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This is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things which must happen soon, which he sent and made known [signified] by his angel to his servant, John, who testified to God's word, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, about everything that he saw. Blessed is he who reads and those who hear the words of the prophecy, and keep the things that are written in it, for the time is at hand. (Revelation 1:1-3)
After these things I looked, and the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony in heaven was opened. (Revelation 15:5)
Threads/themes – revelation/judgment, must, testimony, receive and keep/practice.
3M's: Message, Motives and Methods
We have the message in the words used by John to convey things of extreme importance to us. But if we come to the message with misperceptions about the context or the motives involved, the message will fail to be delivered as intended and may prove to do more harm than good. So it is not enough to simply know the facts or the words of Scripture or prophecy. We must go deeper to know the truth found in both the testimony of God's word and of Jesus and even more importantly, the motives.
Discerning the motives behind the message is vital to understanding the message. We discover the motives of God by coming to understand Him through the lens of the only accurate revelation of God and His heart that is only and always good – Jesus Christ. This is the point of Hebrews 1:1-3 and in fact the entire book of Hebrews. Coming to see that God's motives are always good and never for evil is key to transforming our thinking about what the messages mean. Then we can begin to properly learn how to determine what methods are relied on to overcome the enemy and what methods are disallowed.
Distinguishing between the methods of the enemy and the methods used by God is vital if we want to cooperate with the hero of Revelation. This book is all about motives and methods, both of God and those with Him, as well as of the enemy that masquerades as representing God. This is why a war is going on, because there are challenges and accusations over who is right and how things should be managed and how order should be maintained. (See more below.)
Testimony
Every person has a testimony. It don't know if it is even impossible to be alive as a person and not have a testimony. God repeatedly calls on us as His witnesses. That is because His reputation as ruler over all the universe has been called into question and based on His methods and motives He refuses to simply impose His will to override the will of those He has created for His pleasure. To force one's will on others is to destroy the very meaning of freedom, joy and the pleasure we are designed to experience. God will not mar His beautiful creation designed to function in complete freedom and motivated by love alone for the sake of law and order. But neither will He settle for disorder, rebellion and death resulting from disobedience to the law of love. The core issue however is key to understand. How is God resolving the sin problem? That is the point of contention addressed in this book of revelations about both sides. We might say, the underlying issue is how to best maintain order while granting complete freedom so that love may prevail without reliance on fear.
This book is a revelation of the strategy of God and how He will win over evil without resorting to force like we imagine He must do to overcome evil. This book reveals the back story and God's strategies possibly more than any writings anywhere. Yet because we have been so conditioned to imagine that God must use the methods of the enemy to overcome the enemy, we have failed to connect the testimony of Jesus about His Father to what we find in this book that seems to contradict it. (See more on testimony at the end.)
The Must Factor
The word 'must' that shows up in the second verse is key to coming to a better appreciation of how God intends to win over evil and still maintain complete freedom for everyone. Satan insists that freedom is too risky, that law and order have higher priority over freedom, and that love is too weak to accomplish what it claims it can do. Thus the battle is over whether or not fear should be a primary motivation for obedience or whether love alone can maintain order and regulate the universe effectively. What God insists is that it is necessary that evil be given opportunity to mature sufficiently so that it will eventually be fully seen that it is not a viable option for governing the universe.
At first this may seem like something that should be obvious by now. But the subtle suggestions and insinuations of the enemy run far deeper than any of us can imagine. If even the most brilliant created beings in the universe, the angels of God who live in God's presence and see things far more clearly than we can presently, could be deceived by the suggestions of Lucifer, we cannot imagine that we can know how God should end the war. Even angels who maintained allegiance to God during the initial rebellion in heaven remained affected by some of the ideas of Lucifer and questioned God's motives and methods all the way up to the death of Christ. This should tell us something about the intensity of the power of the mystery of iniquity and its capacity to confuse and mislead.
It is for this reason that we find this thread we might call 'the must factor' that is found both at the beginning and near the end of this book. It is a must because without this key factor in place it will be impossible to defeat evil. Yet this must factor is one of the most contested and denigrated ideas in religion because it doesn't fit how we imagine God to be. So God alerts us from the very beginning of the book that these things must be allowed to play out in order that God's true good (not the good found in the Tree of Good and Evil, but an entirely different kind of goodness that defines God alone) may at last be the only thing left in the universe. And that will be achieved without any compromise with evil.
The Blessing
If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them. (John 13:17)
Blessed are those who read, who hear and who keep.
Happiness. The Greek emphasizes perceiving, being aware of, knowing, understanding more than simply reading. The blessing/happiness is inherent within the writing and released into those who choose to embrace the revelation of the true message in this book.
This is the first of 7 blessings throughout Revelation. This also harkens back to the blessings revealed in the sermon on the mount that Jesus gave relating to how things work in His kingdom.
Therefore, putting away all filthiness and overflowing of wickedness, receive with humility the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not only hearers, deluding your own selves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man looking at his natural face in a mirror; for he sees himself, and goes away, and immediately forgets what kind of man he was. But he who looks into the perfect law of freedom, and continues, not being a hearer who forgets, but a doer of the work, this man will be blessed in what he does. (James 1:21-25)
This ties directly back into Jesus' definition of judgment.
But he who does the truth comes to the light, that his works may be revealed, that they have been done in God. (John 3:21)
Testimony Supplement
After these things I looked, and the temple of the tabernacle of the testimony in heaven was opened. (Revelation 15:5)
Chapters 15 and 16 unveil a testimony so potent that it has been overlooked by most scholars because it is so scandalous. Yet what this reveals is that there will be a people on earth who so closely align their hearts with Jesus that their lives will reflect the heart of God just like Jesus reflected it where living here on earth. Their testimony will be so potent that it will work to break the very foundation upon which Satan has built his entire evil empire and will bring about the collapse of all the institutions that compose that empire.
This group of people are glimpsed over and over throughout this book. I like to call them the accomplices of the Lamb. They are given certain identifiers in various places in the book so that we may track them and watch their development so we may see more clearly the real issues involved.
The issue of testimony is central throughout Revelation because it is key to how God overcomes the power of evil without using force. When we come to see that the real issue in this war is God's reputation and authority to govern the universe with love alone, it starts to become more clear why testimony is so vital and why all throughout Scripture God calls on His people to be His witnesses. God is on trial, and the hour of His judgment has come. Rather than live in terror that He is going to judge us based on our way of doing justice, we need to see that He is calling on us to testify on His behalf because He is the one being judged and our testimony has impact in how others choose to view Him.
God's star witness is Jesus Christ, the Son of God who became the Son of Man for many reasons. Because the war began over whose testimony in heaven could be trusted, that war has now shifted to play out here on this planet until its final resolution on the final day of full revelation of all things, all motives, all truth and the exposure of all lies. God must be vindicated, but only in ways consistent with kingdom principles, not by relying on intimidation or fear, for to rely on fear to gain security for eternity is a false hope. The presence of fear means that love has not yet won, and God will never settle for anything less that love alone. That is why Jesus came to live and die, not to pay off an imaginary debt created by sin, but to expose the real truth about God's design for creation and to win the respect and restore as many as are willing to their original place in His family.
Methods
Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will come in to him, and will dine with him, and he with me. (Revelation 3:20)
Jesus settles for no less than intimacy. He respectfully stands alone outside and refuses to force His way on us. He waits patiently, never using His superior power to force us, for to force one's will is a violation – violence. Intimacy and violence are in total opposition to each other. Violence or even the threat of violence makes it impossible to trust, love or experience intimacy. Yet when we refuse to respond to His patient appeals to our heart, it remains impossible for us to enter the experience for which we were created – exquisite pleasure that can only be experienced through intimacy with God.
The entire book of Revelation highlights the contrast between the methods of God's kingdom and the kingdoms of this world, all modeled after Satan's design. Earthly powers rely on artificial rules, artificial enforcements, systems of rewards and threatened punishments to manipulate and control the masses. Economic measures saturate everything are are exploited to direct social affairs according to the desires of those in power. Fear, violence, shame, deception and threats are all standard fare for the kingdoms of this world to maintain control over the masses. But all of this is foreign to God's kingdom and He invites us to disconnect spiritually from all these counterfeits.
Revelation is a reality check for those willing to listen and realize that things are not as they appear. Revelation lets us know that power is not what we imagine it to be, and our use of power does not accomplish what God needs done to win over evil. Revelation is a radical call to radical discipleship, following a hero who chooses the symbol of an innocent, defenseless Lamb to convey the key attributes of how God overcomes. Clearly this is foolishness to most people, which is why for most it is nearly impossible to relate to this book in any coherent fashion.
But for those with ears to hear and a heart to listen, it is like the coded radio messages sent to sympathetic underground agents behind enemy lines, alerting them to what is about to come down against the enemy. And all who are humble enough to trust a Lamb to lead them to victory will be an undecipherable enigma to all who prefer the versions of God promoted by mainstream religion.
