Author: Bryan Richardson

Re: Verse reading–Revelation 14 (day three)   

“Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.” Consider what death is: darkness, isolation, hopelessness, abandonment, cessation.  Jesus says in John 8 that the one who counts on him will know none of these things.  For the one who has obeyed the word of Jesus Christ, there will be, at the moment this life ends, not one millisecond of dread or regret—of falling into the abyss or receding into the void.  We experience that person as dead, because we cannot presently live with him, but that person will know nothing of the sort.  And one day, his body will be raised to join his spirit in a fully human life in this renewed universe that will never grow old. Now that’s blessed. Go on and rescue that word from social media before it’s too late.

Re:Verse passage: Revelation 12:1-6, 13-17; 13:1-4, 11-18 (day three) 

“The Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”  People are often surprised to hear that their actions have consequences for which they are accountable.  And sometimes, people blame the church—or more commonly, “organized religion” (just a hair’s breadth away from “organized crime”) for making up this system.  But accountability is not an arbitrary system, it’s a fundamental reality.  And it’s certainly not an invention of the church.  (Accountability gives too much credit to the moral reasoning of the individual; you don’t want to emphasize the value of each person if you’re just seeking raw power.)  Accountability is the way the universe has worked from the beginning.  And sinful humans cannot survive it, so God’s mercy has been right there all along—“from the foundation of the world”—to save our lives.

Re:Verse passage: Revelation 10:1-9; 11:1-15 (day three)

“These two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth.”  It’s not uncommon these days for someone to claim that he’s “evolving” on this or that issue, which almost always means that he’s moving from a biblically orthodox belief to a novel, less biblically-faithful position.  But the word “evolving” is a dodge.  Rather than owning his heresy, rather than arriving at a position through careful reflection, the person who caves to the spirit of the age will assign responsibility to forces beyond his control.  Both the Bible and the church will stand through it all, bearing witness to the truth: Men are accountable to God.  The Bible explains what the church lives out, and wicked men and women will find comfort in neither.  But they will find the way to eternal life.  Stay true, church.

Re:Verse reading–Revelation 8 and 9 (day three)

“The rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands.”  God has designed this universe in such a way that our freedom to indulge in evil results in deadly consequences—sometimes sooner, sometimes later, but always by the end of history.  In other words, the wrath of God is reality.  That wrath is not the result of God’s getting worked up into a lather by unruly men.  Wrath isn’t an eventual state of mind that God arrives at after he’s tried to entertain us into good behavior.  No, wrath is a constant quality of his character.  Men who turn their minds against God will discover that God is already against them.  There is no secret escape passage from sin.  Do you know someone who needs to know this?

Re:Verse reading–Revelation 7 (day three)

“After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne.”  Man’s exclusivity is unremarkable: Who among us hasn’t quietly delighted in someone’s outsider status?  God’s inclusivity is the newsworthy item here: “Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.”  But the wideness in God’s mercy is not unaffected by our door-closing habits. So he takes to task those of us who set up barriers that invite men to become “twice as much of a son of hell” as we would be.  Are you, then, a road-blocker or a path-clearer? How many in that innumerable multitude will stand there despite your efforts?

Re:Verse reading–Revelation 6 (day three)

“They called to the mountains and the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb!”  Sound familiar?  We’ve heard this before–in Genesis.  Those who want to keep on thinking about the universe in the same way will always attempt to hide themselves from God. The underside of a rock or the interior of a cave now becomes preferred real estate. The intimacy of the echo chamber holds greater appeal than the intimacy of the confessional.  Which place do you seek?

Re:Verse reading–Revelation 4:1-7, 5:1-14 (day three)

“There before me was a throne in heaven with someone sitting on it.”  “There is no there there,” Gertrude Stein famously said after visiting her childhood home and discovering it was no more.  Such a phrase taps into the common human anxiety that what should be permanent actually decays or fades away or perhaps didn’t really ever exist in the way you thought it did.  When a man contemplates God, that old anxiety again surfaces: What if God does not exist?  What if I have nowhere to go?  What if there is no there there?  In our sin-dimmed thinking, we have forgotten God, and we have lost the way to find him.  Into that twilight, John speaks a word of revelation: Someone occupies the place of sovereignty.  How will you live when you understand that God reigns?

Re:Verse reading–Revelation 2:1-11; 3:1-6, 14-21 (day three) 

“He who has an ear, let him hear.”  Hearing is hard, so we often use our ears for purposes other than that.  We use our ears as early warning systems: We hear a voice we don’t want to encounter, so we walk the other way.  We use our ears as filters: We don’t give attention to difficult or complicated communication.  We use our ears as instruments of revision: We let them convince us we heard what we wanted to hear.  And that’s really why we find something like Revelation difficult.  It’s not the weird imagery; it’s the repurposed ears.  But the Lord says if we’ll do the hard work of listening, we’ll hear what we need to hear in order to live.

Re:Verse reading–Revelation 1 (day three)

“In his right hand he held seven stars.”  The degenerating analytical ability of the sin-compromised human mind has offered two hypotheticals: The universe is devoid of a good person at its center, or, we cannot know whether there is a good person at the universe’s center.  Various forms of despair arise from these two postulates, and so we’ve got the world that we’ve got.  Only when you live from the reality that “in him all things hold together” will your life–and communities and civilizations built on that revelation–take on the resilience that resists decay.  How can you start living in such a way?  You can trust Christ in the stuff of life: You won’t die if you forgive; your boss is not the arbiter of your future; and so on.  You are at God’s mercy, not the universe’s.