Revelation 5 Follow-Up

I'm always podcast ready to go. Five minutes, you listen to your songs. Yes, that's how we're getting the mindset. Okay, okay.

I still think that we need to go come make a apocalypse. We do. We need to make a post-apartlet playlist. You know, just stuff to make it feel good while your friends are dying.

My thought is, like, if you are leading an armored caravan, like, school buses and that kind of stuff, like, what was the movie? It was one of the... Well, the movie that comes to mind is... Okay, maybe not the movie, but the book, which was fantastic, was World War Z.

Yeah. Because when they were fighting back with the zombies, they're kind of having the whole back to back thing. I'm making a made and draw man take him out. Yeah, I'm thinking there's one movie I'm thinking about with Mila.

Oh, you're... It's one of the Resident Evil. It's one of the Resident Evil movies. The third one with the desert.

You're in the desert and they had the armored caravan and then they were making the crows. Yeah. Okay. So the caravan driver that could, like, shake the cans?

No, was in it. That is my cousin's cousin. Really? And he was in a band.

Okay. You got kicked out. Okay. Well, yeah.

So, okay. A apocalypse playlist. So, with his chat here back to Jack Lockby, Revelation 5 follow-up today. Are you ready to roll, buddy?

Man, I have so many weird questions for today. It's not really, like, rabbit trails per se, but... There's just a lot of interesting stuff going on. It's a different chapter.

It's a different chapter. Well, it's a different chapter. I don't have as many questions as I have in the past two podcasts. It seems like each show that we do, it kind of is a little bit different.

Last time, there's definitely a theme of my problems and, you know, me being off center all the time. And this one, it's going to be a little more silly, I think. Okay. Well, I'm ready to roll.

We got to keep it up. We need to have queued up. Yeah. So, my first question to chat is, why are you the way that you are?

Why am I the way that I am? Yeah. You started with an office and I had a throw in just a round. Oh, oh, okay.

Yeah. This is a stream hatred for Toby. Oh, yeah, okay. Okay.

Yeah, I got it. Yeah, I threw that in there because I just now started watching the office because I've never watched it before. And I realized that my family speaks in office lingo. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like, I didn't know. It was just one of those things like you grow up and then you see a movie and you start getting all of the references to that movie.

Well, it has things. I started off this from talking about that. It's like, you really... I mean, there's something about scripture reading.

I think that there's a benefit comes to just kind of continually reading scripture and being very familiar with something and then coming back to what you're very familiar with is that it gets the point to where after a while you begin noticing things that you would not have noticed earlier and that you could not have noticed earlier. It's like the average person, I guess, they're watching the office for the first time. They're not going to be paying attention to Kevin or Angela or to Creed, like that sort of thing. So, like, this is like, this is probably my 25th or 30th lap around Revelation.

And what I'm seeing this time is probably answering the question of like, how does an average person read Revelation as a normal book of scripture? It's probably actually answering that for the very first time because we've not been very apocalyptic really happily. No, not at all. I mean, the only apocalyptic kind of things that we've conversations we've been having is more so like debunking them.

Yeah, yeah, in some ways. And I think that's always been there. But that was the kind of stuff I'd really want to do about like my 5th or 10th lap around Revelation. Okay, let's just prove all this genki stuff that we believe is just most likely not true.

Yeah. No, I was sitting down last night and I was getting all this kind of ready and I just got done marathoning like a season of the office and I was just like, oh my God, it all makes sense. What you're talking about like correlating it. So that was a very good analogy, I think.

But I want to talk a second just we lose a lot of stuff by streaming. What do you mean? Okay, so your Game of Thrones fan, right? I'm a Game of Thrones fan.

We've had conversations before about theories between seasons, last episode, clear fingers. But I mean, if you didn't have those weeks between all these things between each episode. You can't think about it. Yeah, you can't think about it.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's, you know, like you talked about last episode, you got to take it slow. You do.

You got to take it slow. And this thing is like we, for some of us, we read like a little bit of scripture away too slow. It's just like that's the thing. We have to read these as a narrative thing and that they're pieces that are meant to go off of previous pieces.

And so, like especially if we just drop into one chapter and we're not familiar with the book, like we're going to get to some conclusions in some places that, you know, if we would have read the whole thing or even just read a little bit before and a little bit after we realized, oh man, I'm just trying to make this, I'm trying to make the Bible do what it's not supposed to be doing in the least bit. So that's, yeah. And so it's kind of important to look at this as a narrative full, especially books like Revelation that have been victim to just proof texting so much, just one of the letters here without understanding the rest of the whole. Yeah.

I mean, I think this is also the book that says like you have to understand everything else. Why don't you tell me a while back that in the early church people couldn't read Revelation until they'd reached like a certain level? Well, so there's this thing. There's a guy in Thomas Hopko and he's Eastern Orthodox and he has like six, I'm this is going to date me.

I had a six CD set of him teaching Revelation. And one of the things he talked about, I've never heard this anywhere else. I've never read this anywhere, but I've not seen much like canonical work on this sort of thing. So, but Hopko said that, you know, the early church, they did section scripture off in an interesting way.

That if you had not been baptized, that you really can only hear the Psalms and the Gospels. They wouldn't read Paul's letters and that kind of stuff to you. They'd actually be a portion of time and service where if you were not baptized, you had to leave. And Hopko said that Revelation was reserved even for the people who had been baptized, who were part of the church and who had heard the entirety of scriptures enough to understand what might be saying.

Because I when we first started this kind of researching for this series, at first I wanted to keep a running list of all the times that Old Testament was alluded to in passages. And I quit because it's just too much to keep up with. It's just like if I spit doing that, I'll probably spend an hour a week of just maintaining this list. Because there's just so, I mean, there's more Old Testament illusions than there are verses in Revelation.

That's a lot. Yeah. So I mean, John is just like stacking them on top of each other. And that kind of goes back to just understanding that lingo we talked about earlier.

Well, that's how I kind of before we started recording is I started on chapter one on accident instead of this chapter. And I was just like really excited because I was understanding like a lot of the illusions and the, I guess references and stuff. And then I was like, Oh, wait, I've already read through this. That's a, that's why I'm getting this.

And now I'm starting all over with a new chapter. And so you started off the sermon with Hebrews. What necessarily made you go there? Well, because there's this just really well known, there's a couple places in Hebrews and actually kind of comes back in this coming up week.

But this is a classic verse about this is what scripture is. It's, it's a living. It's alive. It shapes us.

It transforms us. That it's not a stagnant thing at all. And that's kind of part of us, like really reading because we still have these, these idea points that this book doesn't apply to us. And instead society, like, no, we need to read like this.

We need to read this as it like seriously applies to us and not in the, like, I wish we'd all been ready kind of way. But like, let's read this like a normal book of the Bible. Okay. And that's where that really kind of came in.

So just want to jump straight in through that and just go ahead and like state that assumption as we rolled into it. Okay, I understand that. I personally went through something like that. I did every table I was talking about with the 24 hour prayer room.

Yeah, that kind of right in my world. I was expecting like some cool stuff. And then it was just like, Oh, wow, I realized all of these issues I have now and I need to start working on. Yeah, that was a fun time.

So you started talking about the seven, so the apocalypse and the scroll and worthy. Yeah. We start talking about worthy and maybe kind of think a little bit of Wayne's world. Well, and there's that piece of, it's really funny.

We're not worthy. We're scum. Yeah. Well, I think that's the thing is that it's about building.

I just, and it's that God is sitting here with this scroll in his right hand and he's holding it and I said, no one is worthy to open this up. And what you're what's what's one of the layers that slowly getting peeled back in Revelation and it's going to really kind of kick in good this Sunday is this identity of the redeemed and the heavenly because in theory, the heavenly, like the creatures, the elders, God himself. I mean, they know everything. I mean, the living creatures who spent eternity protecting the holiness of God, I would assume they're pretty aware of the holiness of God, wouldn't you?

Yeah, or the 24 other representation with the representation that they are portraying. But you're going to start seeing this idea of the redeemed and when the church shows up in Revelation and they're treated differently and they say different things and the creatures and the heavenly beings responded in different ways and interesting ways. And so it's kind of a lot of thinking about like nothing was there. It was worthy to take this scroll, which wraps up.

And there's a lot of different ideas. Like some people talk about the scroll like, oh, to have seven seals across it that you can see or like it was unrolled for a point and there's a seal you broke that and that's that's the way the analogy we've used us to put in our heads. Yeah. But what you have here is like, this is the entirety of God's plan and it has been, it's been secret until now.

We're here about talking about all the time, like in the gospels until the time had come. Like there was something inside of the history of time about why Jesus came, when he came and who he came to. That there was a moment where it would be appropriate for this plan to be revealed. And Jesus is the only one who is able to do that because he has fully been through the earth and he's fully divine.

So he's gone through a range of emotions that the living creatures cannot have gone through. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay.

Well, that kind of makes me jump ahead a little bit, but we'll get back on track eventually. I like the way this conversation is going. So the imagery that is shown when Jesus is like taking the seal, you know, is he looks like a slain lamb with seven eyes and seven horns. And we know that's like, I guess the completeness, right?

Yeah. Now also we'll say that that looks a little bit demonic, but yeah, in my head, like not to. Well, that's a vision. Right.

This is somebody trying to describe something like this isn't. And we have this in the West and modern times. We have this fascination with like fact and provable truth. And John's not even coming from that direction whatsoever at all.

He's trying to describe this just like the word we're using is fantastical. It's just fantastical thing that's going on. That's what he's focused on. Okay.

Well, so, you know, so what I'm assuming though is that he does look like a slain lamb that was fully alive. And he tastes the seal or the scroll. So this takes place after the resurrection. Yeah.

And that seems like you're going to do a whole time thing. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess the question was, did he have to go through all that to be worthy? I mean, that's just that was just something that was kind of interesting to me.

Yeah. Well, and actually it plays into thing is was he worthy before or worthy after or worthy during? Yeah. Okay.

Throw me a curve ball. Yeah. Yeah. I think the action has to happen.

I mean, that's the thing is the action had to happen for that wordness to be there. And that's the thing is like, you know, we look at Revelation and assume that this is just some future thing. But what I mean, it's like time is a different. We're playing with time in a way that's just unknown to us right now.

Yeah. Does that make sense? And like there are things that we see in Revelation that are happening continually and there's things we see in Revelation that probably just happened as part of this vision. And where does this all fit into this?

And that's when we have to remove ourselves away from, I mean, for me to say before in these conversations, we've removed ourselves away from trying to be date setters instead realize that our role is to be storytellers. No. Okay. And it's just like the imagery to me just kind of sound like he was is almost like our destiny is like what he paid for with the blood was like essentially in that scroll.

And when he took it, he was taking over the plan for salvation. Is that more tin foil? No, it's not tin foil at all. No, no, no, no, you're, you're, I think that you're on the track of what this actually is about.

Okay. I like being on track. Yeah. I know you do.

Yeah. But yeah, that was a pretty intense man. I just can't even imagine what it'd be like to go through that. Mm hmm.

That would just kind of probably wreck my world a little bit. But so we kind of talked about just the imagery. And I need to ask, is the upside down cross? That's a saint's cross, right?

Well, you hear like Peter, was it that wasn't in here? Was it? No, it's just a question. Well, I think church tradition says that Peter asked me to be crucified on a cross upside down because he didn't deserve to down away Jesus out.

Mm hmm. Oh, the reason that I asked that is just because we kind of was kind of like the demonic thing in here. Yeah. And, uh, and while we're at it, I was at Warped Tour and there's someone with the upside down shirt.

And I was almost like, you don't understand like how like, how much praise that shirt actually gets. If you want to get like really, really interesting into that kind of that dark imagery of that, you know, a unique way is the Eastern Orthodox Church has a really interesting mission in California. It's been to like the hardcore and skater community for a long time. And it's called Death to the World.

And, uh, Death to the World, the Last True Rebellion and all other, all other imagery is a lot like that. Oh, wow. That's why it's so intense. Yeah, it's like, yeah, like all their stuff.

I mean, it's. And this is a Christian organization? Eastern Orthodox Church. Eastern Orthodox Church.

Yeah. But it's yeah. I mean, yeah, like the teacher, the blood of the martyrs is the seat of the church. They're not wrong.

Yeah. Exactly. It's just yeah. Okay.

Anyway, we'll quit that. I need one of those shirts. I need that shirt. Exactly.

Actually. Right on. I'm very happy with this one. Okay.

So, uh, verse seven and eight. Uh, we see worship with instruments. I thought that was kind of funny. Well, you see, but the harp and the bowl, like the harp is just a huge, Jewish Jewish, I mean, King David played the heart.

And so it's just there. It's just kind of popping into these temple idea, like that bowl is full of incense and the harps. Like it's the John or a Jewish, read the time, their mind, instantly going back to the temple. It looks like the first temple into the tabernacle.

So these ancient expressions of worship, not these like falsely created under the supervision of Rome, expressions of worship. And so you see those that's what that's coming from. Okay. Okay.

Like, because I totally lost track on this because it kind of sounds like peace smells their prayers. Well, I mean, I mean, you see that in the Old Testament, like the prayers, like the way the incense rises is a visible representation of the prayers of God's people rising up to him and that they provide a pleasant environment to God. Yeah. And so, and kind of some way, yeah, that's why you see incense using a lot of very formal traditions.

That's where it comes from. Okay. I actually didn't know that because a friend Blake has one of those. Okay.

Shake it. Wave in front of you. Welcome. Yeah.

Well, that's the more you know. Goodness. Then a verse nine, like I said, like I did not have a lot of questions per se for this, but verse nine, we get into the ransom for all. And one of my favorite things I hear some of the people from a receipt bed is a ransom for all, not some.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, you see, I mean, you're worthy to slaughter and your by your blood, you ransom for God saints from every tribal language people in nation. And this, this sequence shows up about seven or eight times throughout Revelation.

It's showing back up this coming up Sunday again, but it's talking about like the fullness of salvation, the fullness of the resurrection of Christ, like that this was not just happened for a group of people or for people that live in particular place, particular time, like this was a ransom for every single person who has walked across the face of the earth. Mm hmm. And what you really see kind of people were not going to do in either a sermon or really in this podcast is chapter six, where the seals get broken, you start seeing some of the death and destruction stuff and a lot of it comes down to like, do you realize this ransom was for you? You realize this because it's just that word salvation.

We carry in like, I'm saved. Like we carry in these understandings or connotations of it. But if you look at the epistemology of the word and what I mean, it's rescue, redemption. I mean, it is a kin to like when you're a kid and you lose control out in the ocean, you're down, it grabs by the back and pulls you out of it.

And that's what it carries. And so that for his blood, he ramps up every person, every nation, every tribe, every people, every language is across the board. Yeah. I mean, that's something that even in my own life, that's hard to reconcile because, man, there's some people I just, I really don't like.

Yeah. There's people you don't want to do, you don't want to do stuff done before. Yeah. And then it's also, but then you've made it be a kingdom and priest serving our God.

They were right on the earth. So you see the whole harp and bowl thing, and verse eight, this very like temple understanding of worship, then making to be a kingdom and their priests, which is so much of this original identity of the nation of Israel. It was to be a different type of nation and that the king was to serve as the high priest and that the priest were the priests, but they every single person held this representative function of worship before the board. And that was what was going to set them apart.

And so you see that by this and so much of this language, this Jewish language is about people being brought back into a place where they were born. They were being brought back into a proper ethical relationship with God, but also a proper civic arrangement because remember this in Apocalypse, there's also like a subversive language being written and communicated here that John is writing and communicating to Christians living in the first century in Rome. Now he will cloud it using the Old Testament language of Babylon, but a reader of the time would be very quick to realize that the portion of this, what John is writing about is a way to tell them, hey, listen, hold on, it's bad, but he's bigger than they are. Mm hmm.

And so just pulling back into that Old Testament language of worship, it's just about belonging, but in a very, very different way than you and I or any person really living now would natively read it. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah.

And that's what some of our weird, some people have this odd Jewish fascination with end times theology. That's what's coming from us. They don't realize this is about belonging, but this is about God creating a people who belong from across the entire world. Mm hmm.

No, that's also what fascinates me about. I guess just Kingdom of God and then coming to earth and then just like how, honestly, you could have a government form system of Christians that could exist just about anywhere. And think of some of Isaiah's prophecies of the name of Jesus, the wonderful council reminded God of the blessing of the recipes and the government will be upon his shoulders. I mean, like you think about this.

And I'm kind of just here to talk about it, because typically what I'm at my experience is when we start messing with religion and religious Christianity politics, it's really janky, really weak. But like there's some civic undertones to this. Yeah. I mean, what I've found also just being, I guess, in the mission on campuses and stuff like that, it's not about going out and trying to change the culture.

It's about creating a culture and then bringing people into it. Yeah. And so it's about the subversion of the culture that is raining over you. Why not destroying it?

No, it's interesting and hard and fun sometimes. So I wanted to get into a little bit of the line in the lamb imagery. Yep. Is that a band?

No, there's just much of songs like that. That's pretty popular image. Yeah. I mean, I was just like listening to it.

I was like, it's got to be like a rock band or like a heavy Christian metal band or something like that. So I didn't even think about this when I was reading over it. But you know, you talked a lot about how what we expect God to do and then what he actually does. And then this is kind of some new testament imagery, right?

Well, I mean, at the lamb, I mean, yes and no. I mean, it's coming up a bunch. But in Jesus' talk, I mean, that whole shepherd thing, he really, really built a lot of layers on top of that. But you're playing with two animal images that are just throughout scripture.

Well, I just remember that like when Jesus is going up to about to be crucified in the crowds or, you know, was a pilot give him the option to save Jesus, you know, which is the lamb. Then you had the other guy there. It was, Barabbas, the rebel. He was kind of like the lion.

Yeah. Well, yeah, you're right. It's like that's the case. And that's the thing.

It's like all along. Like, if you really look at from a story to perspective, why did you, why was Jesus killed? Because he wasn't behaving the way they thought to Messiah should behave. They wanted the Messiah to be the lion.

And they weren't. And he was not showing. I mean, even even to the point of like, at the, the triumphal entry, they're like, when is he going? You got to imagine like when he started to clean the temple out and throw in the tables over it.

People probably getting really excited. You know, like Peter was freaking carrying a sword tonight. Jesus was arrested. Yeah.

He's like, some of them are like ready for it. In fact, I mean, you look at like Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus and his last name, Iscariot. It's not only from a region, the best idea that scholarship went with it. His last name was not.

There wasn't some town that he was from, but it was, it's a reworking of the word, a saccari, which means to do it. The assassin and that Judas might have been part of this like messianic subversive guerrilla Jewish group of people. They would carry around with these small curved nights and they're primary way of like killing somebody with a busy marketplace. Everyone's like crowded around like one person would go up to this person and would stab them four or five times.

They could put the knife back in their cloak and then everybody would disperse. It means like how Jewish cetera was killed. Like, I mean, they were, yeah, so this whole line in Lamb is a very new testament, a very Jesus image. Yeah.

And to see in Revelation, to see it worked out this way is just really to show like I'm going to do this in the exact opposite way that you can expect. But it's a really beautiful image like the land standing as though it was slain because you hear people talk about this God will call this the third way. Like he's not being aggressive and he's not being submissive. He's being both.

But you think about the general character of God and what the character of God consistently shows is a God who shows him. His power in love and self sacrifice. So the way I'm standing is though it was slain. And if you really want like really not this is not necessarily a rabbit trail, but like just some of the imagery.

He would trace down like how like lambs were slaughtered for the sacrifice at the temple. Oh, this is not going to be pretty. Yeah. I mean, like they dismantled him.

Yeah, and that's the thing like I mean, John doesn't go in this image. Yeah, like I mean, they literally did like dismantle them. So like to what level is Jesus standing and alive as though he had been sacrificed. Hashtag reverse zombie.

Hashtag reverse zombie. No, I like those hashtag white Jesus. You know, how to clean them up a little bit. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that just goes to show if you're ever I guess kind of down on yourself, like you just got some stuff wrong. You know, like we've been getting it wrong for two thousand some years. Oh, yeah. I mean, we're done.

This is just never gotten this right. That kind of this is how we start getting into more of the martyrdom. And as that shirt said the last year rebellion. Yes.

Yeah. What was it? The blood of the slain is the seat of the church? Yeah.

The blood of the martyrs is the seat of the church. Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, so that's where we're kind of getting with this now.

Huh? No, we're heading. Well, yes and no. But that's not what that's too far ahead for us to jump into.

Okay. I mean, because I just remember like we had a conversation not too long ago and I guess it was just we're having a conversation about pacifism and just this whole idea of being worth it in the end. Yeah. I mean, you want to get to martyr conversations.

I mean, there's I mean, you can refox this, which has been around for probably 500 years. But I mean, there's just so much stuff that's out there. So you do a bit to a point in Greek martyr means the witness. And so in that the idea, especially the new testimony of martyrdom is it's the Supreme Witness.

Okay. I mean, so how did that get into the whole like dying for? I mean, I think you've got early church has a very, very, very strong martyr tradition because of this. But that's the thing is that we I don't want to I don't like to chase that rabbit only because it gets to the point to where it's another way for us to disregard the book.

You know what I mean? Okay. Yeah. I mean, I see we're going with that.

Yeah. It's like, okay, we can, but that's another that's another door people close. Mm hmm. Well, how does that relate though?

I mean, does that kind of relate into like breaking clean from sin or clean break from sin and then just kind of self sacrifice? I think you could say that. Yeah. I think you could say that.

Yeah. I'm showing out material. I'm running out of an amount. Well, yeah, unless there's anything you've got that you just like, man, I really kind of wish I would have been able to say this.

Oh, man. No, because this was this is an easy chapter. It's a really easy chapter. And it's a continuation of chapter four, really, truly four and five right there together.

But what we see is that this is the end of the first. There's there's this is the beginning of all the crazy stuff. Well, it's the beginning of it. Oh, wow.

Yeah. Cause what chapters one and three, like one's kind of introduction to three of the seven churches. Then four and five is the beginning of the throne room vision chapter six. When you see things start to happen.

We're going to be in chapter seven this Sunday. And that's kind of one lap around right there because there's because there's one to be three judgment cycles of seven things apiece. And so those happens that first chapter six is the first judgment cycle. But then chapter seven is kind of the when Maritz does offer crazy 50 mile runs.

There's always a the place where you like fill your water bottles back up and you get your food and you rest for a second and that kind of thing. At least these there's these cycles of worship that serve as in between spots and like in chapter seven, but it's going to this coming Sunday is one of those in between spots. So we're actually not on top of any of the judgment kind of stuff in the series. So not just not important, but it's like this is the first time to read it.

Let's see. Let's talk about what's really important. Let's avoid these typical places. We'll shut that off.

Okay. All right. Also, let's go back to y'all again. Let us know what you think.

Talk to Jack. Talk to me. But thanks so much for listening. These episodes are really popular and that makes us very happy.

It's a lot of fun to do. So we'll see y'all back next week, see you Sunday. Ten o'clock hungry. Oh, eleven o'clock.

Thank you. Adios.