Matt Chandler - Seven Bowls

If you have your Bibles, I want you to grab those. Like we’ve been doing throughout our study of Revelation, I just want to highlight some things. If you’ll remember, when it comes to Revelation, the main thing is the plain thing, and the plain thing is the main thing. That’s not me; that’s Alistair Begg, but that’s the rule. Before I became a Christian, I had a couple of go-tos if you wanted to talk to me about Jesus, whom I had no intention of following, which makes my life somewhat ironic. If you were to bring up Jesus to me, I would like to talk about evil and suffering. Help me understand how He can be loving while the world is so broken. Maybe you are undeterred by that. Then I would go to God’s wrath and hell—eternal damnation. In fact, I asked Jeff Faircloth, a guy who was instrumental in my becoming a Christian, this very question: «So you’re saying that if I was just guilty of a single white lie, I would be guilty and punished forever?» To which he responded, «Is that all you think you’re guilty of?» That kind of unraveled my argument, right? These were problems for me. If we look across the world and see the stuff we say about our God, along with all the brokenness, then on top of that, we’re going to talk about God’s wrath and God’s right judgment. Man, these chapters are brutal! I would argue that if we weren’t so desensitized to violence and bloodshed, these would be impossible for us to read. They are grotesque; they are bloody; they are violent. Like I said, if you really thought about it, you wouldn’t want to meditate on it; you would want to turn your face from it. Yet, after I became a Christian, the Holy Spirit indwelt me and gave me what’s called the gift of illumination. If you’re a Christian, you have this gift; if you’re not, you don’t. This means there are truths you can’t see. After I became a Christian, I could see God’s wrath in a different light; I could understand eternal punishment in a different light. But still, you don’t want to lead with that, right? I mean, maybe you do, and if so, we’d like to talk to you for some other reasons! There is this kind of question: Do these chapters have to be in the Bible? Do they have to be so awful? Do they have to be so gross? So nasty? So grotesque? Does it have to be, Lord? Yet, I think if we’re going to be the kind of followers of Jesus He would have us be, we have to look straight into it, understand it, and let it shape and form us in real ways. I believe that by staring into this, if you’re a Christian, you should leave this place rejoicing all the more because mercy is new every day. If you’re not a Christian, all you’re going to hear is an invitation to come out from under what we’re going to spend the next 30 minutes talking about. Now, with this said, we will not be able to understand these two chapters without going back and reminding ourselves of some things we learned in week one, which we have often revisited as we’ve studied the book. There are hermeneutical rules for interpreting the book of Revelation. If you stray from these rules, you’re going to get some janky interpretations. You could end up with tattoos on our foreheads and Apache helicopters being locusts. We would be in some weird, nonsensical, magical make-believe land. But if you just follow basic rules for reading the Bible—by the way, this is not just available to seminary people but to all the people of God; it hasn’t been given to me to know; it’s been given to us to know—so, what have we said? I’m glad you asked. Let me dive into it: the temptation is to read the book of Revelation as though it were a linear unfolding of a story. It’s not linear; it jumps all over the place. Goodness sakes, Revelation 12 is like Christmas morning—it was 90 years before this document was written! It’s not a linear unfolding of a story; it’s scattered all over time. This is a rule by which we have to approach the book of Revelation. It’s not necessarily true about all books of the Bible, but in this case, with apocalyptic literature particularly, it isn’t meant to be read linearly unless it explicitly states that it is. You are going to come to parts of Daniel that are apocalyptic, where he says, «But this is for the future.» But you don’t read that phrase here. That’s rule number one. Rule number two is that the imagery presented in the book of Revelation is meant to hook us and draw us into realities that are hard for us to grasp without the kind of language given to us. If I say, «The devil’s out to get you, ” you might be picturing the character from Saturday Night Live from years ago or like a little figure in a red cape with a pitchfork. But that’s not the image given to us, right? He wants us to feel something.