Worship in the Last Days
May 30, 2021
Preached by Ben Bechtel
Scripture Reading
Revelation 1:1-8
1:1 The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, 2 who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw. 3 Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.
4 John to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth.
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood 6 and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. 7 Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.
8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
Today we are beginning a series on Revelation chapters 1-3, a portion of Revelation which is commonly called the seven letters to the churches. Now, for those who were not at our church membership meeting at the beginning of the month, let me bring you into a moment that happened in the meeting. Pastor Benjamin was talking in more detail about his plan for his summer sabbatical, which has now begun. He began to talk about how the preaching was going to be covered this summer and announced that we were going to be preaching through the letters to the churches in Revelation 1-3. And as he said that there was an audible gasp of intrigue.
Now, my ego instantly wanted to think something of this. But as I’ve thought about it, clearly it is not my preaching prowess that caused them to respond like this. It was the book of Revelation. I think many of us have a strange relationship with the book Revelation. We are incredibly intrigued by it, but our intrigue comes from information other people tell us about it. We don’t actually get close to the book ourselves. Our practice oftentimes in the church is “all Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness except Revelation.” (2 Timothy 3:16)
Our avoidance of the book of Revelation leaves us a lot like healthy people who are deficient in one particular vitamin or mineral their body really needs. It doesn’t matter how healthy you eat otherwise, if you are low on iron, your health will suffer. We are people at this church who love the Scriptures, but if we don’t put the book of Revelation into our diet, we will miss out on the blessings of full spiritual health. So, let’s get close to this book and see for ourselves the beauty of Jesus displayed.
What Is This Book?
With that said, Revelation is a uniquely difficult book to understand, because it is unlike any other piece of writing we have in the Bible, especially in the New Testament. So, in order to understand it rightly, we have to ask ourselves the question what is the nature of this book we have open in front of us?
It Is an Unveiling
The book begins by claiming that it is the revelation of Jesus Christ. Now that word “revelation” is actually the Greek word we transliterate as apocalypse. The word apocalypse in Greek doesn’t carry the same end of the world, no toilet paper on the shelves type of connotation. Rather, it means to unveil something, to reveal something previously hidden. Now, typically when we pull back the curtain on something what we find is either much less impressive than what is on the outside (think Wizard of Oz) or worse it reveals unsavory details of what went on behind the scenes (think Watergate or Harvey Weinstein).
However, this is not true of our world. The book of Revelation pulls back the curtain of what is going on in our world to show us the plans and purposes of God in history. This is, after all, the revelation of Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Savior of the world. It is an unveiling of his wonderful plans and purposes for history.
Notice two things here. First, this book reveals rather than obscures. This book assumes that it will be intelligible to the reader. Revelation actually sheds light on God’s purposes in the world through Jesus. We can understand this book. Second, an apocalypse was a style of writing at this time period, especially in the Jewish world. There are other “apocalyptic” works of writing in and around the first century. One of the primary ways this type of literature communicates is through pictures and symbols. A helpful way to understand this is to think about Revelation more like a cartoon or a graphic novel than a classic work of literature. Its story is told through the mode of pictures and symbols. The pictures and symbols are the vehicles used for this unveiling, as we will begin to see next week.
It Is a Prophecy
Read with me again Revelation 1:3:
3 Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.
Did you catch that at the beginning? This book is a prophecy. The book of Revelation is fashioned like the OT prophetic books, particularly the books of Daniel and Zechariah. Now, like apocalypse, prophet is another word that can lead us into trouble because of our preconceived ideas. Many of us when we hear the word prophet, what comes to our mind is a baptized fortune teller, someone commissioned by God to tell us about the future. However, this is not the primary role of prophets in the Bible.
When we think of prophets, we ought to think of prosecuting attorneys rather than fortune tellers. The primary job of a prophet was to bring a message from God to his people. The message of the Old Testament prophets was often a legal charge levelled against the people that they had broken God’s law and needed to repent. Like Revelation, the Old Testament prophets often conveyed this message with vivid imagery. The primary function of the prophets was not fortune telling, but truth telling, about the people’s sin and the judgment which awaited them if they continued in it and about the blessing that would be theirs if they turned from their sin.
The prophets also spoke about the blessing that awaited the people of God in the coming age of the Messiah. They held out hope to the people of God by promising an age where the Messiah, the King would come to bring salvation to his people and restore his creation. In holding out this hope of blessing, the OT prophets did talk about the future. They spoke about the coming age of God’s Messiah, an age referred to as the last days (Daniel 2:28; Is. 2:2). This was the expectation and hope of the OT prophets.
A question that comes up a lot in Christian circles is, “do you think we are living in the last days?” If you were to ask me that question I would say, “yes, of course…and we have been for the last two-thousand years.” You see, what the prophets of old looked forward to has come in Jesus Christ. And what they thought was reserved for the end of history has broken into history. The last days have broken into this present evil age. With the resurrection of Jesus, his ascension into heaven, and the pouring out his Spirit at Pentecost in Acts 2 the last days have dawned (Acts 2:14; Joel 2:28-29). We are in the last days, we have been since Jesus went to heaven and poured out his Spirit, and these last days will continue until Jesus returns.
And here we find the key difference between Revelation and OT prophecy. John understood that he was prophesying in the midst of the last days, the time that the OT prophets were looking forward to:
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. (v. 1a)
Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy…for the time is near. (v. 3)
This sounds an awful lot like Jesus saying the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Like the prophets of old, John is telling the truth to his readers here. The book of Revelation, and chapters 2-3 in particular, is a prophetic charge for the church to turn from sin to God and stand firm precisely because the blessings of the Messiah are available now. And this ethical challenge is for the last days, meaning not some specific time at the end of history but for the church since Acts 2 all the way up until Jesus returns.
It Is a Letter
Look with me at Revelation 1:4-5a:
4 John to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth.
To those of you who are remotely familiar with the NT, this should sound very familiar to you. And even for those who aren’t, this still might sound familiar to you because this is the beginning of a letter. John is writing the book of Revelation as a letter to these seven churches in Asia, meaning Asia Minor (modern day Turkey).
I have to confess that I regret what we named this series because it can be misleading. We called this series Letters to the Churches because there are seven specific addresses from Jesus to the seven churches to whom Revelation was written in chapters 2-3. However, this could lead you to think that chapters 2-3 are seven separate letters and that the rest of the book is something else entirely. Please hear me: Revelation is one letter, from chapters 1-22. It is all addressed to specific churches, in a specific location, with specific needs and problems.
Now, why is this so important? This gives us a good boundary on how we interpret the book. If our interpretation of any part of this book wouldn’t have made sense as a challenge or encouragement to those believers in Asia at the end of the first century, we are not understanding the book correctly.
In summary: the book of Revelation is a prophetic letter which was written as an encouragement and challenge from the living Jesus to these first century churches in Asia, and to all of his church living in these last days from the first century onward. That is the nature of this book. Now the second question is…
Why Was This Book Written?
To bring blessing…
We’ve read verse 3 several times already in this sermon, but look with me once more at this verse:
3 Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written in it, for the time is near.
There is a promise attached to the reading and application of this book. God wants you to understand this book. Revelation was not written for Bible scholars. It was written for ordinary servants of God (v. 1). God wants to bless you through the reading and application of this book. If we listen and heed these words in the coming weeks, we will find rich blessing for our souls in Christ.
…to the church under fire in the last days…
We already said that this letter was written to the churches in Asia Minor near the end of the first century. At the end of the first century in that part of the world, Christians were beginning to feel pressure. Many scholars believe that the book of Revelation was written around 95 A.D. during the reign of the Roman emperor Domitian. If Nero, the preceding emperor started the fire of Christian persecution, Domitian cranked up the heat. Nero only persecuted the church in and around Rome. Domitian began to make Christian persecution more widespread across the empire, including parts of Asia Minor.[1] Not only was the church facing persecution, but we also find from reading these seven addresses to the churches in chapters 2-3 that the church also faced the threats of false teaching and moral compromise with the culture around them.
No matter the temperature of the age in which we live, we are tempted to forsake our faithful witness to Jesus. If our age is calm, we are tempted toward apathy. If our age is hostile to Christianity, we are tempted toward discouragement or to respond with hostility. If our age is one of moral corrosion, we are tempted toward moral compromise. If our age is one of prosperity, we are tempted to seek comfort. Does any of that sound relevant to our lives today? Any of those temptations sound particularly pressing?
Revelation tells us that the church living in the last days is living not in peace time but in war time. The last days of blessing in Jesus overlap with this present evil age. The breaking in of the last days means an intensification of the conflict between Jesus and the kingdom of darkness. This letter is written to these seven churches and the churches of our day on the frontlines. Whether it may feel like it or not, if you claim the name of Jesus in these last days, your life is one of war. How do we continue following Jesus in this age of warfare? Revelation was written so that the church in the fire of end times tribulation could find blessing…
…by lifting our eyes to worship our God.
Read with me again verses 4-8:
4 John to the seven churches that are in Asia:
Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, 5 and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth.
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood 6 and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. 7 Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him. Even so. Amen.
8 “I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”
As we read the book of Revelation, and as we read these verses at the introduction to the book, we are called to worship God. The way in which the Christian under the temptation and fire of the last days continues to follow Jesus and receives his blessing is to fix our eyes on Jesus in worship.
Notice how the text draws our attention to worship God both as he is in charge of history and is actively involved in it. In verses 4 and 8 God is described as the one who was, is, and is to come. God is past, present, and future. He is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Nothing happens on the playing field of world history, from the moment he created to the moment he will come again, that has taken him by surprise. He is in complete control, and he knows what he is doing. Your life is no accident! Your life and this world are not without purpose! There is one who rules over it all.
And the one who is sovereign over all history is the one who is also intimately involved in it. Our God is so invested in history that he entered into history in the person of Jesus in order to see history through to its fulfillment in the new heavens and new earth. Jesus took on flesh and blood and then let his flesh be torn and his blood be shed so that we despite our sin could have a place in his eternal kingdom. The God of history, of past, present, and future suffered, died, and rose from the dead in time and space so that you can endure the fires of these last days and be raised in glory with Jesus! And one day, as verse 7 says Jesus will come and make all things right and new.
Both God’s rule over history and his action in history for us ought to lead us to worship! John breaks out spontaneously here in verses 5-6. These truths about Jesus were too good to hold it in! And it is precisely this worship which will sustain us through the times of tribulation.
This book was written to bring blessing to the church under fire in the last by lifting our eyes to worship our God. The question is, does your reading of Revelation lead you more to fear, worry, and anxiety about the present and future than it does to worship Jesus? If so, I would submit to you that you are not understanding what Jesus has for you in this book. This book was written so that when you feel pressure from all sides, from your own sinful heart, from those around you, from the difficulty of being a Christian in the world, you might worship the living Jesus and run for refuge into his strong arms.
In closing I’ll leave you with the words of the author to the book of Hebrews 12:3-4:
3 Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted. 4 In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.
[1] Stott, What Jesus Thinks of His Church, 13.
Family Discussion Questions
1. How does understanding Revelation’s original context as a prophetic letter change the way we read the book?
2. In what areas do you feel pressure to give up in following Jesus?
3. How does worship of the living Jesus give you comfort and encouragement in the midst of those pressures to cease being a faithful follower of him?
