How do you decide who to agree with? I hear instant laughter. The thing with how do you decide who to agree with? I think for me, I've thought about this a lot this week, there's kind of three ways that people are convinced of something.
And there are three really different ways. And I like these three ways, because they seem to honor our person, or they honor who we are as people. But the first way is that some people, they love a good big picture. They love it.
That's also a way that we convince people to do things, think about this. Some people love a big picture, a big dream, a big vision. They love like that 50,000 foot view. They are inspired by stories of what could be and all they need is someone to tell a good enough story, and they're willing to jump along.
Other people, my wife is one of these people. Other people like to see some details. Like they want, OK, it's a great idea. OK, how are we going to do this?
Bullet points. You know, you want to know the details, right? Is that how anybody else is convinced to follow something? You want to see how it's going to be worked out?
So that you want to see, OK, you've got a really good idea. Great. And you've got to plan. OK, even better.
That's how some people are convinced. Other people are convinced that the biggest picture, the biggest, that person can shake a sugar stick, and nobody won't follow them. Or they might have a 50 page plan, worked at others that are not good enough. Other folks are only going to be willing to agree with somebody once they see results.
They're OK, what have you done in the past like this? Have you done this before? Think about it. We all are convinced to agree with someone in just really different ways.
Or sometimes, what does it mean for us to follow somebody? Do we want to follow someone into this new reality? We have big pictures. We got details, and then we've got results.
Since today, as we kind of jump back into revelation, in these last couple of weeks, today's about agreement. And today's about how a certain group of people are convinced to agree. And it's an amazing twist to it. And it's a weird type of agreement.
And it's interesting because there's people that we would not think would naturally agree with each other. The situation where we don't think the end result would be happening. And it wouldn't be happening because initially, they're not significant. They don't seem qualified for the task at hand.
But it's a great story about agreements. If you would just open your Bibles with me, or you can read on the screen, behind me, Revelation chapter 19, verse 1 through 4. Just a handful of verses this morning. This is what we read.
After this, I heard what sounded like a vast crowd in heaven shouting, praise the Lord, salvation, and glory, and power belong to our God. His judgments are true and just. He has punished the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality. He has avenged the murder of his servants.
And again, their voices rang out. Praise the Lord, the smoke from that city has sinned forever and ever. And the 24 elders and the four living beings fell down and worshiped God who was sitting on the throne. And they cried out, I'm in, praise the Lord.
Four verses, we see some things in there that over the last few weeks sound familiar. We see some stuff that doesn't sound familiar. We've got a really weird word that you would not expect to hear in church in there. And we're going to talk about all those things today.
And we're going to take this a little bit more verse than we normally do because the narrative really follows this. And I told you we jumped into Revelation this summer. We're going to do a couple of things. Number one is we're going to make a decision.
We're going to read this like a normal book of the Bible. Do we expect this to be a subscription? Speaking to all of us and the entire church across all time. And so this narrative really follows this pattern.
We've done this summer of going a little bit in verse by verse. But the second thing is this, is that we are taking, and they were jumping through a big portion of the book. And a part of the book that most people would really kind of seek to focus on initially and completely. And we're going to talk about why we're doing that differently.
But we find ourselves at the beginning of a new section. When we read Revelation, we see this after this. John, this is a change of vision. Remember we've talked about how Revelation kind of goes through loops, like a collapse around the racetrack.
And every time we find worship, it's almost like a pit stop coming in and change your tires, get more gas. Like we're in the middle of this pit stops right now. After this, it lets us know that that's going on. And John, he sees people that he's been seeing engaging with with this whole book.
We read about this great crowd, singing about the power of God's salvation. We talked about them two weeks ago in Revelation 7. We realized that this is the entire redeemed church of God's people spread out across all time that are here, that are singing this song that John hears. We see the four living creatures and the 24 elders.
They're back in the play now. But there's also some stuff we've not engaged in before. But this church is here and they're singing about salvation and they're singing about salvation in a way that we've not heard them sing about it yet. In Revelation, this represents the redeemed church.
But then also it's the point where we have the thought and the conversation that this is us that's engaging in this. This is us that has gone through the experience of salvation and knows what Jesus did for us. And we're singing these words. And so we kind of jump into the first thing.
We went from chapter 7 to chapter 19. And what happens to 8 through 18? 8 through 18 was a bunch of really weird, gnarly stuff. It's about that section is a judgment.
And a lot of times, early on in the summer, we talked about how sometimes we were fearful of jumping into Revelation because of the things that are in there, they're weird, they're scared that we don't know about. A lot of those things are inside of there. And the reason that we did not go into those is we wanted to read this as a book for all ages, right? We wanted to read this as a normal book of scripture.
Just like we would read one of the gospels or the book of Psalms or something like that. And if we jumped immediately into that judgment portion, we would have a very, very hard time accomplishing that goal. It doesn't mean it's not real. It doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
It doesn't mean it's not valid. But it's just for our quest in Revelation this summer, it was not part of the story that we had to take care of. We want to focus on Jesus. Now, what we do know, though, and what we will say, and we'll talk about judgment just for a moment, is if we go through and read this, this past week, I read chapters 8 through 18 about 20 times to make sure that I understood that I could quickly kind of communicate what we find in this.
And this is what we do see. And what we do need to know about today is that these chapters are about judgment, that judgment is real. But judgment takes on a different shape in Revelation than we think it might take shape initially. And remember how when we first started, we said we need to realize there are more Old Testament illusions in Revelation than any other book of the Bible.
There are more Old Testament illusions in Revelation than there are verses in Revelation. That when we read 8 through 18 the judgment chapters, in light of that reality, we see something very different. We don't see doom, we don't see gloom, we don't see hatred. We don't see the stuff that we love to make apocalyptic movies out of.
What we see is the moral character of God is the exercise in a way that's consistent with Scripture. And we read that in light of who God is. And judgment's part of our theology, it's here. It's there, but it's working out in a way that's different from us.
And I'll illustrate this really quickly with you. How do you judge people? Or how do you judge situations? Don't lie, I do it.
I mean, imagine you do it. You know, Mary and I last year on vacation, we were laughing about it. We were at Schulerbahn, the water park in New Bronzels. You know what I'm talking about?
You know what I'm talking about? We were laughing, we were looking around because we just have to be full disclosure, full honesty. You know what the best part about water park is? It's people watching.
I'm like, oh, my mare just like, it's my Jesus made sunglasses. And if you don't believe in the depravity of humanity or humans abilities to make bad decisions, just go to a water park. The whole place is bad. We judge.
But think about when you, not from a silly side, but seriously, like when you start judging someone, I'm gonna imagine there's a certain emotion that will rise up out of you. And that motion is anger. Okay, think about the thing that drives you crazy. Meet it's texting and driving.
I get angry. Those are things I get angry about. When I judge, I get angry. And what's interesting is when we read all these judgment passages in Revelation, and we read also the idea of judgment in the Old Testament, which is consistent with what we read in Revelation, we don't see God's anger worked out here.
This is not about God's anger. This is not about him desire to go get somebody, or to go get someone. Judgment happens when a God who is completely holy enters into an unholy situation. And then his holiness manifests as wrath in order to make what is unholy, holy again.
That's a cleansing. And we see that in this passage. We see that talked about in this passage, but we're just as God's character. And he's not angry, but he's manifesting himself inside of our world because of the deception of evil, because of deception of Satan, and because of humanity's uncleanliness in our participation with sin.
This judgment is not anger. If anything, this judgment is actually holy love of God coming into a place, a holy God who cannot dwell anywhere that's unholy in him making it a holy again. And there's been some decisions that get it to that place. And we see that cleanliness worked out in ways that makes us uncomfortable, as we read about in Revelation.
The thing that also kind of this story is like slowly, slowly unfolding. This isn't a great prostitute. And that's kind of that work you don't expect to hear that word. If you've been here in Foundry a while, you've heard that word from me before, because we've talked about this a lot.
But we don't expect to hear about that in scripture, right? You don't expect to hear that idea. And what we find is there's a biblical typology that stretched out all across scripture, especially in the Old Testament, especially in the prophets, in the Old Testament, of willful uncoonliness and willful participation in evil and willful participation. And that what draws you away from God, it's about idolatry.
And what we find in the Old Testament is that idolatry is not about people going and finding a false God that looks nothing like God and worshiping them instead. It's about people who distort the image and distort the picture of God. It's about false relationship in broken relationship. Ultimately, this idea of judgment and John's decision for to use this description to describe idolatry and evil in revelation, it's a false picture of a relationship.
It's a false picture of power. It's a false picture of what it's like to rule. It's a false picture of the relationship that God has with his people and that people have with what they call God. And so when we put all of these together and we see the smoke rising from the great city, this is the city that's the opposite of Jerusalem, the opposite of God's place, we find it as a reminder, a permanent reminder of willful missteps and of broken relationship between a false God and the people who've chosen to call that person God.
So it's kind of put judgment in a little bit different of a light than we would imagine it to be. So that sets the tone for this reading today. But now we go on to the more interesting part. The more interesting part of the agreement, we read that the smoke rises forever and ever.
And we have, why does it have to be there? What's going on with you? Look in Revelation, you kind of, there's a picture that goes across back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, across the entire book. And this idea of the smoke coming from evil rising up and the prayers of God's people rising up like incense.
This is a biblical picture of worship and this idea of incense being the presence of God, the worship of God that saturates the place completely. It was used in the temple inside the Holy of Holies and incense was burned. And so people could walk in there, the high priest could walk in to make offerings and that God would not be able to see him and he would not be able to see God because an unholy person could not be in the same place as a holy God. And all throughout Revelation, we see this back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth about how worship penetrates our senses and how worship when it happens in places, it begins to change and to transform.
So throughout eternity, there's always that reminder of brokenness and what has happened before that's surrounded by the reality of who God is and what God's doing. That God penetrates our senses completely. And our experience with God on this earth informs our belief and what eternity will look like. And there's this eternal presence, this eternal relationship with God and it's rising up to him as he comes to meet us and it's God attaching himself to every single fabric and every single part of our life.
When true worship infuses are very being and even after judgment, we see this reminder because we know where we came from and we know what we came out of because all of us at some point in time if I'd invite the presence of God into our lives to clean us, to clean us, to clean the offer to do, to rescue and to redeem, to make us holy again. And there's one more thing, it's a small detail, but it's also about the ultimate ending. It's about that agreement piece. It's what I love about these four verses.
I've been waiting for this conversation all summer long in verse four for you again. And I just listen to this and just think about what this could be saying to us. And the 24 elders and the four living creatures fell down and worship God who was sitting on the throne and they cried out, Amen, praise the Lord. Amen, it's a simple little word.
I think it's also a word that we might forget about sometimes. It's the word we tack onto the end of things, it's the word we might say, it's the word sometimes we might say sarcastically. But when do we say amen? Now as a kid, I'd have to go church with my grandmother and she was a wilderness Baptist, like King James only.
I'm not joking, there was an outhouse at this church. Like, amen at that church was like the deacons on the front pews, amen, amen. I think you might have that remember. You know, does anybody have that memory of hearing amen?
I was away speaking last weekend and I had a bunch of college students that were there and they talked back during the sermon. And whenever you hear something, amen. Think about how we use amen. Will we ever thought about what amen actually means?
Is it just a way to close something down? Is it just something we say when we like what we're hearing? Just like every single thing in this past we read today, we go back to John's favorite grammar, which is the Old Testament. What does this mean?
How is this used? What story is he trying to tell us? And we realize that in scripture, amen is a very strong affirmation. It's a way that the Jewish church would almost say, let it be so.
When you'd hear something that you would agree with and it was a spoken proclamation of envisioning a future. It was a spoken way, it's a say of a community. It was a word that was used corporately. It wasn't a private word.
It was a public word. It was a word that they would use to say, may this be fulfilled, may the truth that you have said be the new reality to which we live in. In a personal way, when we say amen, in this way it's us saying I am willing to take the words that you are saying and to put them into my mouth. I'm willing for your words to mean something in my life and for me to stand up behind this.
So who's doing the speaking here? We've read this passage. It's just a few verses. Who's the predominant amount of the words the speaking's being done by the redeemed church.
Salvation belongs to our God alone. All glory and honor and power. The smoke rises from this great city and the great prostitute has been stopped. It's the redeemed church talking about what full salvation looks like, what full redemption and full power looks like.
Then we have those four creatures. Those 24 elders, the only thing they say in this passage, I'm in, praise be to God. And think about that real quick. We actually think about what's going on.
So you have these things, these beings, the living creatures, four of them, circled around God, around the throne, throughout all eternity, protecting his holiness. Then you have these 24 elders representing the conglomeration of God's people. And they're worshiping eternally. Read in chapter four, they take their crowns and they hand them, they take their own signs of victory and hand them over to God constantly throughout all eternity.
I would say that these two groups of people probably have the best idea of who God is out there, wouldn't you? If you're supposed to be protecting the holiness of God throughout all eternity, wouldn't you say you have a pretty good grasp on that holiness? If you're a worshiping eternally. From before time began, wouldn't you say that you have a pretty good grasp on the kind of power and why God needs to be worshiped, right?
I would assume so. And here we have those two groups of people agreeing with those who mess the whole thing up, with the ones who've participated and divided this in idolatry, with people who have led sinful lives, with people who have not been holy, with people who have created and contributed to the unholy way this world works, speaking about the salvation of God. And now you have the things that know God the best, saying, amen, I will take those words you said and I will put them in my mouth. I will stand behind what you said.
Why do you think that is? Have you thought that you and I had the capacity to know God better than all the angels and the heavenly creatures do? Because you and I have the ability to know God in a way that they never can, that you and I have the ability to know what grace is like and to know what it's like to have to be rescued and to be redeemed. Because of that, we have gone through a fuller experience and a fuller reality than who God is than these creatures.
They've never sent. I know I have, but that I know God better than they do, because I know it's like to have grace in my life. Friends, those creatures and beings are saying amen to you and to your experience. See, we cannot fully worship the reality of who God is until we have fully experienced the reality of who God is and we cannot fully experience the reality of who God is until we understand how grace is impacted and affected our lives.
That's why they can say amen to us.