Revelation 19:10

I fell down at his feet to worship him, but he said to me, “Look! Don’t do that! I am a fellow-servant with you, and with your brothers and sisters who hold on to the testimony of Jesus. Worship God!”

To worship is to bow down, celebrate, acknowledge the rightful place of someone.

Everyday we need to acknowledge the rightful place of water, as our body is about 70% water, and we need to ingest it very regularly to keep alive and function well.

Everyday we need to acknowledge the rightful place of God, as 100% responsible for our existence, and we need to ingest God very regularly to keep spiritually alive and functioning properly.

Today we celebrate Jesus, bowing down before Him, as is appropriate because of His rightful place in the universe and in our hearts—as Master.

Jesus is WOW, which conveniently stands for Worthy Of Worship.

Jesus is WHOA—Worthy of Having Our Attention, or our ALL.

No one else is WOW.

The love of God for us manifesting in becoming one of us, is beyond words.

“I am going to enjoin myself to you, so that we may be one, together in the most intimate way, and forever. Because I love you”

We worship only One, Yahweh, simply because of who He is and what He has done. It’s incredible and incomprehensible if you sit with it for any length of time.

A couple of Psalms have been singing themselves to me this week:

O, come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand. O that today you would listen to his voice! ~Psalm 95:6-7

Know that the LORD is God. It is he that made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. ~Psalm 100:3

I’d love to leave you with what our Ripple Reader, Kenzie, shared with me this morning from the Christmas Eve service she attended at Gobin Methodist Church in Greencastle last night:

Revelation 18:14

All the fruit for which you longed has gone from you; all your luxuries and sparkling objects have been destroyed; you won’t find them anymore.

Eternal life is more descriptively translated as “The Life of God’s Coming Age”.

It’s more than simply living forever. If it’s only the aspect of never-ending living, then I’m thinking there’s quite a few of us who’d say, “Maybe I’ll pass on that.” Because the more you think about it, the less attractive it becomes. There’s the obvious thoughts of boredom, even if everything’s going just how you like. In fact, it might just seem super boring because of that!** That is, if we imagine eternity with the minds and lives we have right now.

But if we have received God’s Life, and are cultivating the growth of that very Life in us, allowing and fostering it to take over us in mind, body and spirit, then forever—as long as it’s thought of while possessing God’s age-to-come Life within us—sounds more and more appealing, more and more like home, our true home.

Jesus inaugurated God’s coming age. This is the age Revelation speaks of—when God’s kingdom is realized in full. Until then, we are privileged to help usher it in all over the world. And this has been happening for 2,000 years. Don’t let the media fool you, there’s more good happening on earth now than ever before. God’s kingdom spreads and expands, like a mustard seed infiltrating the cosmos, and germinating exponentially over time.

When we entrust our lives to Jesus, we are given the Life of God’s coming age. But much is up to us as far as how much of that Life we “use” or live on. The more we chase and hold on to the things this world offers us, the more energy and potential from God’s Life in us that is drained and wasted.

You can’t fully grab on to God’s world with both hands if you still have a grip on any of the things of this world which you think satisfy, or will be the fulfillment of your deepest longings.

Living in God’s domain (the King’s Domain—”Kingdom”), means necessarily forsaking the world’s domain as the object of your longings.

We are not merely living to get to some future, faraway, foreign place after we die, and that starts later. We’re living for/in God’s coming age which has already started with Jesus’s earthly life, and which we as active participants are gloriously tasked with bringing more and more into reality even before we die! And this, via God’s actual Life and energy in us, animating us as we bring God’s kingdom to fruition—God’s desires for how he’d like to see his world run.

We use the optimal energy of grace and Holy Spirit, for that is the only way it can really be done, and it is being done right now in our world.

Are you a part of this?

Are you feeding on God and actively bringing God’s coming age into reality in this age now?

**For an excellent commentary on this idea, watch The Twilight Zone episode 28, “A Nice Place to Visit” [pictured below].

Revelation 17:2

She is the one with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication; she is the one whose fornication has been the wine that has made all the earth-dwellers drunk.

Sin is intoxicating.

As in, it impairs your judgment.

Holding on to something that is spiritually unhealthy is like walking around drunk all the time.

Your awareness is diminished to the point that you cannot see situations accurately or clearly. You’re in a fog due to the nurtured sickness in your everyday life.

And like we said yesterday, the more you indulge something, the harder it becomes to turn back around.

For instance, if you are always focused on self–what you need, what you want–then you become drunk with self-centeredness which impairs your vision for others. You see others with less and less accuracy, less compassion, and, therefore, are more and more unable to see others’ needs. You’re so drunk on your self, that you’re in a fog that thickens to the point of inability to see through it. Your awareness takes on a tunnel vision that closes you in your own little world where you see reality only through your inebriated mind.

I believe we are meant to live in peace, freedom, victory, and even an expanded consciousness—but we can only live this way when living according to the design by Yahweh.

When I am focused on God more than myself and more than what others think of me, I then  see others with more clarity, compassion, and accuracy. My awareness is expanded so that my field of view is enlarged, and I am able to tend to a situation rightly, because I am not drunk on the wine of defending myself, living up to other’s expectations, obsessing about getting my way….

Revelation 16:9,11

They did not repent or give him glory.

They did not repent of what they had been doing.

It does not go well for those who refuse to turn from their ways which go against the Creator of the universe.

The more acts you commit in a certain direction, the more locked onto a path for which eventually there may be no return—like driving on a road going up a mountain in which the road gets narrower and narrower, sheet of rock straight up on one side of the car, cliffs straight down on the other. The higher you go, the narrower the road, and at some point it will become impossible to turn around.

There are the big and obvious sins that most of us know to stay away from, but what about the more subtle and more easily justifiable wrongs?

Like maybe bitterness towards someone.

The more you nurture those ill thoughts of someone whenever you think of them, the harder it gets to turn it around and think purely of them.

The single best thing you can do in that situation is pray for that person. Not only is that just good (and commanded of us), but it really does change your heart towards someone, making it possible to love them, even if it’s that “impossible family member” with whom you absolutely disagree. You will be able to have a spirit of forgiveness towards them.

Now remember, forgiveness does not always mean there is reconciliation. There are situations in which you may not be able to ever have a healthy relationship with someone for various reasons. But you can always pray for them, and cultivate a soft heart towards them.

Be careful and check yourself to see if there are any habits you’ve formed–of thought, of action—that are locking you in to a place from which it is getting more and more difficult to turn around.

Revelation 15:3-4

And they sing the song of Moses the slave of God and the song of the suckling lamb, saying, 

“Great and wonderful are your works, Lord God the Almighty, just and true are your ways, the King of the gentiles! Who, Lord, would not revere—and will not glorify—your name? Because you alone are hallowed, because all the gentiles will come and make obeisance before you, because your acts of justice have been made manifest.”

~Translation by Eastern Orthodox Scholar David Bentley Hart

It is good to sing to and about our Lord.

Singing regularly has the effect of massaging truth into the fabric of your being in a unique way.

Singing of the character of God will work those truths down into your sub-conscience, so that they can be recalled in moments of need without strenuous effort.

It is good to sing with others at gatherings of worship, but it is also of high value to sing on your own, by yourself, from your heart to God.

I have put little phrases or prayers to a melody so as to sing them over and over as a mantra to myself of God. And believe me, these stay with you, always ready for recall. Singing liturgies, or even simply reciting them daily/weekly, will become part of you, and assist in the fight against the lies of the evil one and this world.

I can hardly express the joy of hearing our daughters break out in song from something they’ve learned and sung in repetition at their school chapel. I rejoice that Jesus is there, in the form of music in their hearts.

Think about singing to God throughout your day today, and making it a habit, trusting that this practice will deepen the truth of God in your very soul.

Revelation 14:6-7

Then I saw another angel….He spoke with a loud voice, and this is what he said: “Fear God! Give him glory! The time has come for his judgment! Worship the one who made heaven and earth and the sea and the springs of water!”

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine shared her story of when she was saved, or “born from above”.

She was out west and on her way home from a concert, in the passenger seat. Looking at the mountains and the beauty of the landscape, she took keen notice in a new and enlightening way.

“Someone did this!” she exclaimed.

It dawned on her at the deepest level that Someone was responsible for all of this beauty around us.

Her life was never the same from that moment, as she committed her life to Christ after being overwhelmed with his handiwork.

Revelation 13:13-14

It [the second monster or beast] performs great signs, so that it even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of the people, and it deceives the people who live on earth by the signs which it has been allowed to perform in front of the monster, instructing the earth’s inhabitants to make an image of the monster who had the sword-wound but was alive.

~New Testament For Everyone

One thing we have not discussed in our look at Revelation so far, is the fact that it contains so many allusions to the Old Testament. If you don’t have decent handle on the OT, then Revelation can be even more confusing.

That the monster performs great signs shows that he is a Satanic counterfeit of the prophet Moses, who also performed great signs (Exodus 4:17, 30; 10:2). That this monster makes fire come down shows him to be a counterfeit to the prophet Elijah (1 Kings 18:38-39; 2 Kings 1:10-14).

From G.K. Beale’s commentary:

The allusions to Moses and Elijah cannot be accidental, given the same allusions to the two witnesses in 11:3-12, who, taken together, represent the church (cf. Luke 9:54)….The second beast is a counterfeit of the church and the Spirit who empowers and indwells it.

Jesus of course predicted this: “False Christs and false prophets will arise and will show great signs and wonders, so as to mislead, if possible, even the elect.” (Matthew 24:24)

We also see this predicted in Daniel (11:30-39), a book revelation alludes to a lot.

Here is the take-away by G.K. Beale that I found so piercing:

When purported Christian teachers take their primary cues from the surrounding culture instead of from God’s word, they corrupt the covenant community spiritually by encouraging it to live by norms and a faith that ultimately oppose the reign of God and Christ.

Revelation 11:18

It is time to destroy the destroyers of earth.

Reconciling God’s forgiveness and justice can be difficult.

We tend to either emphasize forgiveness at the expense of justice, or we emphasize justice at the expense of forgiveness.

God can forgive whatever God chooses to forgive, of course. But for reconciliation, restoration, or to live in the will of God, we see that there is need for repentance of that which goes against God and God’s ways as they have been revealed to us.

We see here that those who are committed to destroying the earth, with no intention of turning back, will be destroyed.

This is not so fun to talk about, but what does one do with someone who lives against the ways as set up in, say, a workplace? A church? A home? What if they refuse to change their ways, and are hellbent on destroying the very culture or atmosphere which they are in, not to mention all the damage to relationships?

God has forgiven all, and cleared the path to relationship with him, yet we cannot live into that goodness when practicing that which goes against God’s very nature and set boundaries.

If I attend an AA meeting, and right in the middle of it take out a beer and start drinking it, I’m probably gonna get kicked out.

There’s just a way things work.

It also must be mentioned that throughout Scripture, including Revelation, we are given ample opportunity to turn from our own ways. It isn’t like a one strike and you’re out sort of thing.

*For reflection:

Would you agree that the question of how God can be both forgiving and just is only truly understood through the cross?

Why is this true?

*From Revelation: A Shorter Commentary by G.K. Beale with David Campbell

Revelation 10:6-7

This was the oath: that there would be no more time, but that God’s mystery would be completed in the days of the voice of the seventh angel, who was going to blow his trumpet.

That is what he had announced to his servants the prophets.

The mystery plan from before the foundation of the world, according to Paul, was Jesus Christ.

In the end, this mystery will be completed.

God wins.

Go figure.

Some days, when we might be feeling overwhelmed, we may just say with Julian of Norwich that in the end,

“All will be well. And all manner of things will be well.”

Or in times of unknowing and confusion, we pray with A.W. Tozer,

“O Lord, thou knowest!”

Sometimes that’s all we have.

But that is enough, because it acknowledges what is ultimately true, and who is really in charge of everything, and who will win in the end of time as we know it.