Monday, November 14, 2022

 

Monday, November 14, 2022


Psalm 34

Zechariah 9:1-10

Revelation 6:12-7:8


Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.


Today’s seal, the sixth, is beginning to get a bit sticky, try as we might to wring it out for meaning and application. Let’s try and ride this vehicle of interpretation we established last week, where the scroll is a title deed for creation, and the opening of which looks to be a spiritual history of creation.


What we are having described to us today is the beginning of what the Old Testament prophets called “The Day of the LORD”. (Joel in particular is a good place to read about this.) John is giving us a definite relationship between this Day, and the events surrounding the first Easter and Jesus’ incarnation. In fact, at the first Pentecost, Peter quoted some lines from Joel about the Day and emphasised the importance of Jesus as the Messiah in light of what was to come.


There are three important parts of what we read here in Revelation about the Day of the LORD. Firstly, that it is a very big deal. Global and cosmic natural disasters will leave no-one under any impression that all is as it has always been. (Or, as Matthew Henry puts it, “though God be invisible, He can make the inhabitants of this world sensible of His awful frowns.”) It is a sad indictment upon our human nature that we live quite happily through the first scrolls of war, poverty, disease and injustice, yet are interrupted only when God rips the atmosphere off the earth.


Secondly, there is a sense that we know we are in trouble, that we are being held responsible for crimes we knew we were committing. To cry out to mountains and caves to hide us from God suggests a deep, knowing, abject terror borne of our guilt.


Today’s reading ends with the interlude of hope. It is not humanity at which God is understandably upset (or, righteously wrathful), but the crimes we commit because of our sinful nature. God still loves the humans He made, blessed, and called good. There are His chosen people, the Jews, listed in multiples of the perfect number twelve that will bear His mark and be saved from the calamity. Because of Easter, we know already what will be revealed in tomorrow’s reading, that there are more people yet that God will not hand over to destruction, because He loves us too much.


This initially seems like a paradox to our finite human minds: that God is wrathful and executes justice upon the evil that spoiled His perfect world. And yet, God’s love still overflows throughout it, not to cover up or remove the justice, but something bigger: God’s love defines the justice. This exercise in the massiveness of divine love is perfectly displayed in the person of the Messiah, the Lamb, the Lord Jesus Christ. Zechariah says that Jesus breaks the war bow which we wielded in the first scroll, that He will command peace to the nations. All the evil that followed in the scroll cannot happen when Jesus stops the violence. He is the fount of all goodness. He cuts off all evil. Both in the grand scheme of salvation history, and in the everyday bits and pieces of our lives when we face a fork in the path, Jesus is there, humble and on a donkey, showing the way of peace, where there is no more evil, where there is only love.



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