Revelation 14, see the triumph of Jesus both in joy as well as in judgment. Revelation 14, as we look to the reading of God’s Word, if you would join with me in prayer.
God of all mercy, you’ve promised never to break your covenant with us, and so amid all the changing words of our generation, Lord, we ask that you would continue to speak your eternal words that do not change. That we would be able to respond to your gracious promises with faithful and obedient lives. And Lord, this is what we pray and ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Revelation 14, beginning in verse 1. Then I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven like the roar of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder. The voice I heard was like the sound of a harpist playing on the harps, and they were singing a new song before the throne, before the four living creatures, before the elders. No one could learn that song except the 144,000 who have been redeemed from the earth.
It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins. Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead with the eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on the earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people, And he says with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.” Another angel, a second, followed, saying, “Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great, she who made all nations drink the wine of the passion of her sexual immorality.” And another angel, a third, followed them, saying with a loud voice, “If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives the mark on his forehead or on his own hand, he will drink the wine of God’s wrath poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he’ll be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of holy angels, in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image and whoever receives the mark of its name.
Then I heard a voice from heaven saying, Write this: Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. Blessed indeed, says the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God. As some of you may know, the NBA playoffs are in full swing. Let’s ask the question: What if you pre-recorded your team playing Game 7, and before you watch it, you find out that your team wins by 10 points. You still wanna watch it when you get home. Exciting game.
And as you’re watching it, he— in the third quarter, the opposing team makes an 18-0 run. You’re down 12 points. How worried are you?
Knowing that you win by 10, it definitely takes the anxiety out of a rough third quarter. Now, in Revelation chapter 12 and 13 can seem like that rough third quarter to many. Satan, the great dragon, is let loose upon the earth. He’s trying to destroy God’s people. We see the rise of these two beasts with the dragon.
They represent the unholy trinity. People are worshiping them, and many are getting the mark of the beast, 666. God’s people are suffering, and bad things are happening everywhere. Now, if that’s all that you read in Revelation, it would seem rather terrifying. It’s a rough third quarter, but from start to finish, the outcome has been assured.
God wins. He wins big. There’s no question about it. And chapter 14 is the heavenly view of what’s going on. How easy it is for us to look at the world around us and we begin to fear the things that are happening.
People running around like Chicken Little saying, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling,” and it’s not falling. Bad things happening, sure, but that was what was foretold. The church age, the time from Jesus’ resurrection until his return, it’s marked with conflict. But throughout this time, Jesus is confidently ruling and reigning. And chapter 14, it shows us all this, as it were, from a heavenly luxury box.
We get to see what’s taking place. But it does bring up another concern, the final judgment. And then fear can once more come in, but it’s brought from a different perspective. And sometimes many wonder, like, how is this fair? How do some get eternal punishment for playing for the wrong team?
Because the judge of all the earth will do right, we can be confident in his just judgments. And John is seeing all of this death and destruction, and now his attention is drawn upward. We see coming together are these themes of a joyful jubilee even with the terrors of judgment. Says in verse 1, I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads. And what he sees, he sees stands in complete contrast to what we have just viewed, where the beast is running amok and people are receiving the unholy mark on their foreheads.
Again, We are firmly in the realm of symbolism here. This is a symbolic view of history given to communicate to us these truths. If you recall from chapter 7, this 144,000, it symbolizes the entire number of the people of God. It’s not some special elite group. Rather, it shows the whole invisible church, the total number of God’s elect.
Where are they? They are in Mount Zion, a heavenly picture of salvation. Mount Zion is the heavenly temple, and God is present here with his people. They are sealed and they are protected by him. Revelation makes it clear that our final destiny is determined by whose name we bear.
In verse 2, I heard a voice from heaven like a roar of many waters, like the sound of loud thunder. The voice I heard is like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, and they were singing a new song before the throne. And for all the torment that is taking place upon the earth, there is joy in heaven for those who have conquered, for those who bear the name of Jesus. In worship, God’s redeemed people sing of everything that he’s done. And there is a curious mention in verse 4 of those virgins who have not defiled themselves with women It comes a little more apparent when we recognize that in the Old Testament, Israel, when it was called to go to war, was to keep themselves ceremonially clean.
And the idea here is that God’s people are holy and blameless, an Old Testament symbol for having been utterly cleansed and sanctified. And verse 4 goes on to say, if those who follow the Lamb wherever he goes, they have been redeemed from mankind as were first fruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth was no lie, that they were blameless. This is what we saw earlier in chapter 7. There it reads, these are the ones coming out of the Great Tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
John is using these Old Testament images to speak of God’s people having been cleansed by the blood of Jesus. It is only through Jesus that they have received his righteousness. Jesus. And as Revelation goes forward, a, a greater picture of this joyful jubilee is going to be shown in the later chapters. And what we see here is just the start.
For those who belong to Jesus, they are spiritually protected. They will conquer and they will endure to the end because they bear Jesus’ name. They bear his accomplishment. And that is great news when everything around you seems to be falling apart. But with this joy and celebration also comes a picture of judgment for those who refuse to follow the Lamb.
In quick succession, three angelic messengers come forward, and the first proclaims the gospel: Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water, the one who’s made everything. He is to receive our worship. It’s not too late for those following after the world, the flesh, and the devil to repent and turn to the Lord before the end. And then the second angel comes and gives us the first mention of Babylon.
Fallen, fallen is Babylon the Great, she who made all the nations drink the wine of the passions of her sexual immorality. And Babylon figuratively represents the world’s kingdoms that stand against the Lord. The actual city of Babylon was long on the decline by the time that John writes this. It’s used to speak of the seductive nature of Satan’s kingdom that lures the nations and people away. And from this heavenly vantage point, John sees her ruin as already complete.
And then the third angel comes with a message of doom: If anyone worships the beast, its image, receives the mark on his forehead or on his hand, he He will drink the wine of God’s wrath poured full strength in the cup of his anger, and he’ll be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels, the presence of the Lamb. The smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest day or night. These worshipers of the beast and its image, whoever receives the mark of its name— whose name you bear determines your destiny. But here comes a major sticking point with, with many, an objection certainly to Christianity. It’s one of eternal punishment.
Now the rest of the chapter is taken up with a further picture of this judgment. In verse 14, it says, I looked, and behold, a white cloud, and seated on the cloud like the sun, one like the Son of Man, with a golden crown on his head and a sharp sickle in his hand. And this is the Son of Man on the throne a picture that we also see in the book of Daniel representing Jesus, the Son of Man, coming in judgment. And in verse 15, another angel came out of the temple calling with a loud voice to him who sat on the cloud, put your sickle and reap, for the hour to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is fully ripe. And then down to verse 19, so the angel swung his sickle across the earth and gathered the grape harvest of the earth.
And threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. An image we’ve heard in lots of literary forms, the winepress of the wrath of God. And the final verse 20 shows us the symbolic nature of this judgment. Said blood flowed from the winepress as high as a horse’s bridle for 1,600 stadia. It’s about 5 feet high for about 200 miles.
The 1,600 represents 40 times 40, the squaring, as it were, the number of trials and temptations. Also represents the basic size of Palestine. So God is judging all those who oppose him. This idea of eternal judgment has certainly fallen on hard times in our present society. We don’t have any problem with the idea of God being a God of love and forgiveness.
That’s super easy for people to get behind, but unending judgment, not so much. And along with the problem of suffering, God’s judgment is one of the major objections that we hear concerning Christianity. And often people in one form or another are saying or thinking, who is God to judge us like this? Who is God to punish me?
C.S. Lewis, he gives a great image of this. He has a little short work called God in the Dock, and that’s a British expression about God being put on trial, needing to testify about what he’s doing. The dock, we would say, is the witness stand in how we would speak of it. And he writes this, he said, ancient man approached God as the accused person approaches his judge.
For the modern man, the role is reversed. He is the judge. God is in the dock. Modern man is quite a kindly judge. If God shows to have a reasonable defense for being a God who permits war, poverty, disease, he’s ready to listen.
The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that man is on the bench and God is in the dock.
Flipped entirely around. God has to give me reasons for what he’s doing that must make sense to me so that I can let him off if I find it plausible.
To be sure, many don’t have a problem with judgment for a particular act, but they do with eternal judgment. And that question is, how is it fair that someone who may have only lived 20 years on the earth could still be punished for an eternity from now. That seems disproportionately unfair. Part of the problem is, is what exactly does eternal life mean for us who are finite? How does time work?
There’s so many of these types of theological, philosophical questions that we really don’t know. I don’t fully understand or grasp what is yet to come, what that means, and honestly, nobody else does either. The whole concept of time and eternity are beyond our present understanding. So somehow the thought that I’m going to judge God according to my limited awareness now is foolish. Who am I to judge God for this?
Now there have been Christians who have held a view that God annihilates the person at judgment. They’re judged and then they’re simply no more. He just removes them. And others have had the idea that God will ultimately redeem all peoples over time as a form of universal salvation. I don’t think either of these hold up to biblical scrutiny, but I do appreciate the difficulty that they’re trying to address.
How is eternal punishment fair to finite beings? It is, it is a struggle to grasp. Same with pain and suffering, evil in the world. These are all issues that we have to confront and recognize we don’t have immediate answers for.
These are some of the difficulties that are going to have to await when the Lord returns. Full explanations that we don’t fully grasp now. To deny them doesn’t do us any good. But the other idea of this idea of judgment is to remember that the one person who spoke probably the most about coming judgment was Jesus.
Matthew 25, speaking of that great day, and then the Lord will say to those on his left, depart from me, you cursed, into eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. And then in Mark 9, and if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It’s better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to to the unquenchable fire, where the worm does not die and the fire is not quenched. Or the Gospel of Luke, chapter 12: But I will warn you whom to fear.
Fear him who, after he has killed you, has authority to cast you into hell. Yes, fear him.
Jesus spoke repeatedly about coming judgment. Why? Because he is the Savior. God’s saving us. It doesn’t make any sense unless he’s saving us from something.
And Jesus as the Savior is telling us that there is life only in him and that he is the one saving us from judgment.
I appreciate how a Polish poet, Czesław Miłosz, he talked about this and he said that the true opium of the people— he’s taking a play off of Marx’s opium of the masses being religion— he said a true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death. The huge solace of thinking that our betrayals, greed, cowardice, and murders are not going to be judged.
Yet all religions recognize that our deeds are imperishable. Divine retribution has been universal to most religions. Most people have a sense of an ultimate justice being delivered at death. And the question always is, where does this come from? Why is it so recognized by so many?
An innate sense that what is wrong will be righted. And that not only that it will be, that it must be. That innate sense that we want for justice. Croatian theologian Miroslav Volf, he said, “If God were not angry at injustice and deception,” and did not make a final end to violence, that God would not be worthy of worship. The only means of prohibiting all recourse to violence by ourselves is to insist that violence is only legitimate when it comes from God.
He’s the only one who has the right to judge. God is the only one who has the right to mete out what is actually deserved. And he goes on, he says, underlying the theology of judgment in the Apocalypse is the assumption that nothing is potent enough to change those who insist on remaining beasts and false prophets. We should not shy away from the unpleasant and deeply tragic possibility that there might be human beings created in the image of God who through the practice of evil have immunized themselves from all attempts at their redemption. And when you look in human history, of course, great, Names of notoriety come to mind.
There are people that you go, “Oh yeah, that person has become almost the incarnation of evil.” But we see it not only in the big pictures, we see it in the little ones. That you can actually change from that image of God in you so twisted, so reviling, that you have made yourself immune. To redemption.
If you reject God, in the end you get what you want.
If you reject God, in the end you get what you want. I’m sure many of you have heard that from C.S. Lewis as well. And C.S. Lewis writes, there are only two kinds of people in the end: those who will say to God, thy will be done, and those to whom God says in the end, Thy will be done.
All that are in hell choose it. Whether that self-conscious they should be— without that self-choice, there would be no hell. No soul that seriously and consistently desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock, it is opened.
And that’s the gospel presented to us.
Those who seek find.
Those who knock, the door’s open. That’s the words of Jesus telling us to seek him, to call out to him first and foremost. Even as we recognize it is the divine great mercy of God that opens our eyes to see our need. And how all of these are woven together. And as to God’s fairness, Abraham proclaimed long ago in Genesis 18, saying to God, “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” And the implication, of course, is that yes, God will do right.
Because Abraham was concerned about Sodom and Gomorrah being destroyed, and in this great reverse auction that takes place, God whittles the number down from 50 righteous people to 10, so that maybe the Lord would not destroy it. But the sad news was in the end there weren’t even 10 righteous. And the Lord told Abraham what he was doing ahead of time, and Abraham intercedes with him, and ultimately it’s Lot and his family who are spared.
You see, make no mistake, people are not damned because they have not heard. They are damned because they are rebellious against a merciful and gracious God.
We do not evangelize to improve upon God’s justice. We evangelize as an extension of God’s mercy. We evangelize to bring glory to Jesus the Savior, the one who gave himself for the life of the world. Ultimately, God did not overlook our plight. He did not ignore it.
He entered into our state of sin and misery to overcome it. Jesus took the punishment we deserve, and we see in Revelation 14 the joy expressed by those who have suffered for the name of Jesus. We win in the end because God has conquered sin and death through the eternal Son. And I do know that the judge of all the earth will do right, that we do not judge the rightness of God by our human standards or by our understanding. We sing praises to the one who has redeemed us by dying for us on the cross.
The self-giving love of Jesus has absorbed our violence and our deceit. And because of that, we are then enabled to do the same, even as we await that day when all things will be righted. Every tear will be removed, and we will sing that new song. And here in verse 13, contrasting with those who have given themselves to the beast, I heard a voice from heaven saying, Write, Blessed are are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. Blessed indeed that they may rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.
They’re resting even though they have suffered in this life for the name of Jesus. They are blessed.
And what we see through all of this is that you and I are not wiser or more compassionate than God.
As if somehow God is this angry person who’s just looking for people to get out of line so he can whack them. We’re not more compassionate than the one who sent his only begotten Son to die for our sins. We who are glory thieves, who do not even see our own depravity and sinfulness, this God sent his Son to a world utterly clueless.
To die for us, that we would have life in him, that he would give us what is true and good and beautiful.
That is the God whom we serve, who we worship. And we don’t even have an inkling of the totality of that for our own lives, let alone how all this works out in the entire world, but that we would certainly refrain from our judgment against him and simply offer worship for the mercy and the kindness that we have received from him.
That God has not put us in the dock to give an account for how we have sinned against him and sinned against those who are made in his image. That’s the good news of Jesus. He is not asking us to pay for what we could not, but that he has come into the midst of our sin and brokenness, and he has paid it in full through the Son, the eternal Son.
And the celebration that we see here in chapter 14 that you and I also are going to participate in, in its fullness, even as the Lord would tarry.
But one day that will be complete, and no one is gonna stand and bring an accusation against our God to say that you were unjust, you were unfair.
Or you were disproportionate. We are going to fall simply and say worthy and holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.
That is the promise that is set before us. And I’ll say, brothers and sisters, now not all these answers are easily remedied, or all these questions are easily remedied with answers. But our trust is in him who does right. Our trust is in the one who came into our sin and misery to break it finally and for good. Pray with me.
Father Almighty, as we come before you, Father, we would confess we’ve all judged you. Father, we’ve all held you at times in contempt, Father, or simply in bewilderment. And Lord, we ask that you would forgive us. Father, help us to see beyond ourselves. Help us to see the greater glory of Jesus.
And Lord, we would also pray and ask that through the mercy that we have received, we would also become agents of your mercy to others. Use us, Lord God, to proclaim the good news of Jesus. Use us in this good work, even as we await that day when all things will be made new. And this we would ask and pray through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Discaimer: This sermon text was generated by an automated transcription service.