Come to the City of God

It's the new year, and towards the end of the book of Revelation, the Bible talks about God recreating a place for God and humans to live together. Let's look at it together, a sermon that I gave on New Year's Day.

Revelation 21:1-6

Happy New Year! We are entering a New Year, and our biblical reading tells us about a new creation.  Revelation is such a funny book of the Bible. Well, there aren’t a lot of laughs in it, but it is interesting. What’s interesting about it is more than the fact that it almost seems like a science-fiction movie.  There are epic battles between good and evil. There are enough fantastic creatures, symbols, and images to make your head spin. We are given glimpses into heaven and what it’s like. Evil reemerges again and again, but at last good achieves its final triumph.  What’s interesting to me is how everyday people, not to mention biblical scholars and theologians, run so hot and cold about it.

People, especially in the western world, either seem to avoid it entirely or they delve into it trying to figure out the code, thinking it will help them to predict about the end of the world.  Martin Luther didn’t really have any use for the book of Revelation. Yet, it was included in the Bible and has remained so through breaks between the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox, through the Protestant Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation.

Strangely enough, after the Reformation, the Protestants stopped considering several books as part of the Bible, such as Sirach and 1st & 2nd Maccabees. It seems to me that if other books were going to be removed from the Bible, this would have been the time, but Revelation was not.

What is its value?  I said that it is in the western world where people usually either dismiss Revelation as too complicated or dig into the details trying to figure out when Jesus will return.  However, there is a group of people for whom this book is very important and popular.  That is where the Christian Church is severely persecuted and oppressed.

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