The End or the Beginning?

First, an explanation and an apology. The following is my wrap-up to our church's year-long exploration of the Bible. It follows a two-week hiatus during which I was engaged in year-end festivities and services at church. And it's not an original post. It's actually the manuscript for my final sermon of 2010. So, apologies: first for letting the year end without regular posts; second, for the length of this one! Thanks to everyone who put in the effort to read through the entire Bible this year. And please stay tuned for what we have in store for 2011.
-Ben


Revelation 21:1-5a
1 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 2 I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. 4 He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
5 He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new

One of this winter’s blockbuster movies is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – part one. The last adaptation of the last book in the outrageously popular Harry Potter series. Of course everyone is so sad to see the series come to an end that they’ve stretched the last book out into two movies. I’m sure I remember someone saying something once about killing a golden goose… Okay, I myself got caught up in all the hype over the Harry Potter books. And I will never forget reading the last installment. It was the summer of 2007. Melody and I were on vacation with my family. We’d read almost the entire book, and then found out my sister and brother-in-law were listening to it on CD. So, one sweltering afternoon when Isabelle was taking her nap we just sat in the living room and listened to that final chapter.

We listened with mixed emotions. Plot threads got tied up; characters died; good triumphed over evil. We were sad that it was all over, but satisfied that it was over at the same time. We could finally put Harry Potter down and get on with our lives.
There’s something about finishing the last chapter of a book or a series of books. Sometimes you throw the book down and say, “Great, I never have to read that again!” Sometimes you wish you could go back to the beginning and read it for the first time all over again.

Then there’s the Bible. This week a number of us will finish reading the Bible in its entirety. I know a few of us will heave a sigh of relief. I know a few of us will dive right back in and read it again. But of course the Bible isn’t like any other book. It doesn’t tell any other story. It tells God’s story. And it tells our story. So when we get to the end and say, “This is how it ends?”, we’re personally invested.

Revelation is how the Bible ends. But if you’ve ever read or are currently reading Revelation, you can’t help asking, “Is this how it’s really going to end for us? We can’t help asking because John’s account is so bizarre. Really. It’s full of stuff that’s pretty far removed from our reality. There are scrolls; angels; plagues; horsemen; a beast and a dragon; falling stars. And since Revelation was written readers have tried to figure out what it all means.

Without taking a lot of time – really, Revelation deserves a whole sermon series – here’s what I consider the most helpful way of understanding Revelation. As far as we know, Revelation was written by the Apostle John – one of Jesus’ disciples, author of the Gospel of John as well as the three letters of John. Revelation was most likely written at the very end of the first century. At this time the Christian church has become fairly well-established throughout the Roman world. And the church is under pressure. Some of the excitement of Christianity has worn off. Every day life for Christians is hard. Many who’d been led to believe that Jesus would come back soon are disillusioned – it’s starting to sink in that he may not be back as quickly as first thought.
And the current emperor – most likely Domitian – has instituted emperor worship as the state religion. This means that citizens will have to attend worship services; make gestures of devotion to statues and monuments; pay tribute at the shrine of the emperor before any kind of business transaction. It means anyone who gives their highest loyalty to someone other than the emperor will suffer the consequences.

John writes Revelation from a cell – he’s been imprisoned for his faith. He’s writing a letter that he hopes will get out to the churches. As the last living Apostle it’s John’s sacred duty to encourage Christians everywhere to keep the faith.
John writes a letter that reminds his church that they’re caught in a cosmic struggle between good and evil. John has to remind them that there is only one God. That there is only one ruler of all and it’s not the emperor. But how do you do that when the Empire is reading your mail? You write in code. You use symbols and metaphors – “a beast; a dragon; a lamb that looked like it had been slain.” For much of Revelation John is using code to explain to his church what’s happening in the world around them. The two main messages are this: Jesus Christ is Lord; and this time of trial will come to an end.

Of course the side of Revelation that captures our attention is the fact that the time leading up the end is an ordeal. John may have been describing bad stuff that was happening to him and his church. But we know full well that not everything John describes has happened yet. Jesus hasn’t come back. And if this time of great trouble – “The tribulation” as it’s popularly known – if this has to precede Jesus’ return, then we have questions. Times are tough enough now. Will they get worse? We don’t know. What we do know is that this will all end. It has to eventually. Even absolute unbelievers know that the world as we know it will end.
What none of us can imagine is what comes after that.

And we have mixed feelings about that.
There are certain things we don’t mind seeing the end of. On a personal level, we like it when final exams are over. We look forward to the end of a bad cold or the remission of a deadly disease. Sometimes the end of the day can’t come soon enough. On a broader scale we like the idea of the end of hunger; war; pollution; reality TV; partisan politics. There are experiences and events and phenomena that we want to end.
But then there are all kinds of good things that we wish would never end. Christmas. Vacations. One great day with your kids and your husband, or wife. Birthdays. Wedding days. Youth, vitality, friends and family and home runs and great concerts.
We have mixed feelings about endings because for every bad thing that ends there’s five good things that end, too. As our lives progress we often feel increasing urgency about the passage of time and the end of the best things in life.

I started watching the show Mad Men this fall. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a TV program set in a Madison Avenue advertising firm in the early ‘60’s. A number of the show’s main characters are driven, hard-living ad executives. One of these is Roger Sterling, an aging partner in the firm who has spent his professional career living it up. Partway through the first season, Roger has his first heart attack. The show’s main character, Don Draper, visits him in the hospital. Roger, usually very debonair, looks terrible. He thinks he’s going to die. He says to Draper, “You ever think about it?” Draper says, “What?”
“You know – your soul.”
Draper says, “Not really.” Roger says, “I wish I believed something. Jesus” - (funny the times people use profanity) - “God. I just wish I was going somewhere.” He captures this longing for the end not to be the end.
Deep down there’s a part of all of us that longs for this. For the end not to be the end. We don’t want to lose all the stuff we love about life in the process of saying good-bye to this world. As much as we long for Jesus to come back and put an end to the brokenness and injustice and suffering of our world, we don’t want to lose all the things we love about it, either.

Like it or not, the God of the Bible is a God who is always doing something new. Always pushing his people to take the next step in their journey. When God’s people get too comfortable, God spurs them on. When God’s people get tired, God always promises something new.
Revelation seems to be the end of the story. But this is just one chapter – one chapter in a much longer story.

The difficult circumstances that John describes – the so-called “Tribulation” – these aren’t anything worse than members of his church are experiencing even as they read the letter. And they aren’t any worse than what millions of people experience in our world every day. John is describing life in a broken world. He’s describing life during the most difficult chapter in the story of God and his people. John states without a doubt that this chapter will end.
But this isn’t the last chapter in the story. Not by far. In fact, it’s just the beginning. The next chapter will be infinitely better than the one John is writing. And infinitely better than the one we’re living right now.

Look at how Revelation ends. John says, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away…” The Bible begins: “In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth.” In other words, the Bible starts and ends with Creation. It ends with a whole new beginning!

Our ideas about the afterlife have unfortunately been heavily influenced by cartoons and Philadelphia Cream Cheese commercials. We have visions of spending eternity sitting on clouds playing harps, maybe singing the occasional rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Kind of like being in a church choir forever. For some of us, that sounds like heaven. But not all of us.
This isn’t the picture the Bible gives us. Here we see God bringing his creative work full circle. Ending the brokenness that spoiled his good Creation. Beginning a new Creation that is everything the first one was meant to be. The picture is of us living forever and being able to do everything we were created to do: tending the earth and its creatures; making music and art; playing games; talking and learning and teaching; communing with each other and with God without the restraint of fear, insecurity, shame or prejudice. Spending forever doing and being all the best things humans were made to do and be.

The truth is we can’t imagine how good it’s going to be. Our only frame of reference is our life now. Our life is so limited by pain and loss and the sheer irrevocable passage of time. Every experience is fleeting. Every good thing comes to an end. We can’t imagine never again saying, “I’d give anything to go back to that time.” We can’t imagine never again saying, “I miss you; I miss that; I miss those days.” We can’t imagine what all will be part of life in the New Creation. But we can know for certain what won’t be part of it. Mourning; crying; pain; death. These, says John, are part of the old order of things that will pass away forever.

In Revelation 21 John uses the image of a wedding day. He describes Christ and his church being united once and for all like a bride and groom. The thing about a wedding day is that it’s just the beginning. You’re in trouble if you’ve given all your thought to the wedding day and none at all to every day thereafter. Sometimes it’s easy to do that – to get so preoccupied with the dress and the flowers and the cake and the food and the first dance that you forget that the day will come to an end and you’ll spend the rest of your life with that person. In the general scheme of things the wedding itself is of little consequence. What matters is everything that follows.
Everything between now and when Jesus comes back is the engagement. His return is the wedding day. It’s not the end. It’s the beginning. We are living for everything that follows. And everything that follows will never end. This is God’s promise.

My favorite books growing up were the Narnia series by CS Lewis. If you’ve read them you know that they’re seven novels about the adventures of a number of children who pass from our world into the parallel world of Narnia. Each of the books chronicles a different facet of an epic struggle between good and evil in that world. At the end of the final book, The Last Battle, all the main characters from all the previous books are pulled through time and space and reunited. They watch as the Narnia they know is destroyed. But then they’re taken to a new Narnia. The new one has many of the features of the old; but it’s somehow bigger, and more beautiful. Everything they loved yet so much more. And the book ends with this statement:
“All their life in this world and their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

This is how you want your favorite story to end. To know that the characters you love just keep going. That the adventure never ends. But isn’t this also the way you wish your story would end? To know that the end was just the beginning?
The Bible’s our story. The story of our life with God. And this is how it ends. With a whole new beginning. The beginning of a new, amazing chapter that will go on forever.