This month is Bible Month which is looking at the book of Revelation and this week the material suggests we look as chapters 10-13 with the heading “Witness, worship and waiting”. This seems a little odd as the traditional chapter divisions don’t marry up with the different sections in the book. Chapter 10 picks up in the middle of one section and Chapter 13 leaves off in the middle of another. I’ve thus chosen to concentrate on Revelation 12:1-15:4. This is a more sensible unit which, in my Bible commentary is given the title “The story of God’s people in conflict with evil“. The passage is not easy to understand so I’ve prepared a summary that you can read at this link.

I preached this sermonoon 18/06/2023 after the reading of Revelation 12:1-17.

So how are we supposed to make sense of this sort of reading in the modern world?

First, I think we need to acknowledge that this is a vision, or a dream. John, the author, makes this clear in the very first verses of the book. The language is poetic and metaphorical and should not be taken literally. Second, it contrasts the contemporary world of the author, and the power structures within it, to the world intended by God and revealed in the scripture. It is not a vision of the future and there is no value in trying to go through the book and work out how it predicts various events of world history. So if we want to explore its relevance to us today we need to explore which characteristics of the historical world that it portrays are still relevant today.

John uses thinly veiled imagery to comment on the Roman empire (the first beast). He sees this as the agent of the devil. Something opposed to what God wants. One of the key characteristics of the opposition is that it calls people to worship it rather than God. As we know, the Roman Emperor was considered divine and worshipped. At the stage in history that this letter was written, the Romans were extremely tolerant of all sorts of religions, as long as people would worship the Emperor as a god, as well as their own gods.

In the current world we don’t have a single political entity that exerts power in the way that Rome did, but we do have political and economic ideology that is becoming dominant throughout the world. It’s an ideology of materialism and consumerism. At its heart is a worship of money. It started off in Europe and North America and is now spreading out its tentacles to embrace the whole world. It’s like Rome in that it is amazingly tolerant of other world views and religions as long as people acknowledge its power as well. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, are all welcome to express their faith however they want, as long as it fits in with predominant worldview of a consumer economy.

John’s second beast is subservient to the first beast but no less dangerous. It represents all those people and organisations that collaborated with Rome and were effectively agents of its power. Rome exerted its power by unholy allowances with local rulers. Rulers would pledge allegiance to Rome and pay their taxes promptly. In return Rome would use the threat of its military might to keep that ruler in power. Herod, the Biblical king, was a good example of this.

In the current world we can recognise all sorts of organisations who feel that they need to accept the predominant world view in order to secure their own existence. Many political parties and charities are essentially allowed to operate and survive only if they acknowledge the unquestionable power of the markets. It is fine for charities, for example, to provide food to people who are impoverished by the way our world works, as long as they do not criticise the system that has caused that poverty. We now even have laws in the UK that prevent charities from expressing political viewpoints. We also see this in international relations. A broad summary of how the United Nations and World Bank works is that they will offer financial support to poorer nations, as long as those poorer nations promise to abide by the terms of a globalised consumption based market economy.

John calls this out. It’s not right he says. Rome may be the dominant power, it may be a tolerant power, the lives of the wealthy and powerful may have been made much easier if they collaborated with that dominant power, but it is not what God intended. God did not intend a world in which everyone was subservient to the Roman emperor and enslaved to the economic and political system that he represented. God intended a world in which we would love God, love each other and live our lives in all the fulness that this offers.

I believe the same message is true with the dominant world power today. A consumer based market economy may be the dominant power, it may keep the wealthy and the powerful in control, but it is not what God intended. God did not intend a world in which everyone is desperate for material possessions and tied into a system in which they face destitution if they fail to work for a meagre minimum wage. God intended a world in which we would love God, love each other and live our lives in all the fulness that this offers.

Perhaps most importantly though John’s vision is of conflict. John sees the Roman empire as an evil that has to be resisted and fought against. There is a call to action and opposition. This opposition comes primarily from a Christian community that sees itself as different, that is not subservient to the current world view. The mark of the beast is a mark of collaboration with the dark power, with Rome. It is a mark on the forehead of everyone. Averyone apart from 144,000 sof the people of God. Final victory is portrayed as coming about through a community who mark themselves out as different to the rest. People who are in the world but not of the world in which they found themselves.

I believe this is the calling of the church today. Our calling is to be in the world but not of it, to mark ourselves as opposing the dominant world view and willing to hold fast to God. It is through that faithfulness to God that victory will come.

It’s interesting to me that although my Biblical commentary refers to the 144,000 as the “Army of the Lamb”, there is no mention of an army, or any reference to any armour or weapons or military tactics. It’s interesting how this in itself attests to our subservience to a military-industrial worldview. Even the author of a commentary on the Bible assumes that a large group of people opposing evil is best described as an army.

But the 144,000 are not an army (at least not in this section of Revelation). The 144,000 are a worshipping community. They don’t brandish swords, they sing songs. They don’t attack to kill, vanquish and coerce, they hold up a vision of the world as God intends it. Their victory comes not through military prowess but by worship and witness. Our first priority, in a world that worships mammon, is to continue to worship God. Not a God that conforms to the dominant worldview, but one who has a completely different world view offering good news to the poor, sight to the blind and freedom for the oppressed.

The second priority is to bear witness by living out our lives in the light of that vision of how God intends us to live. We need to be seen to be a community who live differently, we need to tell each other, and the wider community of how our lives have been affected by our experience of God’s love.

The final, and less comforting message, is that we need to do this in expectation of opposition. John was writing after a period of persecution of the early Christian community, particularly of the community that had grown up in Rome. John knew that Christians had died for their faith, and he saw this testimony as one of the most powerful tools that community had to express its difference and opposition to Roman authority and to hold up its vision for a different world. Christians, as people of peace and sacrificial love, could not and should not oppose power with violence. Expression of their identity in the peaceful love of God and as separate to the values of the world was the only power they needed to defeat evil.

If we are to defeat the evil in our contemporary world then we must expect opposition. The evil we confront today is much more subtle and pernicious than the brute force of Rome. We are more likely to confront mockery or even indifference than we are to encounter physical violence, but we still need to resist this and hold true to our faith. We can even question the strength of our faith as a Christian community through the observation that we are not, in most parts of the world, persecuted. Where Christians are persecuted in the world today, it is because they are perceived as a threat to the dominant world view. The fact that we, in the UK, are not persecuted as Christians is largely because we do not pose a threat to anyone. Perhaps we should. Perhaps the lack of persecution of Christians in the UK is a sign that we are not responding to John’s vision of Church that stands apart from the world and proclaims an alternative to it. Perhaps we should be more prepared to take a stand, to proclaim that there is an alternative, and to start to live that alternative out.

So let’s not dismiss this passage as the ranting of a first century madman. Let’s look behind the words and images to the critique that he offers of the world in which he lived. Let’s see in it how little the world has changed and learn lessons from it. Above all let us see ourselves as different to the world in which we live. Let us live our lives out as if we are different. Let us hold to that vision and that lifestyle even when we face opposition. For it is through our worship and our witness that God’s final victory will be won. That all people will eventually come to recognise his face and live lives in all the fulness that that offers.