Title: Metaphors of Heaven
Sunday, July 17, 2010 Sermon <Sequential Sermon for Kingdom Day: Unknown Country 3>
“Metaphors of Heaven”
Revelation 1:9-20
One.
At the eastern tip of the present-day Turkish Peninsula is the city of Ephesus, and about 75 miles from there is the island of Patmos. During the Roman Empire, the island was used as an exile to isolate the impure from society. When they were exiled there, they had to end their lives there, unless something special happened.
Persecution and exile did not stifle or stifle John's faith. In essence, true faith is made purer and stronger by suffering. When a person of faith lays down on a bed, the bed becomes a prayer bed, and when he is imprisoned, the cell becomes a prayer room. John did not accept his exile as a redemption, but used it as an opportunity for deeper prayer. As he prays, he sees the kingdom of God. John wrote of that experience:
On the day of the Lord, in the power of the Holy Spirit, I heard a loud voice behind me, like a trumpet. ... I turned to recognize the voice I was hearing. When I turned around, there were seven golden candlesticks, and in the middle of them stood “one like the Son of Man.” (Rev 1:10-13)
Here, ‘the Lord’s Day’ refers to Sunday, and the early Christians celebrated and worshiped the resurrection of Jesus on that day. Because on the first day of the week, Sunday, the Lord was resurrected. John must have worshiped alone, remembering the church members he had left behind in Asia Minor. While worshiping alone, he sees the kingdom of God. When you are focused on God with all your heart, at some point all your consciousness stops, you hear an incomprehensible voice and see an incomprehensible sight. Heaven was opened to him.
The last book of the New Testament, the Book of Revelation, came into our hands in this way. After John finished his journey to heaven, which may have lasted for some time, he wrote down what he had seen and heard on that journey. There were many things he wrote down that he himself did not understand. So, will the people who read it add to it? Thus, the book of Revelation has been a book surrounded by mystery from the beginning. So the ancient church leaders had to wrestle for a long time over whether or not to accept the book of Revelation as a Christian canon. Eventually, this book came to occupy the last place in the New Testament, and although many scholars have studied it, there are still more books that do not know than know.
2.
Although there is more we do not know than we know, this book is very important for understanding the nature of the kingdom of God. Not because this book reveals everything about the kingdom of heaven. I don't know how many people open the book of Revelation with such anticipation. That is why there have been constant spiritual swindlers who use their vain expectations to deceive people. There have always been people who claim to have unlocked all the secrets of the book of Revelation, and there have always been people who believed and followed it. As a result, heresy arose, and Christianity became the cause of social chaos.
The book of Revelation is not intended to be understood in its entirety. The kingdom of God that John experienced was beyond human words, and the words he heard were beyond human understanding. But he recorded the afterimages that remained in his memory. Because the Lord has commanded it that way.
Write what you see in a book, and send it to the seven churches: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. (verse 11)
Therefore, write down what you have seen, what is now, and what will happen after this. (verse 19)
Why did the Lord tell us to write something that John himself did not understand, and even the readers of it could not understand? I don't think I know everything about this question. How do I know what God is doing? However, there is one catch. As we read the book of Revelation, the most important thing we should realize is that ‘we cannot comprehend the whole kingdom of God’ or ‘the kingdom of God is too great and mysterious for us to comprehend.’
The book of Revelation is not a book that reveals everything about the kingdom of heaven, but reveals a part of it and hides more. In fact, God didn't hide it on purpose, but it appears to be hidden because we don't have the ability to recognize it. When translating the English word apocalypse into Korean, it is also called ‘revelation’ (啓示), but ‘apocalyptic’ (