Notes from Today’s Discussion and Next (Last!) Reading

 Week 10 :  August 16: The Eighth Day

Welcome home.  Again,  Hopefully.

➡️Reading:  Genesis, Chapter 2.

⬇️Attached:  discussion notes from Week 9 Thy Kingdom Come

Nobody said tackling Revelation would be easy, but we were chomping to get at it.  What was a little harder was staying with the verses we had (Rev 11:5-19) and not stray into the other parts of this wonderful, difficult, book.  We strayed, sure, but we kept coming back to what the Kingdom of God looks like when it comes again.

(It did not help that a co-facilitator (anonymous) referred to the book as “Revolution”.)

This is not “the word of the Lord”, but a revelation, a dream, a vision by John of Patmos.  It is highly symbolic - that is one way to read it, but even John himself said he didn’t understand all the symbols, an angel had to help him.  Revelation means “uncovering what was previously hidden”.  This vision is the coming again; Jesus is back and triumphant and He wins.  After our reading, is the cosmic battle between good and evil, taking on everything that has happened since the Garden of Eden, the snake.  The Kingdom of God is coming—this is the last call.

You can read it as a message to hold on to the faith.  You can read it as prophesy, this is what’s going to happen.  You can take it as the ongoing conflict between humanity and Satan.  

 We are told in this vision that Jesus wins.  The vision is so hard to decipher that a lot of people decipher it by saying it has already happened, usually by naming a political power.  

Do we get our hope in the Resurrection of Jesus or in the final judgement?  Where is our Christian hope located?  The kingdom of the world has become the Kingdom of our Lord.  That’s the hope.  The Kingdom of God is in this hope.  Will be in this hope.  

What is adversarial to God’s Kingdom today?  Politics is what we think of, where the noise is, but that may be too little.  Sin.  Evil.  The Kingdom will dissolve all the nations; it will be only, all, people.  The battle will be between good and evil.

Putting human processes on top of Revelation doesn’t work. The more you do it, the more you can get misled.  We were getting in trouble doing this in our discussion.  (That’s because we’re human….). In discussing the figure of the anti-Christ (or “a” anti-Christ, as one of a continuing series and battles), what if we said “anti-Kingdom”, could be anybody, could be within us, our actions with the Kingdom, nations’ actions, cosmic actions.  

This book does not come up much in Sunday lectionary - we don’t just lay this out in front of people because it is prone not so much to interpretation as misinterpretation.  One of us suggested the book can be read as a confirmation of what Jesus said:  that He would return, that He would judge the living and the dead, a day of final judgement. This is what it looks like in John’s vision.  Jesus comes back.  Jesus wins.

One of us pointed out to verse 15 to give us hope.  (We all scrambled back into our bibles.). The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah, and he will reign for ever and ever.  Which is fitting, as we have discussed in other sessions, ancient Mediterranean texts arranged the most important message, the “end” in the middle of the work, and these verses are in the middle of the Book of Revelation.

P.S.  This is not the end of the discussion.  You might think so:  it’s the last book of the bible; Jesus returns, but there is one more session.  One more reading, the last word on the Kingdom!