll kill the wheat and you won't have anything to eat.

Let it grow together for the great day of harvest.

When then you can separate.

So not only is that an act of God's justice, but it's an act of God's patience.

The difference is that the weeds can become wheat.

The weeds can repent and find righteousness in Christ.

The weeds don't have to go into the fire.

So that is another element of this that we see at work.

That God cares about collateral damage, that God cares about the innocent.

He also cares about the poor and the oppressed, especially.

And this language is the most apt and vivid description where they see the smoke of her burning because the judgment of a nation needn't come with atomic bombs.

Needn't come with guns or political legislation.

It often is when God just simply holds up a mirror to us.

God holds up a mirror for us to see, as Nathan did with David.

You are the man who has done this.

You are the one who engaged in injustice and trafficking and violence.

And in many ways that reveals the evil for what it is because it forces us, not necessarily the church, but all of humanity, to grapple with our complicity, our violence, our arrogance, our pride, our power at making weapons, our power at killing.

It's one of the few things I think we're actually good at in this world is killing people.

We're actually gotten very good at it, especially these days.

It's become a sanitized thing.

So, in essence, you have a carnivorous, brutal, hateful, spiteful, corrosive image that is absolutely searing in its indictment.

There is nothing good in Babylon.

There is nothing holy.

So be wary of how you live.

Be wary of how you ally yourself.

Be wary of how you live within Babylon, because it is seeking to eat you.

It is seeking to subject you and subordinate you and use you.

It sees you as a slave.

It sees you as something worthy of exploitation, not as a brother or a sister in Christ.

And Babylon's torment is rather shocking because she does not continually burn, which is a very interesting image.

She is incinerated.

She is gone.

There is no sustained fire, just a final and irrevocable, done.

No protracted war, thank God for that.

No protracted violence.

It's done.

As on the cross, Jesus said, it is finished.

There is no more.

Which tells us that the fight is not ours.

Because we like wars of attrition that go on for a very long time.

There's good money to be made in those sorts of things.

God's way of doing justice is in protraction.

It is being finished with it.

God judges and then it's done.

And her fate is in essence wiped off the face of the earth, eternally destroyed, never to be found again.

No longer will any of these things be found.

The smoke of her torment, that is her legacy, goes up forever, as a monument not just to the patience and justice of God, but of what God redeems and saves us from.

If we are slaves, then that is the plantation.

If we are in abusive relationships, that is the internment camp that God has destroyed.

God will not let those things remain.

God puts them underfoot.

The difference is he gives the plantation owners a chance to repent before he does so.

I don't think we'd be that just or merciful.

And then we see a shift in thought.

Going from John's point of view, from kind of the big picture, to the merchants of the earth, what they think about this whole thing.

And here we see the true participants in Babylon's hedonistic regime.

Alas, alas, the great city, Babylon, the mighty city.

For in one hour your judgment has come.

And then in verse 11, and the merchants of the earth weep and wail for it, since no one buys their cargo anymore.

They have no place to sell, they have no place to participate in the economic hub of satanic power.

They are left holding the receipts with nothing to show for it.

And he continues with this massive, extensive list: cargo of gold, silver, jewels, different types of wood, different types of spices.

These magnets were opulent, but it ends with something really interesting.

It ends with this language of enslaves, that is, human lives.

In verse 13.

And here we see that the economic substructure of Babylon is not built on the majestic things.

It is built upon the backs of the people who harvested all of it.

Who were the ones who mined gold and silver?

Who were the ones that chopped down the opulent trees?

Who were the ones that created the spices and all of the money that made Babylon rich and wealthy and violent and grotesque?

It was not the affluent.

It was the poor.

It was the slaves.

And so here we have an absolute condemnation of the very mechanism of the sinister means of production.

It is that Babylon was using slave labor.

And so you have an absolute condemnation, not just of the slave trade in the New Testament.

You have its source.

It is demonic.

Human beings, when we were made, were not designed to own one another.

That was something we invented.

And so here, John is not just indicting the economic structures of Babylon, the satanic realm.

He is giving dignity to those who've been put under its heel.

In the language of, we might say human souls or human life, suche and anthropos.

Suche in Greek is the technical word for soul or life, often used as a synonym for the human person.

And the fact that you have the second term, anthropos, person, often translated as male, but human being, person.

You have those two words put together right after slaves.

So you have here, they are trafficking in human bodies.

In fact, the word there for slaves is soma, body.

That slaves were seen as living tools, as the ancient Greeks said.

And here, John, is an absolute condemnation of it.

This is what empowered and generated the regime.

This is what Satan used to make the world the way it is.

And the church must resist it.

The church must recognize the sinful underbelly that has gone on for too long in our world.

And that is why the merchants and the kings weep, because now they are as poor as the people they oppressed.

Now they know what it's like to be little when they made everyone else little.

And it continues, with such violence, Babylon, the great city will be thrown down and will be found no more.

The only thing left is the smoke that goes up as a monument to human ingenuity and evil.

And we haven't gotten to chapter 20 through 21, where you have the ultimate clash between Satan and Jesus.

But here you see how God interacts with the human realm.

God gives ample grace for repentance.

God resisted in the Old Testament hundreds of years, bringing the boom down and the sword down upon pagan nations of idolaters and people who exploited children.

God waited a long time.

God waited so long that people assumed God wouldn't do anything.

And that is why the language of the prophets is so pertinent.

How long, O Lord?

And for the church, we must be mindful that it's too easy for us to say God is not acting quick enough.

Lord, you are not doing what you need to do.

Let us do it.

Last time we tried that, it did not end well.

It ended in mass death.

And so the church must be mindful of the corrosive nature of political power as an entire enterprise.

That includes Christian nationalism of all its varieties on left, right, and center.

It includes militarism, it includes racism, it includes the exploitation of human beings that we see in our own city.

That's something we're known for in Los Angeles.

I'll just say this.

The church did not invent the casting couch.

But we should be the ones to condemn it and put it into nothingness.

So at the heart of John's hymnic vision, this sort of apocalyptic experience he's having and seeing and tasting and smelling is a vision of a God who rescues and protects the little ones again and again, over and against the tyrants of the evil regime.

The little ones do not make demands of God as if he's a cosmic butler, but see their sins and brokenness in light of his restoring love.

That everything God does is not an act of wrath.

Wrath is not an essential or eternal part of God.

It's not as if God always has an exercise muscle called wrath that he has to flex.

That's not a very impressive flex.

Hey, Nick, can you come up here and do a flex for me?

Just give me a there we go.

It's not something God needs to do in order to be God.

But love is.

Again and again in Scripture we see that God is love.

Not an easy love, not an affirming love, not all these sorts of loves that we see in culture or we see in the church or we see everywhere.

It is a love built on generosity.

It is a love built on seeing, understanding, and wanting the best.

It wants reconciliation.

It wants the sinner to come home, to find her rightful place with her Heavenly Father.

He wants to see people redeemed from slavery, and that is why slavery is such a perverse thing.

And slavery today doesn't mean what black people in this country have historically experienced, although it certainly would include that.

There are many different types of slaves, there's many different types of exploitative systems.

So the church must be mindful and ask those sorts of questions.

What has grip over me?

As Kevin prayed for us earlier, who's in charge of my life?

You give in to big tech or AI, eventually, maybe that becomes a little more than it should.

If you give in to Dodger baseball like I do too much, it becomes a little bit more than just a Sunday afternoon thing.

But that's how Satan often works: taking good things, taking holy things, and twisting it, perverting it, injecting, as my son said, a turd in the punch bowl.

That's what Satan does.

The Christian response is, of course, not to drink it.

You throw it out and you just burn the whole thing down, right?

You add a little bit of bad to it, suddenly it destroys the whole thing.

That is what Satan's deceptive power does.

That's what sin does.

You give it a little bit, it'll take everything you have.

Like a virus.

And the final verse is the most illustrative of this truth: that God places the blame squarely on Babylon's shoulders.

And in you was found the blood of prophets and of saints, but not just prophets and saints, not just the people who stood and condemned this, not just the people who were righteous, the church, the body of Christ throughout the world, throughout time and memorial, how long we've resisted evil, but also all who have been slaughtered on earth, collateral damage, exploitative power systems, regimes, it impacts all of us.

Babylon is not just concerned with Christians, it is concerned with the whole world.

And so for us as the church, we need to recognize that this exploitative regime is not just something we rebel against for the name of Jesus, although we do that.

We do it so that others might experience liberation and freedom, emancipation.

A freed person knows what it's like to be in chains.

A sinner who's been redeemed knows what sin is like, knows what pain is like, knows what submission and subjection are like, knows what exploitation is like, knows what abuse is like, and can name it for what it is.

And intercede on behalf of a fellow slave.

And offer them freedom in Jesus' name.

Offer them forgiveness of sins, that he or she might be redeemed from the power of Babylon.

And so it has three things for us in mind to keep in mind.

One, it forces the church to be humble.

We need to recognize that the little ones, that is, us in this world, are in deep need of the light of Jesus Christ.

We are not just the ones impacted by the economic regime, by Satan's power, by Babylon.

It impacts everyone.

And thus everyone must be saved.

And that is something Jesus says.

He came not to give his life for the healthy.

The healthy don't need a doctor, you're already healthy.

I came to give healing to the sick.

So if you've been healed, it's not that you don't need Jesus anymore.

It does mean other people need Jesus too.

And so when we go forth into the world, we go forth into the world with a steel spine of righteousness, taking Jesus with us wherever we go.

It is not our job to exact judgment on the earth in God's name.

Trust me, we'll make a mockery of God as we do it.

Second, it forces us to be magnificently generous with others.

For Satan and Babylon show no favoritism in their destructive ways.

All are under the power of sin and death, and thus all are in need of the offer of Jesus Christ and his grace.

And if we've experienced that and tasted that, that is something we're to share in bounty.

We don't get 1099s when we go to heaven for all the good deeds we do.

We don't, a Christian should not keep receipts for doing what Jesus tells us to do.

When you do good, good.

Keep doing good and don't keep account of it.

God sees it, God will judge it, that's on him.

We are to be righteous in all that we do.

And that means being a Christian every day.

When you're driving in LA traffic, be a Christian.

Try to be a Christian.

When you're watching Edwin Diaz come in from the bullpen to save a game, try to be a Christian.

It'll be okay.

When you're dealing with a spouse who's gotten on your nerves and you're in the wrong, try to be a Christian.

When you have a friend who's deep in need, again and again and again, be a Christian to them.

And the hard part, let others be a Christian to you too.

It's very easy for us to get isolated in our own little holiness, our own little code, how we engage and how we live our lives.

Bear one another's burdens applies to us too.

Especially to those who think they don't need the help.

Trust me, you do.

We all need help.

And third, it forces us to live beyond our comfort zones, seeking to be salt and sunlight to the world.

You will be, and perhaps for a lot of people, the only gospel they ever hear preach to them.

Your deeds, your words, your allegiance to Jesus Christ will tell the world very loudly who you believe is the Savior of all people.

How you live your life is a model of how you choose to be faithful.

It speaks in word indeed to the God of the universe who is love, who is powerful, and who will ultimately destroy sin, evil, and death on that final day.

And you have to come hear Pastor Nick preach on that and how that all works out.

I don't have to talk about that this Sunday.

He gets to deal with that next time.

There is still salvation to be had.

God is patient.

We are still here.

The Church of Jesus Christ still stands.

But not forever.

And that is why our mission, our care, our provision must be ongoing.

God is at work in the world with and beyond his church, and John's prophetic word, a word of triumph and longing and righteous indignation, resides with us today.

We live in a world of darkness.

We've seen the accumulation of power and bloodshed as opposed to the Lamb who poured himself out for the sins of the world.

We tend to view evil in clinical terms like a surgeon behind steel and glass.

But for John, evil was a very close thing.

He was incarcerated as an insurrectionist on Pat Moss.

He knew what it was like to be in prison to feel chains on him, to feel enslaved and burdened.

Let us not forget that.

You may not have chains on you, you may not be incarcerated.

And if not, praise God.

But how do you live your life in freedom?

How do you take that freedom, that liberation, that emancipation, that not on the plantation anymore reality, and extend it forward?

How do you mirror the grace of God and the glory of Christ?

It's very simple.

Do what Jesus tells you to do.

It's the easiest thing in the world for me to say, it's the hardest thing in the world for us to do.

Love your neighbor.

Pray for those who persecute you.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

And the final vision I want to leave with us is this.

This is how Isaiah sees it, and this is where John gets a lot of his imagery from, chapter 20 and onward.

But we all know this passage from Isaiah.

The wolf shall lie down with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid or the goat, the calf and the lion will feed together, and a little child will lead them.

And then moving down a little, the nursing child will play over the hole of the asp or the snake, and the weaned child shall put its hand in the adder's den, meaning, there is nothing to fear.

There is no more conflict.

There is no more pain or suffering.

They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain the sacred space of God's presence where all people are being drawn.

For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

No more chaos, no more Babylon, no more sin, no more devil, no more demonic things, no more things that go bump in the night, no more things that aggravate us, no more trepidation when Edwin Diaz comes in from the bullpen.

I still can't get over that.

The final word that John leaves with us is this Holy, holy, holy, the Lord God Almighty, who is, who was, and who is to come.

The Lord will instantiate justice, and we are but children at his calling to love and serve others.

May our gospel treason be a song that warms their heart unto righteousness and draws them close to the God of fire and love.

Would you pray with me?

Loving God, we thank you for the righteousness we have in Jesus Christ.

We thank you for his patience, and we ask that we would have the strength and courage to be righteous in this world, to honor you by loving others, to being willing to calling out sin and injustice and exploitation for your name's sake.

Like Jonah, maybe we don't understand, but guide us forward so that we might proclaim your love, however imperfectly, so that the Ninevehs of the world might be saved.

God, you are a God of love.

You are a God of provision.

You have saved us and redeemed us.

May we take that glory with us wherever we go.

In love and in power, and by the working of your spirit.

In whose name we pray.

Amen.

Thank you.