A New Heavens and a New Earth

The consensus seems to have moved to the Gospel According to Mark. So I will begin posting passages from that gospel in a more or less regular rate starting next week. I thought it sad somehow to leave off this book in the muddle of plagues and disasters, before the decisive battle, kind off like getting all the way to Frodo in Shelob's lair in LOTR and laying the books aside. So here, for weal or ill, is the Revelation 21:1-22:5.

Revelation 21
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and lying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.

And the one who was seated on the throne said, See, I am making all things new. Also he said, Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.

Then he said to me, It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life. Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children. But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.

Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.

And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. It has the glory of God and a radiance like a very rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal. It has a great, high wall with twelve gates, and at the gates twelve angels, and on the gates are inscribed the names of the twelve tribes of the Israelites; on the east three gates, on the north three gates, on the south three gates, and on the west three gates. And the wall of the city has twelve foundations, and on them are the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. The angel who talked to me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city and its gates and walls. The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width; and he measured the city with his rod, fifteen hundred miles; its length and width and height are equal. He also measured its wall, one hundred forty-four cubits by human measurement, which the angel was using. The wall is built of jasper, while the city is pure gold, clear as glass. The foundations of the wall of the city are adorned with every jewel; the first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst. And the twelve gates are twelve pearls, each of the gates is a single pearl, and the street of the city is pure gold, transparent as glass. I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day-- and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb's book of life.

Revelation 22:1-5
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

housekeeping

Okay, though Quakes go by sense of the meeting and not by vote we still have a tally. Larry votes we bail and move on to the Gospel of Mark. Forrest wants to stick it out with Revelation but will bail if Revelation means he'll be the only one posting.

I can't guarantee Forrest won't be the only one posting. I've abstained thus far and Crystal hasn't said anything. Yet.

I'm heading back into Revelation unless I get an overwhelming response otherwise. I won't get a chance to post before the weekend likely.

I don't feel as strongly as Larry that this text is devoid of wisdom. Luther felt the same way about James, James is my fav biblical tome, James started this blog in the first place.

At the same time -- I'm really not finding a lot to say. And even Forrest, who does find stuff to say, does so by posting long tracts from commentaries (mostly Ellul) which means those who've found the Apocalypse enlightening are is some ways more enlightening than the Apocalypse.

The point however -- we're coming into the pay off. Reading to this point is kinda like buying tickets to an all-you-can-eat rib-fest and ordering a garden salad and leaving.

Judgement

From one of my poems on another site...

"...Don't demand peace
or call loudly for justice.
Beg mercy; our nation's trial
is now in the sentencing phase..."

This has been on my mind for a very long time. It's a cliche when people say they don't want some particular American atrocity "done in my name." It's a cliche because it happens and happens over and over again.

There's a crash coming. We've worked hard for it; we deserve it; and unless all the signs of our times have just been kidding, we're going to get it.

I don't want to carry this discussion all by myself; I didn't join up here to be a blog of my own. But we can't quit now; Babylon ain't even fallen yet.

This book takes the justice of the Hebrew prophets and ups the ante. Yahweh was just angry because he loved his people and they weren't giving him the attention he wanted. That's a very human thing. What we've been getting here is more like Yahweh vs Pharoah. ~'Plagues coming, armoured locusts tomorrow followed by occasional fire-breathing horses, clearing by sometime next year.' The specific details may have been symbolic of something in our condition, but mostly we get this impression that God doesn't like us. And that puts people off; I can't blame them for that.

Jacques Ellul keeps finding love, hope, and good stuff in all this.

In my own life, so far as I feel myself part of this world, I find a continuing tension between love and hope vs the vast public spectacle of corruption triumphant.

Jacques considers the powers beaten, from the moment of Incarnation... "But they still have a considerable force among men. They can cause men to perish; upon the earth they can accuse and destroy.

"Why then this delay?... Why is there not an immediate and total victory of God? ... First of all, if there were a total victory, this would be once more the expression of the absolute, unlimited power of God. Once more there would be a competition of powers. Now this explosion of power is exactly what the Tempter proposes. He continually provokes God to combat. But if this takes place, God is no longer love.

"The way decided by God in the Incarnation is the triumph of love; but precisely this love which gives itself, abandons itself, delivers itself up, is not that which kills....

"But the other aspect of this delay... is the time of testing for humanity; the time of the desert... In other words, the issue here is knowing if man is going to follow Jesus, is going to enter into the plan of God, is going to accept this unity with God.... The time of the desert is the time when man is deprived of all his natural resources, the possibilities and protection of civilization, when he is truly 'unchained', but with all the risks that that involves. The time of the desert is that when man has strictly no other support, no other assurance than the grace of God."

Maybe you don't feel yourself in that position yet?

Certainly, as I've been trying to say elsewhere, this is not testing us "to see if we make the cut" to get into the best neighborhood in the Afterlife. Perhaps the attempt to pass ourselves through such a test may help us see the absurdity of the very idea.

This is a spot quiz, not for the grade but for learning. Are we in unity with God yet? Not entirely? Why not?

This reminds me a little of my first notion of Friends, many years ago, that we all would march around obeying our consciences in perfectly idolatrous, triumphant integrity. I went to the nearest worship group, sat there a few minutes, felt a presence standing by the door, asking: "Forrest! What are you doing, trying to hide with the good people?"

I think I have learned to know God much better, since then. And it has never gone quite as I've expected.

How can we be under Judgement?--as I feel we must be--and yet be loved, held safe, protected even from our own inadequacies? Because we've bribed the Judge. Because the Judge is (among other things) the Defendents. Because the object of this trial is not to punish us, but to lead us toward doing that one right thing, to put our trust in God at work in and around us, at this and every moment.

still much for discussion--if we're up to it (?)

While we're still here...

You left out verse #14: "The second woe has now passed. But the third is yet to come."

It's rather difficult to pinpoint what that third woe is. Jacques Ellul thinks it's the Incarnation. God becomes a mere human, thereby resigns his absolute power over the universe.

I don't think this Greek distortion of a Hindu notion had entered the author's essentially Jewish mind. For him, as for Paul, I think Jesus is still up there "at the right hand of God," in the royal favor and enjoying ultimate authority, but still distinct from God. But Jacques Ellul, thousands of years later, finds the doctrine there, and who can say that God is only active in the writing?--and not in our later misunderstandings...?

"To the exact degree that the man Jesus is in perfect and constant accord with the will of the Father, that it is not a matter of servile obedience to the law but of perfect response of love to love, to the degree that Jesus is constantly free to be other than God and never-the-less is constantly the voluntarily expression of the will of God, then there is no longer any possible role for [the] powers...
There can no longer be accusation of men before God or separation of men from God (and that is why Jesus is designated the Savior.)

"But these powers are not abolished. They have only lost their decisive power, their power to prevail and to establish definitively chaos or rupture. For a rupture on the part of God--meaning that God would reject humanity--would end in him condemning himself and would be a victory of the powers.

"When there is talk, somewhat thoughtlessly, of the judgement of God, with condemnation and damnation for certain men (and for some theologians, the immense majority of men) it is completely forgotten that this would be not the expression of the justice of God but, rather, the success of the infernal powers. If God condemns, he does what Satan suggests. If he delivers the creation to destruction, the Devil has finally succeeded in his work of breaking decisively the relation between the Creator and the creation. Thus the 'apocalyptic' judgement, which is too often depicted, is not at all the realization of the justice of God but of the victory of the infernal powers.

"And we note in passing that the justice, which (it is declared) demands the judgement of God, is in reality a juridicial concept issuing from the interpretation of the Roman law. That has nothing to do with what the Old Testament calls justice, nor with what Jesus shows us as being the justice of the Father (by example, the workers of the eleventh hour or the parable of the talents.)"

The Time Has Come

the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes -- and ships -- and sealing-wax --
Of cabbages -- and kings --
And why the sea is boiling hot --
And whether pigs have wings."

We have come to a point in our original agenda, where we would reconnoitre the lay of the land so to speak and determine whether or nay we might continue in this project. Methinks energies have dropped off -- though blogger has been on the fritz on and off for about a week and commenting may have been difficult. So maybe I misread the circumstances.

Kindly check in with how we be with Revelation. And if some other tome would move you -- suggest it.