Revelation 19:1-6
1 After this I heard what sounded like the roar of a great
multitude in heaven shouting: "Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power
belong to our God,
2 for true and just are his judgments. He has condemned the
great prostitute who corrupted the earth by her adulteries. He has avenged on
her the blood of his servants."
3 And again they shouted: "Hallelujah! The smoke from
her goes up for ever and ever."
4 The twenty-four elders and the four living creatures fell
down and worshiped God, who was seated on the throne. And they cried: "Amen,
Hallelujah!"
5 Then a voice came from the throne, saying: "Praise our
God, all you his servants, you who fear him, both small and great!"
6 Then I heard what sounded like a great multitude, like the
roar of rushing waters and like loud peals of thunder, shouting:
"Hallelujah! For our Lord God Almighty reigns.
(NIV)
Several years
ago, I was very wrapped up in the World Series.
I don’t remember which year this was, but it was an exciting series and
I reserved my calendar for every night’s game.
No committee
meetings. No family gatherings. Nothing was going to keep me from the
television.
But one night
I got a call from a parishioner and I had to go meet a family in the emergency
room. I had enough time, however, to
turn on the VCR before I left.
I got home too
late to watch the game, so I left notes all over the house – on the television,
on the refrigerator, on the bathroom door – “Don’t tell Maynard how the game
ended until he sees the video tape.”
I woke up the
next morning and left the newspaper on the driveway. While the family ate breakfast, it was
forbidden to turn the television on to watch the Today Show.
Finally, when
everyone had gone to school or work, I settled into my easy chair to watch the
previous night’s game.
I was just
about to settle into my chair and watch the game when I decided to call the
office and tell them I’d worked all night and was taking the morning off.
My secretary
answered and before I could say anything, she said, “Could you believe that
game last night? I can’t get over how
badly the Braves lost.”
Thanks.
We don’t like
to know the ending until we live through it.
Don’t tell us
how the game ends, let us watch it and savor the thrill of victory and the
agony of defeat.
Don’t tell us
how the book ends, let us read through the chapters on our own.
Don’t tell us
how the movie ends. Let us buy the
ticket and enjoy the film.
How many of
you are familiar with the term “Spoiler Alert?”
I see that
more and more in the newspapers and on the Internet. Anytime a writer is dealing with a movie or
television series and is about to reveal the ending of the show, the writer
will warn the reader that there is a “Spoiler Alert.”
In other
words, if you don’t want to know the end of the movie until you see it, the
phrase “spoiler alert” is a warning not to read any more of the article.
Today’s sermon
is a spoiler alert.
I’m not going to tell you the end of
the movie – I’m going to tell you about how reality turns out in the end. The end of history. The end of time as we know it.
In fact, this is what the Book of
Revelation is all about.
Revelation is a confusing book. We get bogged down in all of the strange
parts of it. We know there are important
clues, but we don’t know how to interpret them.
666? What’s that about? All those earthquakes and fires and
floods? Meteors falling to earth? How are we to understand all of that?
You can get bogged down in a lot of
little issues in Revelation, but I’m going to give you the bottom line, big
picture of how it all comes out in the end.
The answer to the most important
question is not – what does 666 mean.
The most important question is “who is in control here?”
The answer is -- God is in control.
That is what Revelation is all about.
When you were in school, you often
had to pick out the thesis sentence of an article or a book. Or if you wrote a paper, you sometimes had to
write and identify the thesis sentence, which was a sentence that identified
the purpose of the paper or article.
The thesis sentence of Revelation is
in our Scripture lesson for this morning.
It is the spoiler alert that reveals what Revelation is all about. It is the answer to what life and history are
all about.
Verse 6 of our reading lays it out
very clearly.
“Our Lord God Almighty reigns.”
God rules!
God is in control.
God never stopped being in control. God was never threatened. God has always been on his throne.
Now that sounds great.
Until you lose your job.
Or you can’t finance your home.
Or the doctor tells you that you have
cancer.
Or you discover that in a low-crime
area a man broke into a home, brutally stabbed and killed a 67 year old woman
in the wee hours of the morning.
If God is in control, why doesn’t he
just stop all of this?
Why must evil exist?
C.S. Lewis imagined a world without
pain and suffering and evil. He wondered
why God didn’t just stop evil, but he came to realize that such a world would
make little sense.
Lewis wrote, “We can, perhaps,
conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of this abuse of free
will by His creatures at every moment: so that a wooden beam became soft as
grass when it was used as a weapon, and the air refused to obey me if I
attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults. But such
a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and in which, therefore,
freedom of the will would be void; nay, if the principle were carried out to
its logical conclusion, evil thoughts would be impossible, for the cerebral
matter which we use in thinking would refuse its task when we attempted to
frame them.” (C. S. Lewis The Problem
of Pain Harper Collins:New York, 1996 p.24-25)
In other words, God is in control,
but not in the same way that a puppeteer is in control. God created, and allows us the freedom to
reject the Creator.
So here we are in a world of evil. So when a child is molested and killed, do we
simply smile and say, “God is in control?”
To simply do that seems so shallow.
Almost silly.
In fact, it is almost to be in denial
that there is so much evil around us.
What does it mean to live in an evil
world and to say, “God is in control?”
When the Book of Revelation was
written, it was during a time of tremendous violence and evil.
Christians were being killed for
their faith. There was no religious
freedom. There were wars. There were terrorists. Crime was rampant. The city of Rome had suffered a terrible city-wide
fire. Ethics were out and scandals were
in.
It would have been easy for
Christians to lose their faith.
It would have been easy for them to
respond to violence with violence. It
would have been easy to have given up on ethical living, and to have lived like
everyone else.
But when John told his church, “God
is in control,” it meant, “we know how
the movie ends. We’ve read the spoiler
in the review. We know what the last page
of history says.”
To know that God is in control is to
be able to live justly, in unjust world.
To know that God is in control is to
be able to love, when there so much hate in the world.
To know that God is in control is to
be able to watch the television news with its stories of rape and violence and
murder and not go crazy.
In 1770, an incident in Boston led to British soldiers
firing upon civilians, killing five Americans.
You’ve read about that incident – the Boston Massacre. The colonists were outraged and this incident
contributed to a growing movement of American independency. Many wanted to hang the British without
trial, calling them enemy combatants.
John Adams, one of our greatest founding fathers, agreed to defend the
British troops in a court of law. He
believed that even in the face of great evil, the rule of law and the right of
trial must be held sacred.
But he and his wife faced threats of
violence, and they were concerned for their lives and for the lives of their
children.
In his diary, John Adams reflected on
the encouragement he received from his wife, who had told him that, “she was
very willing to share in all that was to come and place her trust that God was
in control.”
To say that God is in control is not
to understand God, but to trust God.
God is in control.
He was in control at the time of
creation.
He was in control at the time John
wrote Revelation.
He is in control today.
And someday, Christ will return and
establish his rightful and righteous kingdom and there will be no longer any
doubt that God is indeed in control.
That is the good news of Revelation.
I heard a story recently about a
mother who was struggling with her strong-willed 3-year-old son, Thomas, who
looked at him with a stern eye and asked a question that she thought would
bring the child in line.
“Thomas, who is in charge here?”
She did not get the answer she
expected or hoped for, which was that she, the mother, was in charge.
But she was not disappointed with the
answer.
Apparently quoting what he had
learned in Sunday School, Thomas answered without batting an eye, “Jesus is in
charge.”[1]
We live in a time of violence, but it
will not always be this way – for God is in control and Jesus is coming back
soon.
We live in a time of illness and
disease and terrible deaths, but it will not always be this way for God is in
control and Jesus is coming back soon.
We live in a time of terrorists and
crime and natural disasters, but it will not always be this way – for God is in
control and Jesus is coming back soon.
Copyright 2016.
Dr. W. Maynard Pittendreigh
All rights reserved
Ministers may feel free to use some or all of this sermon in
their own ministries as long as they do not publish in print or on the Internet
without ascribing credit to the author.
[1] PreachingToday.com – A Higher Order; Citation: Susan C.
Kimber, Brea , CA . Today’s Christian Woman,
"Heart to Heart."