The Great Wedding
Introduction
We live in a time when people are very careful about spoilers. If you are not familiar with spoilers, it is the careless sharing of information about a novel or movie that spoils the ending for people who do know the whole story. It would be like telling people ahead of time that the Titanic sinks. Or maybe not.
What about the story of salvation history? About the story of God’s plan for humanity? We are not left wondering how things will end. It is not a mystery. The ending of the story is revealed to us. It is not revealed to spoil the story, in the sense of ruining it, but for the purposes of giving us hope. This is one of the purposes of the book of Revelation.
The Point of Revelation
I was a part of two different denominations before becoming a Baptist. The first never talked about Revelation, the second talked about Revelation all the time. For many people, the entire purpose of Revelation is to give us clues about the end-times. It is a source book for us to search for hidden meanings to discover details about how God will wrap up human history. The problem with this is that it only sees the original audience as having a role in passing on the book to future generations. That is Revelation had no value for the original audience because the end of the world didn’t happen in their life-time.
That is a bad way to interpret the Bible. Biblical books must be intelligible to the original audience before it can make sense to us. When we read the book of Revelation as a whole, we see that it is not just a collection of future predictions. Instead it is written to actual churches existing at the end of the first century, seven of them in the area that we now know as Turkey. Everything that we read in Revelation was written first for them and made sense to them, even though it also has meaning for us.
Who were these early Christians that this Revelation was given to? They were followers of Jesus who were attempting to live out their faith in a hostile world. It was a time when Christianity was emerging from Judaism and was losing the legal rights it had as a Jewish sect. The Romans didn’t care if people worshiped Jesus, as long as they were willing to acknowledge Caesar as lord, something they could not do. Christians were facing the choice of staying faithful and experiencing persecution or compromising their faith.
It would be possible to just tell those Christians to hold steady, and that message is there. But more is shared than that. Revelation acknowledges that the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer but it also states that is not the final word. We have heard that same message over and over throughout our tour of the Bible over the past year. This time more detail is given.
God is not a victim of history, he is the Lord of history. Time is moving in a certain direction and God has a plan for it.
All of this means that the contemporary audience who will find Revelation relevant are not those who are students of prophecy or those trying to calculate the date of Jesus’ return. Rather those who will find this book relevant are those who find life difficult, who are paying a price for following Jesus. With that in mind, let’s see where that takes us.
The Conclusion of Revelation
Revelation outlines the ongoing battle between good and evil, something we are familiar with from what we see on earth. What we discover is the battle that takes place on earth is reflecting a similar battle that is taking place in heaven. For a season, God allows the power of evil to seem to thrive but that chapter will come to an end. Ultimately, evil will be conquered.
This brings us to Revelation 21. The end of the story is not just the punishment of the devil, it is about the meeting of heaven and earth. What we find is that our hope is much more than going to heaven when we die. What is described is heaven coming to earth. We are told that something more intimate than us going to God is coming. Rather God will come to us. God will come and be with us, his presence will be experienced in a way that we can’t imagine. This is the promise of Emmanuel, God with us. That process began with Jesus coming into the world but will be fulfilled when Jesus comes back and hands over the kingdom to his Father.
Hear this through the ears of that first audience. As they suffered for their faith and God felt far away, they are being reminded that God is not ignorant of their experience and he is coming to them.
It is not just that God will come to his people, rather he will come to heal suffering. He will wipe away tears. Not that he will have an angel do it for him but that God will do it. We think of the resurrection as God bringing healing of our sick and weak bodies. But what is described here is the healing of all creation. Everything that didn’t work right will be fixed and made to operate the way it was designed. We don’t have full understanding of how this will all look and we don’t need the details. What is important is that God has a plan and he moving us toward the consummation of that plan. This brought hope to the first audience of Revelation and it should bring hope to us. Do you have tears that need to be wiped? Do you have pain that needs to be relieved? That day is coming.
Conclusion
This Revelation was first given to Christians almost two thousand years ago. The reason was not to get them to calculate details or even to get them to focus on the end of the world. The purpose was to give them hope, not to just endure suffering, but to remain faithful no matter the circumstances.
It is the same message for us. We may not be having the same life circumstances as those first Christians, but life is definitely not always easy. Revelation provides perspective. It gives us the big picture. No longer is life about random events of pain. We are in the midst of a battle between good and evil that is taking place in both heaven and earth. At times it looks like evil is winning but spoiler alert: God wins in the end. And because God wins, we win also.This is our source of hope.
