Church News: August

These are difficult days for our world.

Every time we read the newspaper or turn on the television, it seems a new war has started. Yet another war to bring peace.

Or so they tell us.

Presidents, prime ministers and politicians of all persuasions wave sabers, exploiting human evil for political gain. They try to convince us that killing the world will save it.

If you are like me, you may have been told that all this was forecast in the Book of Revelation – the last book of the Bible.

But that’s not what it’s about. Revelation is a God-inspired work of literature, written by Christ-believers in the early first century. It gave hope to early Christ-believers being persecuted – or even martyred – for their faith.

Christians are not persecuted in any serious way in North America today. Still, Revelation carries the same message now as then of God’s triumph over evil. Revelation tells us how to read the Bible through the lens of God’s love, not religious hatred.

This isn’t just making the Bible say what we want it to. We only have to turn to the last words of its last book to see that the Bible is a book of glorious anticipation, not damnation.

Now, it’s true that Revelation does show us a vision of human harm. Yet at the end of it all, Jesus says, “I am the bright morning star.”

He is the rising star who welcomes a morning of healing after horror.

In response to this bold declaration, Revelation wraps up with this:

“Let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’

Let everyone who is thirsty come.

Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”

At the end of it all, after all the harm we bring on ourselves, Revelation says that living water is for everyone, everyone and anyone. Everyone who needs to repent of evil and anyone who is overwhelmed by it all. When we remember that everyone is offered God’s water of life, no matter who they are, what they believe, or what they have done, everyone and anyone can become galvanized with justice and love.

Yes, it is a crisis-of-the-a-day kind of time. Even a crisis-of-the-hour time.

But Christians know how the story ends.

Instead of being overwhelmed, we proclaim that it’s God’s love that overwhelms – overwhelms our tendency to devastate and kill. 

For the last words of the apocalypse speak of God’s expansive love. A love so big, so strong, that maybe – just maybe – everyone and everything in the world will be saved.

We’re agents of this immense love when we resist everyone and anyone who, in the name of God, and for the cause of peace, would destroy it.