Revelation 1:9-20

My name's Ben.

Speaking to you from my living room here, preaching in slippers this morning.

And one of the advantages of being in your living room is you can look through your shelves and find interesting things.

One of the songs that's really stuck with me from, I don't know, 24 years ago or something like that, is off of this CD right here.

Yes, kids, this is what music looked like before, MP3s and digital music and all of this.

This is actually one of the first Christian CDs that I had I had owned, you know, probably the first few.

A band called Church of Rhythm.

They're so amazing that they don't even have an article on Wikipedia.

Um the uh there's a fax number on the back though, so we can probably get some information about them in that way.

But the song that I was uh that's come to mind in these times is a song that was called Um Where is God?

And I find that uh that's a question that I ask a lot.

I I really appreciated the song because it said it didn't just try to give slogans and say, okay, if we believe in God, everything's fine.

But no, there's real heartache, there's real pain, there's real suffering out there.

Um, there's a lyric in there, a line that I that I love, and it said, I don't believe that everything can be, you know, Jesus talked away.

Um, so this idea of where is God, I think it's a question that maybe a lot of us are asking these days, especially with with all that's going on with this pandemic.

We've got the whole world pretty much at a uh at a standstill thanks to COVID-19.

And, you know, despite all of the quarantine, all the self-isolation and distancing, um it seems to just be getting closer.

It seems to be getting more real.

It went from something that was kind of vaguely in the news to something that's you know out there uh to having an impact on people that we know and love and care about.

Um, a good friend of mine lost her mom suddenly and unexpectedly to the virus this last week, and it's obviously devastating, heartbreaking.

And so it's impacting all of us in one way or another.

I think uh just from changed routines and having kind of the rug pulled out from under us, you know, the economic loss, a lot of people have lost jobs, and obviously the health and the loss of life that we see.

It's a far-reaching thing, it's a long-lasting thing.

Nobody really knows how it's gonna end up, nobody knows where it's gonna where it's gonna end.

But um the question of where is God is very relevant.

Maybe in the past six weeks we have felt maybe like God is too far away, or maybe that he's just not up to the task, something this big.

Is God asleep, right?

Does he not care?

Is our world now just some kind of runaway train that's picking up speed?

Passage that Philippa just read uh for this morning was written in a time when the church may have been asking some of the same kinds of questions.

You know, because of persecution, Christians were scattered, so we're self-isolating.

They were they were self-isolating for their own reasons there.

Um many of them were were fearing for their jobs, their relationships, their livelihood, even their lives.

John the apostle writes these words as a as a source of comfort to them.

And I think we'll see that they'll they'll be comforting to us as well.

But where does John place the basis of this this hope that he speaks of, this comfort that he points to?

I think we're gonna see that it's none other than Jesus, this risen, reigning, glorified Jesus.

Uh and John is gonna show us that Jesus is both big enough and near enough to care for his church.

So as we dig into this passage uh and we try to apply it to our lives here in 2020, let's go to the Lord and ask his help.

Lord God, we do uh we thank you for this day and the opportunity to gather virtually.

Lord, we we long for the day when we can gather uh in person again.

But uh as we are doing sort of the next best thing, Lord, um may we uh grow and learn from your word.

May you reveal yourself in this um tricky passage with a lot of a lot of images and a lot of a lot of stuff going on in it, Lord.

May we see clearly uh the hope and the comfort that we have in Christ.

I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So our first point, Jesus is big enough.

John really hits this pretty hard in the passage.

Um, if you've got the passage open in front of you, I say open, see, I'm still old school, you know.

If you've got your passage open in front of you, um, go ahead and follow along.

I'm gonna jump around a bit.

We're gonna see just different points that are gonna get pulled out on this.

But look at verse 13.

John calls Jesus one like a son of man.

Now, if you've read the Gospels, you know, kind of these four books at the beginning of the New Testament that uh detail Jesus' life and ministry on earth, you'll know that that Jesus called himself the Son of Man more than any other term.

It's dozens of times across the four Gospels.

But I think that this uh passage points to something further back, going into the Old Testament, the book of Daniel.

Uh, in chapter seven of that book, Daniel is this prophet, and in the sixth century before Christ, he has this prophetic vision.

And he sees, let me let me read to you, read to you.

It says that uh there was the Son of Man, and the Son of Man was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples and nations and languages should serve him.

His kingdom is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

So, right away you can see this is something that's pointing to an eternal uh person, something that is someone that is from eternity past and eternity future.

But if we look beyond that, we can we can ask the question the Son of Man was given this authority.

Who gave him this authority?

In the same chapter, Daniel points to uh someone he calls the ancient of days.

This is just his term for this eternal God who will judge the world.

Listen to how Daniel describes the ancient of days.

He says, His clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool.

Now that sounds familiar.

And it's in verse 14 of our passage where it says, the hairs of his head were white like wool, like snow.

So you see what John is doing here.

He's saying Jesus is not only this Son of Man, this one with the with the eternal kingdom and the dominion that will that will go on forever, but he is also fully God, this ancient of days that will that will reign and will judge from from eternity past to eternity future.

Uh it's it's it's a powerful image.

And if we if we look at these Old Testament references, we really get a better sense of just how how big John is making Jesus to be here, what he's pointing out here.

See some other things as well.

If we can look at uh verses 14 and 15, it says Jesus has fire in his eyes, his feet like bronze, his voice like rushing waters.

These also echo passages in the Old Testament, largely from uh Daniel and also the book of Ezekiel, another prophet.

Um, they just point to divine majesty, especially the stars and the sun.

Sometimes we talk about the glory of God being like the sun, where if you stare at the sun, it damages you, it's not good for you.

And the glory of God is so intense and so holy, it just ruins us in some way.

We'll we'll take a look at that in a minute here.

But what about the uh what about the sharp-edged sword, two-edged sword coming out of his mouth?

So in the ancient world, the sword would have been kind of a symbol of authority or power.

You know, rulers and kings would would arm their officials with swords so that they could, you know, kind of keep order.

But for Jesus, we can see that this authority is not based on you know physical strength or political power or even like the size of his army.

It's in his words, and this this even echoes all the way back to the creation account at the beginning of Genesis.

We have this this whole universe, the world made, not with hands, not with efforts in those ways, it's made with the word of God.

So this is this is the Jesus that John is pointing to, this fully God, fully God-made flesh.

These these images that we see here have ideas from all over scripture, and they unite them in the person of Jesus.

He's the eternal God, the ancient of days.

He's the Son of Man with everlasting dominion by his word.

He's the creator from the beginning and the judge in the end.

In the context of all of Scripture, it's all pointing to him.

Jesus is the fulfillment.

There's no one better, no one higher.

Jesus is big enough to care for his church.

So, how does that impact our lives today?

Well, we can rest in this.

We can have confidence that he is able to deal with anything that comes along.

Whether we're talking about first century persecution or 21st century pandemic, he's reigning, he's on the throne.

We know that the twists and turns of history do not come as a surprise.

Jesus was not caught unaware of coronavirus or any of the uh fallout that we're seeing in this.

Verses 17 and 18 say he's the first and the last, he is the one who is alive evermore, and he's the one who holds the keys to death in Hades.

Certainly worthy of confidence in that regard.

Let's make it a little uh closer to home here, a little uh easier to understand here.

If we were to picture a teenage kid who's getting bullied, right?

So a young fellow, maybe he's a little guy, physically small, maybe he's just has a personality that makes him an easy target, or maybe there's just some particularly nasty older kids at his school.

Right.

So think about how this kid would feel, how he would be feeling under constant pressure, anxiety, fear, you know, never quite certain of what's what's coming.

But now imagine that this kid was able to have a really big, really tough, really mean looking guy as a bodyguard.

You know, I thought about Dwayne the Rock Johnson.

I'm I'm an old guy, so maybe that reference doesn't work on everybody.

But uh, you know, what if what if you had The Rock walking around with him as he's going to school and walking from class to class?

How would his outlook on life change?

Right?

How would how would he feel different?

What fears would he be able to let go of?

And there's kind of a sense in which the bigger and tougher the bodyguard would be, the more he would be able to relax, the more at ease he would find himself.

And I think this is this is why John is pulling out all of these different things to show us just how majestic, how eternal, how big Jesus is.

Jesus is eternally, infinitely more than any power that could come against him.

So yeah, Jesus is big enough.

That's our that's our first point there.

Second point coming to now was see that Jesus is also near enough to care for his church.

We've already looked at verse 13.

We've seen this talk about you know the son of man.

And yeah, this is a call back to you know centuries earlier and pointing to eternity and all of these great things, but when you think about son of man, what does that mean?

That's that's like a statement of identification, like man, mankind, humanity.

This is pointing to the human side of Jesus, the near side of Jesus here.

Let's not forget the miracle of the incarnation was God made flesh.

Jesus didn't come to earth as some disembodied spirit, he didn't come as some otherworldly being, he came in the weakness and the frailty of human flesh.

The writer of Hebrews says that Jesus is not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses.

He came in weakness, he came in humility.

Book of Philippians even says that he humbled himself to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Jesus has indeed come near to us.

We can also see this in the way that he interacts with John.

There's a lot of compassion there.

Verse 17, John has this strong reaction, seeing this glorified Jesus.

It says, When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead.

Given all that we've just seen, I think John's response is pretty understandable.

This isn't like some kind of theatrics or heavy-handed show of worship.

This is visceral response.

You know, John is just overwhelmed in the presence of one so holy.

And this is not the only place in scripture that we see something like this.

Uh, Daniel and Ezekiel, we've already talked about uh their books in the Old Testament, but both of them have times in their ministry where God appeared to them and it just knocked them down.

They fell down as though dead.

The apostle Paul, he was blinded when he met with uh the risen, resurrected Jesus.

But I think probably my favorite example of this is in the book of Isaiah.

Isaiah was a prophet in the Old Testament as well, and he gets this vision, chapter six of Isaiah.

You can check this out.

Um, he finds himself in the heavenly throne room and in the presence of God Almighty, and there's all of this stuff going on.

And holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come.

And Isaiah doesn't come into this and go, Yes, I have this sense of peace, I have this sense of calm and warm fuzzies everywhere.

No, his his uh his response is very, very visceral as well.

He says, Woe is me, I am lost.

Because when you stand in the holiness of God, when you stand in the presence, it points out all the ways that we're weak, that we're failed, that we're fallen.

And it's just overwhelming.

His holiness is intense.

But coming back to our passage, again in verse 17, it says, But he laid his right hand on me, saying, Fear not.

This is remarkable.

If you really think about it, we've had so much of the passage that has just shown Jesus in his power, in his majesty, in his eternality.

And yet he comes over to John.

John's this little old guy and puts a hand on him and a kind word to reassure and say, fear not.

Another place we see that Jesus is near enough is in the discussion of the lampstands.

Verse 20 says that the lampstands are the seven churches, seven physical, literal churches on earth.

And verse 13 says that Jesus was in the midst of the lampstands.

In other words, Jesus positioned himself to be right in the middle, right among his people, among his church.

You think about the Son of Man and all of these images that we've that we've looked at here, this eternal, mighty ruler.

And he's also one of us.

He's not placing himself far away from the church.

We're gonna take a look at the churches, the seven churches in the coming weeks.

And I don't want to give spoiler alerts or anything like that, but not all of these churches are doing it right.

There are some pretty strong words of rebuke and correction that are coming.

It doesn't even say that Jesus was standing in the midst of the good churches, that he was standing uh far from these bad churches and good churches were close to him.

But no, he was in the midst of his people because his people are his people, not based on how they perform, but based on faith and grace.

So you might see there's a there's a parallel actually in between the way that John uh that Jesus interacts with John and the way that he interacts with the churches.

Verse 16, it says, In his right hand beheld seven stars, which we later read are the angels of the seven churches.

The very next verse it says, Jesus lays his right hand on John.

Now, this is apocalyptic writing.

It's a lot of symbolism, a lot of metaphor.

I don't think we're supposed to literally look at this and say, okay, Jesus had these seven seven stars in his hand, and he set them down, and then he went over to John and put his hands on John.

No, I think it's a parallel image.

I think we're supposed to see that Jesus reaching out this hand of comfort and friendship and identification to John is the same in the way that he is extending it to the church.

So, why is this important?

A strong and eternal Lord is only a comfort if he draws near.

Take it back to our illustration with the teenager who's getting bullied.

You know, the rock may be a tough and imposing figure, but what if the rock's not returning his texts, right?

He's not not much comfort to the young fellow if he's not actually with him.

Psalm 18 in the Old Testament.

David writes about this.

This is a great Psalm just pouring out.

But David talks about talks about God as a rock, as a fortress, as a deliverer, and as a shield.

These are great things, but David doesn't quite say it like that.

If you listen, I'm going to read verse two of Psalm 18 to you.

He says, The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold?

Do you see how this is so much more personal?

And because it's so personal, this is how we can get comfort and encouragement in this.

Jesus is big enough, and Jesus is near enough to care for his church.

So what happens if we're looking at Jesus and we miss one of these, right?

One of them is big in our minds and the other one is not.

You know, Jesus is either near enough, but he's not big enough, or he's big enough, but he's not near enough.

How does that impact our view of Jesus?

And more importantly, how does it impact the comfort that's in this passage?

Well, if we don't think Jesus is big enough, then how can he really help us?

How can he be a benefit to us as we're going through the troubles of life?

Going back to our case again with the bully teenager, if in instead of the rock or some big MMA fighter or something, if he got, I don't know, me, right?

I mean, he's not going to be as comforted uh in that regard because that's not something that's going to be able to protect, not going to be able to give that kind of comfort.

So a Jesus who's not big enough is powerless to comfort, powerless to protect, powerless to encourage.

A Jesus who's not big enough does not bring about this response that John just had, you know, falling down as though dead.

You know, maybe this is maybe this is your view of Jesus, maybe this is how you see him.

You know, Jesus, the moral example, Jesus the wise teacher, maybe in some ways, Jesus the irrelevant, Jesus the boring, someone who would be great for a coffee and chat, but not really somebody who's going to be able to help you out of a tight spot.

Right?

Maybe you've got the opposite view.

Maybe your idea of Jesus is that he's mighty, powerful, and eternal and victorious, but he's too distant, he's too uninterested, he's too busy kind of, you know, ruling the world and taking care of everybody else's problems to really be concerned with your struggles and the struggles of those around you.

You know, why would he care?

How would how would he even understand what it is that I'm going through, what we're going through?

Maybe you feel like it's presumptuous or arrogant to think that this high and exalted God would act on your behalf.

Maybe you think it's self-centered to think like David did in Psalm 18 that we just saw, to think in terms of my God, my rock, my fortress.

You might even believe that you know Jesus is going to be victorious, and in the end, I'll probably be okay.

But the idea that he's a help here and now, the idea that he is near and comforting you is foreign to you, and it doesn't make sense.

For me personally, if I'm being honest, that's the direction that I would tend to go in my my wrong thinking about Jesus.

Um, that's just being honest.

And I recognize from this passage and from the from the weight of scripture all around that just that this thinking is something that I have to let go of.

And when those thoughts creep into my head, I need to let them go and go back to what I know to be true.

Jesus is near enough.

But whether you struggle personally with the idea of a Jesus who's not big enough or not near enough, I pray that we're all transformed.

I pray that we're all changed in our thinking as we read this passage.

Jesus is big enough.

Jesus is near enough.

Are you grieving the loss of a loved one?

Jesus is big enough and Jesus is near enough.

Are you in despair over all of this COVID stuff?

Are you sad and fearful for all the people in the world?

Jesus is big enough and Jesus is near enough.

Do you have a lot of anxiety?

Do you just have frustration with not being able to gather with people?

Do you miss being able to come together on a Sunday morning and just get hugs and handshakes and coffee and laughs and just enjoy being together in the same place?

I do.

I do a lot.

But even in that, Jesus is big enough.

Jesus is near enough.

And you want to know what else?

Jesus is big enough and near enough as we try to encourage one another from afar.

Jesus is big enough and near enough as we seek to have gospel conversations with non-believers in our lives.

All kinds of opportunities are opening up because our routines are changed and we're around our neighbors, maybe more than we've ever been.

Jesus is big enough and near enough to speak into those situations.

Jesus is big enough and near enough as we irritate our housemates and have to reconcile together.

That's the reality.

Sometimes we get on each other's nerves.

Being quarantined together is difficult, but Jesus is big enough and near enough there.

Jesus is big enough and near enough as we show love and honor to our community and those around us and the vulnerable by staying home.

Now maybe you're hearing this this morning and you don't know this Jesus.

Maybe you've heard of him, but you're stuck with one of those uh unbalanced views that we were just talking about there.

You know, he's too, he's he's he's too far off or he's not up to the task.

If that's you, I can understand it.

I can understand being wary of a Lord who's either too small to make a difference or too far off to give a rip.

But I would encourage you to take a look at this passage and take a look and figure out what is this saying about him?

And maybe this is displaying Jesus to you in ways that you've never seen him before, ways that you've never considered him before, beyond all the all the imagery and all the symbolism and metaphor, just what does it mean and what's behind it, showing us that Jesus is that that mighty and eternal King, and Jesus is that near and close and trusted counselor, priest, friend.

We can know Jesus.

We we have this privilege of knowing him, and it's not on the basis of making ourselves good enough.

It's not on the basis of somehow going through a spiritual experience to rise up and climb up to him.

We know him because he has acted in his power, out of his great love, to draw near.

So I pray that if you don't know him this morning, that you will know him.

And finally, for the church, for city church, and for the sort of gathered church all the way around the world, even though gathered church is scattered just like we are.

All the Christ followers, let us comfort one another with these words.

Notice how John frames all of this in verse 9.

What does he say?

He calls himself brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus.

He doesn't appeal to the readers based on his authority as an apostle or his experience as one who walked with Jesus.

He doesn't do any of that stuff.

He appeals to them on the basis of suffering together, shared suffering.

So may we, as we suffer together, as we are apart, may we offer the encouragement of this risen, glorified, reigning Lord Jesus to one another as we face this time.

And may we display this and offer this same hope to a world that's watching, a world that so desperately needs this, Jesus.

Let's pray.

We see in this passage written all those centuries ago, that we serve a Lord who is risen, who is glorified, who is reigning, and is very near to us, has chosen to be near and amidst his church for their comfort, for their encouragement.

Lord, I pray that we would just be drawn deeper into relationship, that our affections, that our that our uh our thinking on Jesus would be stretched and encouraged in this time, and that we would see all the more how much you care for us in your provision, in your grace, and in your uh just your relating to us, Lord, out of your great love.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.