revelation part 1: we need God...

We all need God--- badly. I have this friend (she will probably read this and kill me for using her as an example--- no names, though) who went through a crazy amount of tragedy. To make a long story short, she had to grow up in a hurry and was thrust headlong into a grownup life. She shouldn't have to worry about the trauma of her situation. She's in high-school! She should have a normal childhood free from pain. It shouldn't be like this!

What do you say to something like that? How can you offer someone who has been through that much trauma the cliche advice of pseudo-wisdom? I can say, in a plea for some sort of empathy, that I know what she's going through. I would be lying. I have no idea. It shouldn't be like this. She shouldn't have to go through what she went through. She shouldn't have her life twisted by the ugliness of circumstances into something God never intended. It shouldn't be like this!!!!!!!

God thinks so too. I think that revolutionary restlessness of Christ is the central message of the Revelation. The book of Revelation reads like a protest letter from God to the twisted, sorid state of affairs in which we find ourselves. God screams throughout the letter not only that things are not how He intended, but that He is taking steps to change them. The world in all it's sorid messiness is ending and the anticipation that throbs throughout the book is like the beating of our own heart, running hard after God. The world is being fixed--- God couldn't be happier.

This immenent fixing of the world (Biblical Redemption) does not only excite Christ. It also gives the churches to which the Revelation was addressed something to celebrate. This protest letter was written during an intense time of persecution by the Emperor Nero. The Temple of Jerusalem is less than a decade away from being destroyed in the most bloody atrocity in the history of Israel second only to the Holocaust. Christians everywhere, in a statement of defiance to these crosswinds of corruption, defy oppression by just existing. This is why they were thrown to the lions, because the message of Christ is that this twisted mess of a world is being fixed. It scares the twisters half to death. Christ threatens to undue the entire system of power they built on the backs of the the poor, the helpless, and the hurting. He threatens to save the world by toppling them! What else could the Emperor do but try futily to eliminate this very real threat to his cherished way of life?

The Revelation was written to encourage the church in the midst of this subversion. It was Christ speaking to their personal situation (the letters) and the situation of the world (the rest of the book). Have you ever wished God would answer your cries for Him to justify Himself? Have you often wished God would open the brazen heavens? Have you often wished he would fix this madness? Have you ever been desperate for God to say ANYTHING, just so the pain would stop? The Revelation is all of these things. It is God's answer to a dying and decrepit cosmos. The answer he suggests is not a cosmic band-aid. There are no quick, cure-all solutions here. The problems will not even be solved in the present state of affairs in which we find ourselves. In this temporal madness, we will not find the answers we so earnestly covet. But God, in all the glory and grandeur of the Revelation, brings us out of time and into eternity. It is in that eternity that our souls truly find the rest they truly seek.