Deep Calls to Deep

Psalm 22 

Psalm 22 begins with words that are burned into the Christian psyche, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Matthew records Jesus’ anguished cry, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (Matthew 27:46; see also Mark 15:35) – quoting this verse in the Aramaic language. The Psalm itself continues for 21 verses of something close to despair: “I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death.” 

 

Have you ever felt this kind of pressure? Have you ever been forced to go so deep within yourself that you wonder if there is any hope for relief? Keep the memory of such times in your mind as you hear the verses that we read from verse 22 on. The Psalmist continues: 

• I will praise God when I stand in the congregation of God’s people.
• All of God’s people should praise God.
• When I was in trouble, God heard me and helped me.
• God hears and helps all who are in trouble. That’s the kind of God we serve.
• All the families of the earth should also praise God, for God saves all of them.
• Even those who die bow down to God. Future generations also will serve God forever.

A regular recitation of praise! A complete contrast to the pressure and despair of the first 21 verses. We can assume that in some fashion beyond our ability to understand, God brings joy and safety to people who have given up all hope. If you want to know God in the depths of your being, you must have everything else other than God squeezed out of the marrow of your bones. 

 

Mark 8 

The Gospel reading moves in an opposite trajectory from the Psalm. Psalm 22 moves from despair to hope; Mark 8 begins with the feeding of the four thousand, continues with the healing of a blind man, and comes to a climax with Peter’s great confession, “You are the Messiah!” The public response to God’s presence in Jesus’ ministry is growing, and an observer might think that “the best is yet to be”. What happens next?

• Jesus tells the disciples about his coming death and resurrection.
• Peter responds to his words by saying, “Don’t talk like that!” Jesus rebukes Peter, “Get behind me, Satan!”
• Jesus gives the crucial teaching: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?”
• Jesus adds that God will embrace those who embrace this teaching, and that God will reject those who reject this teaching.

The same truth emerges as from Psalm 22: If you want to know God in the depths of your being, you must have everything else other than God squeezed out of your marrow. 

 

This Lenten Season 

Last week, our theme called us into the depths of the seas, a call to deep relationships. This week, our theme calls us into the depths of the woods, a call to deep commitment. I have a personal feeling about both of these themes. 

 

Thirteen years ago, I experienced something like a depression that almost crippled me – a bout with acedia, a kind of spiritual lethargy. Healing for that time came to me in a series of dreams. In the last dream, I was floating in the sea, an image that makes little sense, because I don’t swim and I’m afraid of the water. As I floated there, I realised that the sea was the sea of God’s love and that I was completely safe, no matter how the waves might toss and swirl about me. 

 

Fifty-two years ago, I went out into the woods with my sophomore class in college. We planned to spend the night at a cabin owned by our faculty advisor. The rest of the group did so, but I got separated from the others during a walk through the woods just before dark. I spent the night lost in the woods and walked out the next morning through a cathedral-like setting of the trees in the light of dawn. Being afloat in the sea and being lost in the woods are both experiences that lie deep within my memory. 

 

In both cases, a time of distress led to a time of joy and delight. How do we bring these images – deep in the water and deep in the woods – together with the Scripture passages we have just read to reflect on our commitment to God and to each other? 

 

A Synthesis 

Consider again the common theme that emerges from the Scripture readings: If you want to know God in the depths of your being, you must have everything else other than God squeezed out of your marrow. We are by nature self-centred. We are by our natures inclined to think of everything that others do in terms of how it affects us. “What’s in it for me?” is the essential question that we ask constantly, even if we do not ask it aloud. I have wondered, for example, why the Lord’s Prayer includes the line, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” I think that part of the answer is that by nature we evaluate everything in terms that place ourselves at the centre. 

 

When we nurture this self-centredness, Christian theology defines it as pride. It is the essential sin, mimicking the way that Adam and Eve chose to be “like God” and replace God at the centre of their own lives. If pride is the essential sin, then a reorientation of our lives, placing God at the centre, is the essence of salvation. We use terms like “dying to self” and “living for Christ” for describe this reorientation of our lives. 

 

Apply this insight, then, to our overarching theme of developing deep commitments to God and to each other. Any relationship that exists primarily at the level of a self-centredness can only be a shallow relationship. Deep commitments require investment in the other: God invested God’s self in us by sending Jesus to die and rise for us. In response, our deepest commitment to Christ and the other comes when we are joined in Christ. We can use an image for this joining – “the body of Christ”, in which Christ is the head and we are the body itself. Or in a non-biblical and mechanical image, we are joined to each other the way that the spokes of a bicycle wheel are joined to each other – through the axle at the centre (the person of Jesus) and held in place by the hub of the wheel (the Holy Spirit). 

 

If we want deep commitments, we begin by recentering our lives in Christ. This truth brings us back to the insight from the Scriptures: If you want to know God in the depths of your being (or recentre on Christ), you must have everything else other than God squeezed out of your marrow. 

 

How Does this Happen? 

For the past several months, I have been struggling with high blood pressure. When my blood pressure rises too much, I feel pretty miserable. By listening to my body, I have learned to recognise when I am internalizing stress and tensing up. I have also learned to relax intentionally, and when I succeed in relaxing, I can feel my high blood pressure subside. Relaxing feels so good that I wonder why I haven’t relaxed intentionally all my life! I think I can tell you why. 

 

Relaxing means letting go, letting go of my need to control what is happening and letting go of my need to fix everything. In the terms we have been using, relaxing means not needing to be at the centre of everything, not being in charge. Such letting go is so hard that it has taken a real physical problem to force me to do it, and even now I can do it only imperfectly. As we have said, if you want to know God in the depths of your being, you must have everything else other than God squeezed out of your marrow. 

 

A Cautionary Tail 

You may have heard recently in the news of the situation with Ravi Zacharias. After his death, it became clear that his public ministry, however successful, concealed a long period of time in which he abused his power and position to take advantage of a number of different women. One source (Patheos.com) describes the situation like this:

 

Like most people following the Ravi Zacharias scandal, I knew the full report of his misconduct would be bad when it came. The only question was how bad. Now that it’s dropped, we have the whole ugly picture. Calculated side deals, manipulation, Inception-like layers of deception. A man who publicly preached the vital importance of private virtue, yet ostracized anyone who dared to scratch the facade. For those on the outside of the scandal looking in, the story may not seem particularly shocking. Why should anyone be shocked that a powerful, charismatic religious figure gamed the system for sexual perks? But within the evangelical and apologetics communities, the shock-waves are going to be felt for a long time to come.

 

There are many hard lessons to be learned from this, including lessons about the culture that enabled Ravi to get away with his crimes for so long. It is now emerging that multiple people failed to act on what should have been clear warning signs, simply because they were blinded by loyalty. Ravi’s two-faced act made it beyond unthinkable to them that he might be concealing sin of this magnitude. And so it continued to lie concealed, right up to the day of his death.

 

The writer (Esther O’Reilly) observes that a basic problem undergirding the scandal was the extent to which Ravi Zacharias was in control of the whole organization that bears his name. He did much good in his ministry, but the fatal flaw at the heart of the whole was his control of every aspect of the ministry. Like the One Ring in Lord of the Rings, this level of control consumed him. “All power corrupts …” 

 

O’Reilly continues with a comparison to another prominent Christian of the last century: 

 

As I was reflecting on all this recently, my mind went back to another figure who was a “celebrity Christian” in his own way, …. This figure also had a magnetic appeal, also had a lucrative and popular ministry, and also used his platform to address the challenges of the Christian walk. …. I’m speaking about Christian singer-songwriter Rich Mullins…

 

He had first entered the business as a callow, troubled twenty-something, full of demons and wholly unprepared for the Nashville machine. After one of his tapes landed in the hands of a young Amy Grant, he went overnight from eccentric Bible college alum to CCM star. …. Where most artists feared failure, Mullins found himself terrified of his own success. The story of how he worked through that terror is instructive, inspiring even, though not conventionally so …. One can glean elsewhere that Rich was chronically depressed and battled a complex of addictive tendencies, including a lifelong struggle with alcohol abuse. …

 

In spite of all this, Rich was able to take enough initiative to set up a strong accountability network for himself. … He cut himself off from the bulk of his wealth, entrusting it to a board of local church elders who paid him an average working man’s salary and distributed the rest to charity. Recalling this decision …, his brother David reflects “I don’t know if it was the strength to do it or the utter terror of not doing it. I don’t know. Probably both.” …

 

Rich also spoke openly, though tastefully, about his struggles with lust as a lonely single man. … He tells an embarrassing story on himself about an incident in a German train station where he and his best friend were having a highly explicit accountability “talk,” unaware that the only other man in the station was listening with understanding. At one point, the man leaned over and asked, “Excuse me, are you Rich Mullins?” As Rich puts it … , “I had to think back over our conversation to decide whether I was or not. But then I decided that I must be.” …

 

O’Reilly concludes her analysis with a quote from Rick Mullins himself,

Maybe when God calls us, it feels like a pain. And for years in my own life, I tried to drown that pain. I tried to avoid that pain. I tried to fill that ache with all kinds of what I can now look back on and see was a lot of stuff that was destroying me, corrupting me. And to listen to the call of God means to accept some of the emptiness that we have in our own lives. And rather than always trying to drown out that feeling of emptiness, instead of always trying to fill it with a lot of junk, to allow that to be a door through which we go to meet God. 

 

If you want to know God in the depths of your being, you must have everything else other than God squeezed out of your marrow. If you want deep commitments to God’s people and the people around us, you will make them only as you enter into their pain and hurt and find God there. Sometimes we name this openness “vulnerability”. Today we have named it as releasing control of our own lives and opening ourselves to God and to each other. “Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me. By day the Lord directs his love, at night his song is with me – a prayer to the God of my life.”

 

Steinbach Mennonite Church 

28 February 2021 

 

Focus statement: We are transformed by God as we follow God’s voice along the path of life, a voice calling us to deep commitment. Even when our path leads deep into unfamiliar woods, as we lose ourselves, we are found. 

 

Going Deeper Questions: 

1) I said that developing a deep commitment to God and others require openness about our own struggles. What are the dangers of such openness? Can we be “too vulnerable”? 

2) How can we live the kind of de-centred life (re-centred on God and others) if we have not fallen into radically selfish ways in the first place? What if you were brought up to think of God and others naturally? Do we still need to be saved from our selfishness? 

3) What do you think is the basic reason that so many television pastors and evangelists have fallen into addictive habits of sex or drugs or some other failure? 

4) How are we different from them? 

 

 

Psalm 22:23-31

²³ You who fear the Lord, praise him! All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him; stand in awe of him, all you offspring of Israel! ²⁴ For he did not despise or abhor the affliction of the afflicted; he did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him. ²⁵ From you comes my praise in the great congregation; my vows I will pay before those who fear him. 

²⁶ The poor shall eat and be satisfied; those who seek him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts live forever! ²⁷ All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord; and all the families of the nations shall worship before him. ²⁸ For dominion belongs to the Lord, and he rules over the nations. 

²⁹ To him, indeed, shall all who sleep in the earth bow down; before him shall bow all who go down to the dust, and I shall live for him. ³⁰ Posterity will serve him; future generations will be told about the Lord, ³¹ and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn, saying that he has done it.

  

Mark 8:31-38

Jesus predicts his death

³¹ He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. ³² He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 

³³ But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

The way of the cross

³⁴ Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: ‘Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. ³⁵ For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. ³⁶ What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? ³⁷ Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? ³⁸ If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.”

The End Game of God’s Mission

Introduction

We have reached the end of our brief series on God’s reconciling mission to the world. We began with a look at God’s mission to “the nations”: God seeks all the families of the earth for full reconciliation. We continued with God’s mission expressed as covenant: God makes us into a priestly kingdom, set apart for the gospel of peace. Last Sunday, we considered the salvation that lies at the heart of God’s mission: We are saved from self-rule and saved for God’s reign in the community we call the church. This salvation is not simply a moment experienced in a conversion experience, but rather it is a way of life yielding repeatedly to God met in each other.

Now we come to the end game. God’s mission began with the fall of Adam and Eve – “for as in Adam, all die” – and reached its climax with the death and resurrection of Jesus, the second Adam – “even so in Christ, shall all be made alive.” Malachi points towards that climax, but he does so in surprising words: “But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?” Jesus’ first coming points towards his return, the final end of all things, when the heavens and earth “pass away” and Jesus reigns in the new heavens and the new earth.

These are complex matters, and we may think we cannot understand them. But perhaps they are not so difficult; perhaps there is a more straightforward missionary call here. A word of hope for a world in despair. We look at the prophecy in Malachi, with some of Jesus’ own words from the end of his ministry on earth, to grasp the end game of God’s reconciling mission to the world.

Malachi 3

The name “Malachi” means “my messenger”. One might say, “God’s missionary”. The prophet lived about 450 years before Christ’s birth, around the time of Ezra and Nehemiah. His great concern in this last book of the Old Testament is that God’s people have forsaken the covenant God made with them. He calls them back to the covenant and tells them that God will renew the covenant by coming to them, first through his messenger and then directly as “the Lord” (3: 1).

This coming is good news, in that God will purify God’s People so that they can live in a new and restored relationship with God. This coming is also terrifying news: “Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?” (3: 2) In this combination of fear and joy, we see a basic truth of the gospel. The gospel is good news – to those who will receive it. Those who try to satisfy God without yielding to God will live and die without God.

 

Matthew 24

The passage in Malachi points directly to Jesus. The messenger who prepares the way in Malachi 3 comes as John the Baptist. The Lord who comes as a refiner’s fire is Jesus. At one level, Jesus’ life and ministry is a commentary on the book of Malachi. Malachi’s concern is that God’s people have broken God’s covenant. Jesus brings in the new covenant in his life, death, and resurrection.

One can understand the disciples in Matthew 24, then. They recognize him as the Messiah, and they quite reasonably think that the end of the age, the time prophesied by Malachi is here. So they ask, “Tell us, when will this [the destruction of the Temple, which Jesus had just described] happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Immediately, we can see that they have grasped a major change from Malachi. The coming of the Lord, Jesus’ own life and death, is not the final end. Jesus had told them that he would leave, and he had told them that he would return. They knew they were in what we sometimes call “the last days”, so they wondered when the consummation of the end would arrive.

Jesus gives them a surprising list of answers:

They ask, “When will this be?” Jesus says, “Many will claim to be the Messiah returned. Don’t believe them.”

They ask, “When will this be?” Jesus says, “There will be all kinds of problems, the sort of things you have already seen – wars, hatred, and conflicts around the world.”

They ask, “When will this be?” Jesus says, “You will face death and persecution for Christ’s sake, and many of you will fall.”

They ask, “When will this be?” Jesus says, “False prophets (messengers) will tell many lies.”

They ask, “When will this be?” Jesus says, “You can stand firm in the faith, in community, and in Christ. When you do so, God will save you.”

They ask, “When will this be?” Jesus says, “The primary task throughout this period of persecution is preaching the gospel that God reigns over all the earth. Keep doing that until I return.”

The last item is the most important. For two thousand years, Christians have lived at odds with a world of violence. Jesus did not want his disciples to answer the question, “When?” Jesus does not want us to find the answer either. Jesus wanted them and us to preach “the gospel of the kingdom” until he returns. Some people use this truth to say that preaching the gospel hastens Jesus’ return. Jesus says, “You’re asking the wrong question. Stop trying to figure it out. It is not for you to know the times or the seasons that the Father has set in his own authority. Your job is to preach the gospel of the kingdom. Your job is to help renew the covenant and to witness to the saving grace of Jesus.”

Why any Reference to the End?

We may wonder, then, why Jesus refers to the end of the Temple? Why did Malachi prophesy the end of all things? Why are these references in the text? If our job is to participate in God’s reconciling mission to the world, why bother with the texts we have read – or with related passages such as Rev 21 and 22, which portray the New Heavens and the New Earth, the New Jerusalem, in vivid detail.

 

I suggest that we take these descriptions of the End of all things seriously – not so that we can tell “when the End will come”, but so that we can orient our lives in the way God wants us to. The End is not simply the time when this earth passes away; the End is our goal in life. It is what we live for. It gives us purpose and direction. [Compare the way that the Carver model for board governance uses the term “End”.]

 

With these thoughts in mind, what do these passages about the End of All Things tell us? Here are four brief thoughts.

1) The coming of God’s Messiah, Jesus, is the cure for our rebellion. Malachi reminds us that the Messiah will refine and purify God’s People and make them whole.

2) The coming of Jesus, God’s Messiah, is good news, but not everyone experiences it as good news. If we have oriented our lives away from God, God’s appearing is terrible. Malachi asks, “Who may abide the day of his coming? Who shall stand when he appears?”

3) Many people will misuse the promise of Jesus’ return at the End. God wants us to prepare for the End and to live in the light of the gospel of peace. “False prophets” and fake Messiahs will try to derail us.

4) Our task is twofold: To gather in community living for the new heavens and earth; and to invite others into the community of God’s Reign.

 

Living for Heaven

I have made this point often before: We live for Heaven while we are living on earth. “Aim for Heaven, and earth will be thrown in.” I want to develop it more fully in the rest of this sermon.

 

Revelation 21 and 22 gives a wonderful picture of what we call “Heaven”.

21 Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. ² I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling-place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ⁴ ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”….

22¹⁷ The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come!’ Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.

 

There’s much more here. The goal of our lives is a perfection and delight. Joy without ceasing. A great dance in which we celebrate all that is good and beautiful. No stains of sorrow, no shadow of pain, nothing to mar or detract from the glory in which we live. C.S. Lewis preached a sermon in June 1942 titled, “The Weight of Glory,” a reflection on 2 Corinthians 4. He was preaching in Oxford, England at the height of World War Two. In the middle of wartime, he and the congregation took time to think of Heaven. I recommend his sermon in full – a simple Google search will find it for you.

 

Lewis summarizes what we learn about Heaven thus:

The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised, firstly, that we shall be with Christ; secondly, that we shall be like Him; thirdly, with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have “glory”; fourthly, that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and, finally, that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe—ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple.

 

He observes that these ideas are less attractive to us than they would have been to the first Christians. We live in a different place and time. But they make the point that Heaven is glorious! Finally, Lewis comes to his conclusion, which I find immensely moving.

… It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour. The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. …

 

Wow! This is the very heartbeat of our participation in God’s reconciling mission. Everyone we meet, everyone we know, represents God and potentially reflects God’s glory. How could we do otherwise than greet them in the gospel of God’s Reign?

 

God’s Mission

This idea reminds me of the way that Mother Teresa used to say that she saw the image of God whenever she served a beggar. A quick internet search turned up this quote: “I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus. This one has leprosy or gangrene; I must wash him and tend to him. I serve because I love Jesus.”

 

Our series on God’s reconciling mission in the world leads us to see everyone around us the way that God sees them. We never give up on someone, thinking they are too bad for us to love. We always see, as Lewis puts it, their potential glory. When I relate to the server behind the counter in a restaurant, I see someone who may shine like the sun, even when they’re having a bad day. How can I do anything other than relate to them in love and in wonder?

 

We might think, then, that our lives are the whole message, and we need no verbal witness. That idea is, I believe, mistaken. Our goal is to relate to the image of God before us, but why would we not talk about God when relating to the image of God? Why would we conceal the source of glory when relating to someone in whom that glory may shine? Our goal is not to make another conversion; rather, our goal is to come to God together with everyone we meet and to immerse ourselves together in the love and peace that God gives us in the person of Jesus. Our goal is to preach the gospel of the kingdom until Jesus returns. Jesus’ return is the end game of missions, when our missionary task is over and we worship God together forever in the New Heavens and the New Earth.

 

Steinbach Mennonite Church

7 February 2021

Texts:

Malachi 3: 1-6

3 “I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty.

² For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. ³ He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver; he will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, ⁴ and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years.

⁵ “So I will come to put you on trial. I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud labourers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless, and deprive the foreigners among you of justice, but do not fear me,” says the Lord Almighty.

 

Matthew 24: 1-14

The destruction of the temple and signs of the end times

24 Jesus left the temple and was walking away when his disciples came up to him to call his attention to its buildings. ² “Do you see all these things?” he asked. “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

³ As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

⁴ Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. ⁵ For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many. ⁶ You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. ⁷ Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. ⁸ All these are the beginning of birth-pains.

⁹ “Then you will be handed over to be persecuted and put to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of me. ¹⁰ At that time many will turn away from the faith and will betray and hate each other, ¹¹ and many false prophets will appear and deceive many people. ¹² Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold, ¹³ but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved. ¹⁴ And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”

 

Excerpts from Revelation 21 and 22

A new heaven and a new earth

21 Then I saw ‘a new heaven and a new earth,’ for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. ² I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. ³ And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling-place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ⁴ ‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

….

 

22¹⁷ The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let the one who hears say, ‘Come!’ Let the one who is thirsty come; and let the one who wishes take the free gift of the water of life.

 

Going Deeper Questions

1. What do you think of when we talk about “the End Times”?

2. I suggest that “when will the End be is the wrong question. Why is it the wrong question? What should we be asking instead?

3. What does “the End Times” have to do with missions?

4. How can we use a lively belief in the return of Jesus as a vital part of our daily Christian lives? (I don’t want to be a crackpot, but I do live in light of “the End”!)

5. What does the word “End” mean, anyway?