How do you describe something that's unknown to you? A couple weeks ago, my wife and I went on vacation with my parents and with my sister and her husband, and my sister and husband, her husband have a six-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy. Now, Mary-Thonn have done a kid to the house. We got the doxin', but she didn't ask too many questions.
But we went to Colorado with them. And it was interesting because this was the first time for either of them to fly on a plane. This is the first time for them to be outside of the terrain of Central Louisiana, to see all sorts of, we were up in the mountains and let me tell you what, man, a four-year-old boy can ask some questions. And what's even more interesting is, I see that heads nodding, yes they can.
What's even more interesting is, like, when they don't know what they're asking about, like the words they come up with, it was just funny to watch them try to figure things out or try to explain things to us that they saw throughout their day. And we read Revelation, one of the things that's going on, so many times in the book that confuses us or that scares us or makes us kind of stay away from it, is there's a lot of stuff in there that's kind of weird, right? There's a lot of just very vivid imagery and there's stories of what's going on. And really, most people, when they want to get into Revelation, that's the first of all the crazy stuff, let's talk about that.
And some of the reasons, some of the state away from it, has been like these things that we don't know how to explain. So how do you explain something that you don't know or have words for? So we're gonna talk about that a little bit, but I'll talk about the dangers of it, but really the fun way that I know to do this is through this book that I found here, I've talked about this little story time with Uncle Chad, almost, yeah, okay, just a little bit. But there's this book that I stumbled across years ago that is perfect for talking about Revelation.
It's called Motel of Mysteries. And it's a children's book, it's a really weird children's book. But it takes place like 2000 years from now, and that apparently in 1985, so relax, it's not gonna happen, that was a long time ago, so we weren't born yet, that in 1985, there was this cataclysmic apocalyptic event in the entire North American continent, it was obliterated, people forgot it, it was even there. And our archeologists like show back up 2000 years afterwards to this land, they call Usa, spelled USA.
And they begin like excavating things. I think there's an image we can show of this, like this whole like scenery is just dilapidated and come across. What the book's about though is, they stumble into a roadside motel. And the book is about their excavation of this roadside motel.
And really what you have going on here is the author, has a little bit of social commentary, what's going on, but he is mocking our human insistence upon having absolute knowledge of things. And so how we can get so focused on something, so time, so focused on our own idea of what something means that we can explain it, that we can miss the whole point. I guess there's an image of this up here, that Kim can pop up and I'll show you this next story time on the whole chat. But do you see this, do you see this, it's a bathroom?
And if you look ahead, this is a picture of a woman wearing a toilet bowl, or toilet cover on her head. And their whole interpretation point, these archaeologists was, this roadside motel they stumbled on, was actually a ceremonial burial ground for ancient people. And the whole book, I mean you can look at this thing afterwards if you want to. The whole book is like every single tiny little thing they find this hotel room being part of this burial, like the plant that never dies was a plastic plant, of course.
They call it, the fact that there's a big huge box in front of the burial platform, the bed, and the big box is the altar, it's the TV. It's like they're just trying to interpret what these things are that they're finding. We laugh about it, but I love to think about that when we talk about revelation because it makes us think about how we become so focused on a big story made up on our head that we try to make the small things fit into that. And it happens when we find small things, and we turn them into big things that support our own view of things and how they work.
And before we jump deep back into revelation today, it's just to think about that. What happens when we don't understand something and we try to explain it to fit our agenda? What we have here is a story of a visionary experience of somebody 2000 years ago who saw something amazing and beautiful and vivid and wildly fantastical and were then tasked with trying to explain this to other people. So let's read Revelation chapter four today, and let's try to not miss the point that John had for us.
This is what it says. I'm going to read the whole chapter, it's short only 11 verses. And then as I looked, I saw a door standing open in heaven. The same voice I'd heard before spoke to me like a trumpet blast, and the voice said, come up here and I will show you what must happen after this.
And instantly I was in a spirit and I saw a throne in heaven and someone sitting on it. And the one sitting on the throne was really in this gemstones and like Jasper and Carnelian the glow of an emerald circled his throne like a rainbow. And 24 thrones surrounded him and 24 elders sat on them. They were all clothed in white and had gold crowns on their head.
And from the throne came flashes of lightning and a rumble of thunder. And in front of the throne were seven torches with burning flames. This was the sevenfold spirit of God. And in front of the throne was a shiny sea of glass sparkling like crystal.
And in the center and around the throne were four living beings, each covered with eyes front and back. And the front, the first of these living things was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a human face. And the fourth was like an eagle and flight. Each of these living beings had six wings and their wings were covered all over with eyes inside and out.
And day after day and night after night they keep on saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty, the one who always was, who is and who is still to come. Whenever the living beings gave glory and honor and thanks to the ones who live forever and ever. The 24 elders fall down and worship the ones sitting on the throne, the one who lives forever and ever. And they weigh their crowns before the throne and say, you are worthy, O Lord, our God to receive glory and honor and power for you created all things.
And they exist because you created what you pleased. You know, when John says he must see what takes place after this, the first thing he sees is worship, not disaster. And for many of us, when we think about the book of Revelation, we instantly think of disaster and turmoil and fire and all sorts of other wild and willy things. But the first thing John sees in this vision is worship.
That's the first thing that God wants him to see. And Rob Bell, he says this, that worship reminds us that we are not at the center. Eugene Peterson in his book, Reverse Thunder, about Revelation, he says this, that Revelation shows that worship is at the center. And so our lives are centered in God, so we do not live eccentrically.
And this idea of center and us not being at the center is the picture that John gives us in Revelation 4. It's the conversation that we are gonna have today. Before John can see any future or anything else that he must see who holds the future and what they are doing. Friends, I hate to tell you, but you are not the center of the world.
I've told myself that. I am not the center of my world. But God is at the center of all things. We see this with John telling us today.
So we're gonna jump into that conversation. Last week, I told you that we're gonna kind of orient ourselves through three questions in Revelation. First one is, what does this mean? Because we have to kind of explain some stuff going on, right?
The second question we're gonna ask is, now what do I do? Now what does this matter to me? And the third question is, now what do I do about it? And so we kind of have to decode some stuff jumping into this.
Because this is a setting really for the rest of the book. And we've kind of met the cast of characters for the rest of the book here as well. But John's having a visionary experience who he has taken to the throne room of God. Now this has actually happened to a few other people in the Old Testament.
So this isn't like the only one that we know about. But in this throne room, what's interesting is every one of their throne room visions are kind of the same and they're kind of different. But it also gives us credence to think that this is what happens when an individual has this visionary experience with God and is taken in this place. Because here's the thing, you and I are going to explain things differently, aren't we?
Like you can take any two people in this room and pop them into a new experience, a new circumstance situation. And they're going to explain things differently, right? It's like a four-year-old trying to explain a mountain, which I experienced two weeks ago. It's very different.
It was called a dirt ladder. But what's interesting is all of these throne room experience we can read in the book of Ezekiel and the book of Isaiah, what's interesting is they're similar, but they're different. But all of them are talking about the same thing, all of them are trying to portray the same truth that God is sovereign over his whole creation. That God is over, God rules, God has dominion, and God has power across all time and all places over our world.
Now we meet a couple of things, a couple other interesting stuff is going on. The first thing we do is that we see that underneath God's throne is this giant sea sparkling like crystal. Now if you remember, we talked about Jonah about a year and a half ago, and we talked about the idea of chaos in the role. This has been happening.
And the role that chaos plays in scripture, in the way that people in the ancient Near East a long time ago, the way they viewed the world being formed, was that before everything else was there, there was the sea, and all the earth was a sea. This kind of sounds familiar with your Genesis before, right? But that the sea was where chaos and evil happened. And almost every other story at the beginning of the world, that there was simply someone or something in this sea that was more chaotic and more powerful than everything else, that they just like warden fought and subdued, that they came out on top.
We're just reading the Bible in Genesis, a story of God never being part of chaos, God never being part of this world, but God having the ability to shape and shift, and God having dominion over this from the very beginning. So chaos, this place where they're from the very beginning, it's where bad things come out of. And what we see here at this vision on the throne is that God literally has his feet on top of that which would cause death and destruction. We also see John describing colors coming out of God, and colors being just the description of who God is and where God was and what's going on.
And inside that, we read about this rainbow that seems to be proceeding from the throne. Now, I think back to your vacation Bible school days. I think about the rainbow. We find that in the scripture.
We find that at the end of after Genesis and Genesis, after the Noah story, that the rainbow was sent as a covenant by God to say that I will never again destroy the world like this before. So you have God, who's at the center of all things, with his feet on top of death, destruction, and hurt and pain. And then the only way that John described what he looked like was light and was a covenant promise of redemption and renewal coming from him. He meets two groups of people.
And this is well, he meets the 24 elders. Now in scripture, we talked last week that numbers are kind of important and we see all throughout the Old Testament and New Testament is that the number 12 is used to group God's people together. So you have 12 tribes of Israel. There's also the 12 disciples.
And the interpretation point, this is where I really kind of stem the church history, the interpretation point that's been with the 24 elders from the longest amount of time, almost down to the second and third century, is that this group represents God's people of his covenants. This represents God's people in the Old Testament. This represents God's people who are part of the New Testament, the New Covenant church, that's us. They have God's people from both sides of the story, from before Jesus and after Jesus.
They're there. And then these four living creatures, and these kind of pop up in Ezekiel and Isaiah's vision. And they're, I mean, we're not going to get into all that stuff. But that's where we kind of motile.
If we start talking about that, we're going to put a toilet seat on our heads. That's what happens when you start trying to do that. But what you do see is that the number four also is another interesting number when it comes to God's people, when Israelites, and Exodus is a huge, huge image bank. Remember last week I told you all that there's more Old Testament illusions than Genesis, but there are not that many outright quotations that John just new scripture so much.
He seemed to speak. The scripture was just the grammar that he shared from. The groupings of four, and the Exodus, that the tribes of Israel situate themselves in four groups around the tabernacle and where God was. There was a group to the north, a group to the east, a group to the south, a group to the west.
And it seems like these living creatures are situated around the throne, just like the tribes of Israel were situated around the tabernacle and the Old Testament. These are the crowning beings of creation, eagle and fly to lion and ox, which at that point in time was the highest domesticated animal that you could have in the face of the human. We see creation here. And it goes back with what people said, that's just for the longest amount of time that's what I'm gonna trust.
So I don't propose to go my head. This is symbolic of all of creation. So you have all of creation surrounding the glory of God, protecting that holy, holy holy holy is the Lord God Almighty. And you have these 24 elders, a representation of the entire church sitting on their own thrones, even further around.
And they have an action that every time this is said that they are going back and forth, and that they are not going and doing their own thing, but they are then casting down their crowns in front of Jesus. What we have here, think about this, this is not a time to make bullet points, this is a time to draw a picture. And what we see here is every single thing in John's vision pointing towards the fact that you are not the center, that God is at the center of every single thing that's going on. So what does this matter to us?
Okay, we've learned some new information, we have not put a toilet seat over our heads yet. What does this actually mean for us? What does this do? There's a couple of things going on.
You know, we think about these characters and who they are, what's going on. How do we think about this 24 elders? You know, they have crowns, they're wearing white robes, they're sitting on a throne. Now there's some bahk of God's people who have, in fact there were a Paul who have fought the good fight, who have won the race.
They're triumphant in death because of their relationship with God and who he is. But they recognize, even though in that point that they can only be in a right relationship with him, when they willingly lay down whatever they feel like makes them important and give that over to God. I mean, can you think of anything that seems more valuable in that imagery of a throne room to have a crown on your head? And they're handing that over.
So think about what makes you feel important. Like what are you good at? Like legitimately, what do you have the right to brag about? Like my life skill of like destroying a catfish buffet is not something to brag about.
There's, I got some stuff I can do pretty. Like what defines you? What do you do that? You might have worked really, really hard.
That defines who you are. It's that thing that you feel like you have a right to say I'm at the center of something because what I've done for this. And these creatures, these four living creatures and then all of creation is centered around God and is moving towards the day when creation will absolutely, absolutely be recreated with God in its proper place. So we think about this vision of the center and of God actually being at the center and our participation alongside of it.
And it actually, it does some interesting things because it tells us something about a good. It tells us something about evil though as well. We think about like God literally has his feet. Like you think of that image of like standing on the neck of someone and I think back to tombstone.
I'm talking about white art. Things that God makes contact with this spur. Okay, rabbit trail. You know the power that holds that image.
But God is literally sitting with his feet over chaos. Now I say chaos that might not really like get us to go in the thing about this way. That God has his feet controlling brokenness. That's a word I think we can identify even more with.
And what unfolds throughout Revelation is the fact that God has absolute sovereignty over this. He has absolute control over it. That brokenness will, the sea will overflow its banks from time to time. But God always rains it back in until the day to where it is completely and fully rained back in.
Revelation's a story of what happens when chaos decides to overflow its banks. You know each one of us had those times in our life where brokenness is overflowed its banks. But Jesus is always subduing that until the time when it will finally be taken care of. It's one of the stories that we see in Revelation going on.
But the second thing is just, what does it mean for us to anticipate complete remaking? And it's tough for us to anticipate complete remaking in the entire world when we feel like we have not experienced complete remaking in our own hearts and our own lives. We have a struggle with seeing God of subduing evil and we feel like evil has touched us a little bit too much lately. That the flood waters of chaos don't want to carpet up in our house a little bit.
We've got to cut the sheetrock out. But what do we do about this? This is the question I've been asking myself these last few weeks because I've been reading this chapter for years. And I've never really thought so much about this particular part of it.
The more I read it, the more I read it in light of the whole book, the more I realize, I think this is the one thing John is trying to communicate above all to us. This idea of the fact that you are not at the center. I'm at the center. And there's bad ways we can think of.
We all can think of that one person that will climb on top of anybody's back to get what they want. I know you've got that picture in your head right now. That's all right. Give it to Jesus.
But one of the innocent ways that we fight for our own center as well. That's the thing I've been thinking about. What does it mean to have this power and this realization and this truth in our life of God being at the center of all things. And the only way that I can understand that is when I'm willing to get rid of every single thing, this of me trying to stay at the center.
We have to intentionally de-center ourselves and allow Jesus to re-center us. And there's a lot of temptation here. We can get ourselves into problems. The best way to think of it was straight this is I've shared before.
But I have a slight YouTube problem. You know that YouTube is one of the biggest search engines in the world now? Have you ever fixed anything off of YouTube? Every time you've ever looked on YouTube and not fixed anything off of YouTube.
So a couple of when we moved here to St. Andrews, last year I bought a really big pickup truck because I got tired of everybody. All the guys in the church are transmission and are shocked for all going out from the massive church trailer. So I was like, I'm going to go buy a truck, but I'm going to trade it in and get rid of it when we move into here and I was in a process of doing that.
So I'm doing research trying to do what do I want. It's just the best and I get into like a do-it-yourself truck YouTube thread. If you've ever watched like more than three videos on the same topic on YouTube, it just spitched those to you and you get addicted to it and you kind of get into that whole junk. OK, we've seen this one.
I watched, this is what I've ever stopped doing this. I watched a YouTube video about a guy trying to save money. He was teaching you how to align your pickup truck in your driveway with a measuring tape, a piece of steel bar stock and a chalk line. How much is an alignment cost?
It's not that much. I guarantee you give me a measuring tape, because I steal bars off in a chalk line, I can cause four times the amount the alignment cost of damage to my truck and try to fix that myself. You know so many times when we are trying to re-center ourselves, we're doing a red neck alignment job in our driveway. And for me, that measuring state, but if I can parbefer it too, it's 49 cents.
I'm interested. You've got them too, you know it good and well. But that's why I said, when we think about this, it is possible for us to acknowledge Jesus in our life, but to not have him at the center. And all of the work, all the things that we try to do are in vain until we de-center ourselves.
We perform homemade alignment jobs on our soul. And the tools we have aren't true, they're cheap, and they got rust all over them. And it's never going to get us there. This whole de-centering process is us actually asking ourselves the tough questions about what we will not yield control to God to.
What do we, hey, this is, I need this. I'm doing good on this. You don't need to take care of this. I'm doing good control.
This is a good part of me. Just take care of the bad parts of me. Just take care of the stuff that I know I'm worried about. Don't worry about this kind of, we have a too simplistic relationship with Jesus for him to actually do the tough stuff with us.
You know, de-centering is a deliberate practice of consistent work with God, of consistent prayer, and of private worship and of scripture reading, of asking ourselves the tough questions and allowing other people that we trust to ask tough questions for us at the exact same time. You know, we don't accidentally stumble into a relationship with God at the center of things. We can. So many times, I know I've tried it, and I hear some other people who just think that a life, a good life with God is something that will just accidentally happen one day.
But you are not going to accidentally stumble into the life with God that you want or the life with God that you need, because we failed to de-center ourselves. You know, we won't accidentally stumble into grace that we need for a tough season of life. You know, we will not accidentally stumble into a passage from scripture that provides us relief and calm and comfort when we need it the most. We will not accidentally stumble into the personal revelation that you are deeply loved by God.
Just how you are. You will not accidentally stumble into the life with God that you need for your friends, for your spouse, for your kids, for your parents. We don't accidentally stumble into that. That takes consistent work of de-centering.
We don't accidentally stumble to a life that's this gracious and full of the Holy Spirit. When we think about those elders, they've taken the things that they felt they have earned. Like not the junk that they got rid of before they got there. They're taking those things that they have earned.
Like that crown. And they are handing that over to God. I mean, if you want to talk about complete emptying, that's what they're doing. And I think the toughest part about a healthy life with God is not getting rid of what you know you need to get rid of.
It's willfully handing over the best parts of who you are so he can make them even better. That doesn't happen accidentally. You're not the center. God is at the center.
He has his foot on top of everything that is bad for us. And the time will come to where his remaking and redeeming will completely cover and fill this earth. But until that point in time, we need to keep up center in the right place. The best place for us to think about this and move into this is just asking ourselves an honest question.
What crown do we need to put down today? It's different for each and every one of us. But that's the first step that we make towards desentering. As just saying, this is the first thing I need to give to you, God.
Let's pray. Jesus, you've given us so many things. You're in the business of remaking. You're in the business of radically taking what we think is good and just making it even better.
Beyond our wildest imaginations, you have a life just made for us. And so Jesus, in our hearts right now, we might have a list of those things. But God, we've seen this vision that John had, this vision of something that in some way, shape or form, is happening right now in front of you as we speak. What would I pray for you to speak in each of our hearts?
For us to know what do we need to lay down before you? Because you're worthy to receive all this power and the glory. Everything we have is yours. And we give it to you so you can redeem and remake it and part it part of your mission of love to this world.
And now your son's usually praying, amen.