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Week 52  Revelation 21

Right near the end of his vision John saw: a new heaven and a new earth, for the old heaven and the old earth had disappeared…And (he) saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem , coming down from God out of heaven.
John gave quite a few details about the holy city but I stopped where he said: its walls were broad and high, with twelve gates guarded by twelve angels. And the names of the twelve tribes of Israel were written on the gates. There were three gates on each side – east, north, south, and west.
I stopped there because I was thinking back to the similarities I remember from Ezekiel’s Temple-vision. It had twelve gates too. Three on each of the cardinal points of the compass. Each gate named for a tribe:
North: Reuben Judah Levi
East: Joseph Benjamin Dan
South: Simeon Issachar Zebulun
West: Gad Asher Naphtali
In Revelation John didn’t name who was on which side of the city. So I wonder if I could get away with plugging-in Ezekiel’s names of the twelve gates of the temple. But I don’t think I can. It’s apples & oranges. The New Jerusalem vs. Ezekiel’s Temple. I just don’t know. It’s better not to guess.

Note: quotes from Revelation 21:1-2 21:12-13 14 Ezekiel 48:30-34 (NLT). I also thought back to Numbers 2 and the way the tribes were positioned by threes around the tabernacle to north-south-east-and-west. I compared those names. The groupings weren’t the same at all.

Week 51  Revelation 18

“The Fall of Babylon” is what my bible calls chapter 18 . In his vision John saw an angel appear and shout: Babylon is fallen. The margin in my bible says to check Isaiah (I do. Isaiah also says: Babylon is fallen).
The impression I have is that Isaiah was talking specifically about the actual city of Babylon in the ancient world. I check and see that the ancient ruins of the historical city of Babylon are in Iraq. Before the old Iraq-Babylon fell it was a flourishing center-of-the-world city. But Isaiah predicted that before too long: wild animals of the desert will move into the ruined city. Houses will be haunted by howling creatures. Ostriches will live among the ruins, and wild goats will come there to dance. Hyenas will howl in its fortresses, and jackals will make their dens in its palaces.
Reading Revelation I don’t get the impression that John is talking about the same Babylon that Isaiah was. I think he’s talking about another Babylon. A similar but different city or empire still in John’s future (and I’m guessing my future too). John describes this “New Babylon” in pretty graphic and uncomplimentary terms. And the outcome for Babylon #2? It has become the hideout of demons and evil spirits, a nest for filthy buzzards, and a den for dreadful beasts.
So it looks like equally dismal prospects for both Babylon Past & Babylon Future.

Note: quotes from Revelation 18:2 Isaiah 21:9 & Isaiah 13:21-22 (NLT). See Wikipedia “Babylon”

Week 51  Revelation 12

It’s pretty obvious that some bible passages are more interesting than others. I thought once about doing an exercise where I’d organize the 1189 chapters of the bible into an ordered list that went from Most Interesting Chapter to Least Interesting Chapter. It’d be very time-consuming. I doubt I’ll ever do it. But the basic idea came back to me while I was reading chapter 12 today.
Chapter 12 seems pretty important – really important actually – and I wondered if it was the Most Interesting Chapter in Revelation. (I can’t say for sure since I like the letters to the seven churches. But twelve is right up there.)
A couple of years ago I was thinking about the pregnant woman and the dragon. The dragon is furious with the woman and plans to kill her boy the minute he’s born. But he’s unsuccessful. The boy is born: a boy who was to rule all nations with an iron rod. An important boy. An important man.
So then the dragon can’t kill the mother either. Now he’s even more enraged because he failed twice. He starts looking around for substitute victims: the dragon…declared war against the rest of (the woman’s) children.
John spells out who these other ‘children’ are. They are a) people who keep God’s commandments and b) people who confess that they belong to Jesus.
Meaning that anyone who loves and obeys the Lord is in the dragon’s crosshairs.

Note: quotes from Revelation 12:5 17 (NLT)

Week 51  Revelation 7

Yesterday I was looking at the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The four horsemen appear one-after-the-other when the Lord opens the first four seals that were locking the Unopenable Book.
There were seven seals in total and six of them get opened in chapter six. The last one doesn’t get opened until chapter eight. The reason for that is because there’s a short time-out in chapter seven while people who are servants of the Lord are given a protective seal on their foreheads.
I think the main point of chapter seven is that the Lord cares about his people. That he is looking out for them. Protecting them.
But even though that’s what I think I get tied up a bit over the twelve tribes of 12,000 people who get the protective seal. There’s only 144,000 of them. Which is a very small number of servants-of-the-Lord.
A bigger concern is the twelve names John lists: Judah Reuben Gad Asher Naphtali Manasseh Simeon Levi Issachar Zebulun Joseph Benjamin.
Something’s wrong with the list. I flip back to Genesis 49: Reuben Simeon Levi Judah Zebulun Issachar Dan Gad Asher Naphtali Joseph Benjamin.
So Dan is completely omitted in Revelation.
The other inconsistency I don’t need to look up. After Genesis Joseph is replaced by his sons Ephraim & Manasseh. There is no tribe of Joseph. But in Revelation there is Joseph & Manasseh…but no Ephraim.
It’s not a big deal but I wonder what’s going on.

Note: lists from Revelation 7:5-8 & Genesis 49

Week 51  Revelation 6

Today I read about the four horsemen that John saw in Revelation six. And I thought back to Zechariah’s vision. A similar vision. There were four horses back there too: two red horses & a sorrel & a white. Zechariah wondered who the riders were and he was told: they are the ones the Lord has sent out to patrol the earth (Zechariah learned the earth was peaceful and quiet).
Things shape up a little differently in John’s vision. The focus there is on a sealed scroll – an Unopenable Book – that no one but the Lamb could access (chapter five implies that the Lamb is the Lord). When the Lamb began to break the seals the Unopenable Book seems less like a book and more like a huge vault with doors that start swinging open and from behind the first four doors ride John’s four horsemen. But John’s horsemen were different. For one thing the horses were different colors: white & red & black & off-white. And the horsemen hadn’t been patrolling. They’d been confined and inactive but now they’d been released to subject the earth to international-warfare famine disease & death. The four horsemen of the Revelation are about to inflict serious damage.
So I don’t know if there’s a connection between Zechariah’s four horsemen and John’s. Four horse-riders is a tempting similarity. But there’s differences too. So for now I’ll not complicate Revelation by trying to connect it to Zechariah.

Note: see Zechariah 1:8. Quote from Zechariah 1:10 (NLT)

Week 50  1 John 4

John says do not believe everyone who claims to speak by the Spirit. You must test them to see if the spirit they have comes from God.
Two things: a) don’t believe everyone/everything you hear and b) assess what you hear.
I don’t know how much of what I hear from day-to-day isn’t true…how much is lies half-truths deceptions misrepresentations falsities and like that. Maybe 50%. Who really knows? But sifting truth from lies is a pretty big task. In this case John is thinking about a subset of All Lies in Total and talks specifically about Religious Lies. A guy might seem to be a religious guy (says John) but don’t buy everything he’s selling.
That means there’s a second pretty practical question: how do I test what’s true & what isn’t? John gives what looks like a basic litmus-test for Religious Truths & Religious Non-Truths. The test for knowing what’s true and what’s false is to consider-the-source: if a prophet acknowledges that Jesus Christ became a human being (then) that person has the Spirit of God.
There’s a guy who’s ‘from God’ and a guy who isn’t. The acid-test I can use to distinguish between them is the question: what do you think about Jesus?
The gospels say lots of things about the Lord but the one about Jesus Christ being God and coming to earth in a material-human form moves to the very top of the list of Key Things to Believe.

Note: quotes from 1 John 4:1 2 (NLT)

Week 50  2 Peter 2

All the books of the NT have some pretty weighty content. For instance Peter: when people escape from the wicked ways of the world by learning about our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and then get tangled up with sin and become its slave again, they are worse off than before.
According to Peter if a guy breaks free from his old life but then goes back he’s not as-bad-off…he’s worse off: it would be better if he had never known the right way to live than to know it and reject it.
Let’s say that the numbers 1-25 are listed left-to-right across a page. The guy starts at #1 and follows the Lord – moving left-to-right and up the numbers…1-2-3-4-5-6. He gets to #6. For some reason he quits following the Lord. Back he goes: 6-5-4-3-2-1. Right back to where he started…right? Wrong says Peter.
It’s like the guy gets to #6. He decides to quit following the Lord so…back to #1. But he doesn’t stop at Square One. He keeps moving right-to-left past #1 to zero…maybe even farther into the negative numbers.
What’s his terminal point? No idea…but Peter says that #1 isn’t where he stops. It’s like any temporary progress he made contributes to making the regress even worse.
This is really seriously hard to figure…that a guy would potentially be better off and farther ahead by not following the Lord to begin with. It’s a hard pill-to-swallow and especially hard if it’s factually accurate.

Note: quote from 2 Peter 2:20 21 (NLT)

Week 50  1 Peter 1

Peter begins his letter talking about the topic of salvation but then for some reason takes a little sidetrack. It is salvation-related…but it’s more about prophets: salvation was something the prophets wanted to know more about. They prophesied about…salvation…even though they had many questions as to what it all could mean. They wondered what the Spirit of Christ within them was talking about when he told them in advance about Christ’s suffering and his great glory afterward.
Peter is kind of vague about how the mechanism of communication-transfer worked. He does say that the Spirit ‘within them’ was talking to them. Which is interesting but not too explicit.
More interesting to me is that the prophets themselves wanted to know more. Peter admits they had many questions as to what it all could mean. So even when a prophet got a miraculous forecast about the Lord he was – to some degree – still in the dark.
So for instance Isaiah said: to us a child is born…and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. This was good information no doubt. But it looks like Isaiah still had questions. Who will this be? When does he arrive? What’ll he do? What’ll things be like?
The prophets got correct – but not comprehensive – information.
They transmitted what they got but they – like their audience – still had plenty of questions.

Note: quotes from 1 Peter 1:10-11 (NLT) & Isaiah 9:6 (NIV)

Week 50  James 4

I made a mistake when I read James 4:5: do you think that the scripture speaks to no purpose:… The mistake was that I stopped right there at the colon (which James didn’t do since he still had half of the verse to write).
The problem with making a mistake is – obviously – that I’m wrong. But in this case I can live with it because my mistake left me asking a pretty good question: do I think that the scripture has no purpose?
It’s a pretty good & timely question to be asking myself during Week 50 because in a couple of weeks I’ll be deciding whether to start back in Genesis 1. Let’s face it…if the bible doesn’t have a goal or purpose then why should I bother?
So does the bible speak to no purpose? There’s two basic answers to the question:
Answer #1: Yes. The bible doesn’t really have any purpose.
Answer #2: No. The bible does have a purpose in mind.
I think it’s a pretty good self-administered bible-reader’s question to ask: if there’s no purpose or value or merit in the bible then why read it? On the other hand if there is something to be discovered then why not? There’s nothing much to lose…and maybe something to gain.

Note: This question is completely different than asking: is the bible difficult to understand? (if I asked 1,000,000 people that question only a couple of outliers would say: no the bible is simple.)

Week 49  James 3

James wrote: not many of you should become teachers in the church, for we who teach will be judged by God with greater strictness.
So if I’m a teacher I’ll be judged at a higher standard…
But if I’m a not teacher I’ll be judged at a lower standard.
This is a pretty interesting verse. Following the Lord is a little bit like being in a job where I’ll be evaluated for my work performance. Maybe not annually. But eventually.
I wondered whether I could map out a more comprehensive Assessment Hierarchy for the church. James says teachers will be assessed more strictly. What about other church positions? I started thinking back… In week 47 Paul listed a few positions: apostles prophets evangelists pastors teachers. He also mentioned bishops and deacons in the church. They’d likely be included. But I’m not sure what to make of people with “spiritual gifts” like healing & miracles & speaking in tongues. Are they ranked too?
I don’t get far before I start thinking that developing a church Assessment Hierarchy tool is likely a waste of time. For one thing the NT isn’t giving me enough info. And for another what difference does it make if an apostle is judged to a 98% degree-of-strictness and a teacher is assessed 12% less strictly?
The point is likely: keep it in mind that my assessment is coming…and act accordingly.

Note: quote from James 3:1 (NLT). See Ephesians 4:11.