Preaching Apocalyptic: Its Function and Usefulness (Part 3)

D. A. Carson focuses on the unique characteristics and practical importance of apocalyptic literature. He discusses how this genre helps convey transcendent and ineffable themes through vivid imagery and symbolism, enhancing moral clarity. Carson also highlights how apocalyptic texts like Revelation serve to culminate biblical themes, drawing on various scriptural elements to deliver a powerful, conclusive vision of God’s ultimate purposes.

My responsibility in this session is to talk briefly about the function and usefulness of apocalyptic. To organize what I have to say, I’m going to speak of apocalyptic’s function and usefulness, first, with respect to what is intrinsic to the genre; second, with respect to Revelation’s place at the end of the Canon; and third, with respect to a miscellany of specific functions.

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1. The function and usefulness of apocalyptic with respect to what is intrinsic to the genre

I hinted at this previously in that …

A) Apocalyptic, with its appeal to mixed metaphor and the like, has an ability to disclose things that are transcendent, right on the edge of ineffability.

How do you talk about the throne room of God? How do you talk about the person of God?

You can use a lot of abstract adjectives, you can do that sort of thing, yet at the end of the day there’s power in the multiplied, piled-up, and sometimes formally-mutually-contradictory images which coalesce somehow to make a powerful insight into realities for which we have no visual component in our brain. I mention this especially with respect to God and, similarly, with respect to God’s throne room, but even with respect to the new heaven and the new earth. Think what Revelation 21 and 22 say about the new heaven and the new earth.

Apart from the explicit symbolism connected with the New Jerusalem and the mention of some things that are not there (there’s no sun, there’s no moon, there’s no temple, and so on), what Revelation 21 and 22 primarily say is what it’s not like. There’s no more death, there’s no more crying, there’s no more pain, and there’s no more sorrow. The old order of things has passed away, the text says. That’s just the negative side of consummated holiness.

Then when you get to the positive side you have a ratcheting up of themes that have been running right through Scripture (one or two of them I’ll come back to in a few moments; “I will be their God, and they will be my people”) and then symbol-laden descriptions of the new heaven and the new earth, and symbol-laden descriptions of Jerusalem. Apocalyptic enables you to handle transcendent themes, themes on the very edge of not being able to be spoken about, on the very edge of ineffability.

B) Apocalyptic contributes to genre diversity.

One of the great things about the Bible is precisely that diversity, which has importance to it in many ways. One is the way it appeals to different cultures. It’s changing now in the West, but until about 25 years ago the overwhelming majority of sermons preached in the West came from discourse parts of the Bible, with a few narrative bits put in.

These narrative bits were almost all of the life-of-David or life-of-Abraham sort, with not many sermons on Wisdom Literature, not much on apocalyptic, not many on Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, and not many on 2 Samuel, or the like.

Lloyd-Jones was a man I knew reasonably well and revered. Some of the greatest preachers do things the wrong way. You can’t imitate them. If you try to imitate John Piper you end up looking like a twit. God only made one John Piper, and it’s a good thing. If you try to imitate Tim Keller, you look like a twit. God only made one Tim Keller, and it’s a good thing.

Somebody has said that if you listen only to one preacher you become a clone, if you listen to two you become confused, but if you listen to 50 you’re on the edge of being freed up to become wise and your own person. Genre can function a bit like that too. Lloyd-Jones, who now has something like 75 volumes of sermons in print, was a great preacher. Idiosyncratic in all kinds of glorious ways but, nevertheless, a great preacher.

I don’t know how many times I listened to him and in my arrogance thought, in the first 10 minutes, “This guy’s overrated.” He had the most boring introductions on God’s green earth. Then somewhere along the line I woke up, I realized he had me again, and I was in the presence of God right to the end, 50 minutes later.

The man had unction, but at the end of the day, of the 74 or 75 volumes of sermons, all but one are from discourse parts of the Bible. Not narrative, not apocalyptic, not wisdom. Now in all fairness, too, he often incorporated many of those other parts of the Bible. However, in terms of the texts that he was actually, on the surface of things, expounding, he was expounding discourse. That was part of his generation.

Yet I’ve been to sub-Saharan black Africa quite a number of times, and until fairly recently, I just couldn’t find more than two, three, or four sub-Saharan black African preachers who could handle Romans. They were terrific at narrative. They could make narrative sing. It’s a narrative culture. God, in his wisdom, has given us different genres in the Bible. That’s a good thing, but it is also a mark of our relative immaturity if we only focus on those parts of the Bible whose genre we are most comfortable with.

Now in the last 20 years or so, there has been a huge emphasis on narrative in the Western world, especially in the under-35 crowd. Now we have all kinds of clichÈs that are almost embarrassingly trite. Things like, “The aim of this sermon is that you might live your narrative in the Bible narrative.” Good grief! We’re creating our own spectacularly ridiculous clichÈs. “Live your narrative in the Bible narrative”?

I mean, if I push with my imagination, I can almost figure out what that means, but I can say it a lot more simply than that. “Do what the Bible says!” Moreover, sometimes people like narrative today because narrative as a genre is intrinsically more subjective in its interpretation. I’ll come back to that point. It is intrinsically more morally ambiguous.

One of the reasons why we like narrative today is that we like moral ambiguity today. Nevertheless, what we do have to say is that to be fully mature with respect to the Word of God, we ought to learn how to preach all biblical genres. So sub-Saharan black Africans need to learn to preach Galatians and we need to learn to handle 2 Samuel, Job, and Revelation.

C) Apocalyptic intrinsically espouses moral clarity.

Another genre in the Bible that is very similar in that respect is Wisdom Literature. Wisdom Literature offers you polarities. You either follow Lady Wisdom or you follow Dame Folly. One or the other, not both. There is a good way and a bad way. It is intrinsic to Wisdom Literature to offer you two ways. That’s why Psalm 1, for example, is often called a wisdom psalm.

On the one hand, “Blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked or stand in the way of sinners or sit in the seat of mockers. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He shall be like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season. Whatever he does prospers.”

On the other hand, “Not so the wicked! Not so! They are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore the wicked shall not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous.” Then the last verse is a comparison of the two ways. That’s a wisdom psalm, you see. In the New Testament, probably the most notable wisdom preacher was Jesus; but actually, the most notable apocalyptic preacher is Jesus, the most notable aphoristic preacher is Jesus, and the most notable parable preacher is Jesus.

Jesus is astonishingly diverse in his preaching forms. You see this wisdom contrast in Jesus, for example, when you come to the end of the Sermon on the Mount. Then there are two trees. One produces good fruit; the other produces bad fruit. “How about in-between fruit? Maybe not a Fuji apple, maybe not a crab apple. How about a McIntosh?”

You build on two types of soil. You build on sand, and the whole thing comes crashing down in the next Katrina, or you built on solid rock. “Well, how about hardpan clay? Take a chance.” You either go in at the narrow gate with the straight way that leads to life, and not many find it, or into the broad gate and the broad way that leads to destruction. “Mmm … that one’s a bit fundamentalist; this one’s a bit sloppy. How about a mid-sized gate?” You can’t do that! It’s wisdom; there are just two ways.

What wisdom gives you is great moral clarity. That’s what it gives you, but if all you had in the Bible was great moral clarity, it would either produce only Pharisees or despair. Great moral clarity tends, in fallen people, to produce either hypocritical pharisaism or despair. You read Psalm 1 with its absolute moral clarity (“This is what the good guys are like; this is what the bad guys are like”), and you either come out thinking, “Hey, I’m pretty hot,” or if you know yourself a little more, “There is no hope.”

However, God in his mercy has given us other kinds of genres. Narrative genre, which gives us a David, a man after God’s own heart, who is also an adulterer and a murderer. One wonders what he would have done if he hadn’t been a man after God’s own heart. He gives us an Abraham, the friend of God, the father of the nations, who is also a liar and compromiser. He gives us a Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, who betrays his kingdom with endless alliances consummated by marriage. He gives us a Peter, the rock, who disowns Jesus with oaths.

Moral ambiguity, compromise, failure, victory, and defeat. Now if that’s all you had, then the Bible would be like a lot of contemporary literature which is prized for its moral ambiguity. Likewise, our films will sometimes produce Rambo-type things with good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are very bad because you need to shoot a lot of them, and the good guys are very good because they’re heroes.

Nevertheless, they never get Oscars. They sell well at the box office, but they don’t get Oscars. The Oscar films are always the ones that promote some kind of moral ambiguity, like the one that won two years ago, Crash. There are four pairs, and each pair begins by making you think that one is the good guy, and the other is the bad guy, and by the end of the film, they’re all reversed. That’s an Oscar right there.

Now the difference between the Bible’s moral ambiguity and our film ambiguity today is that the ambiguity is treated today as an intrinsically good thing, whereas when the Bible treats moral ambiguity, it is an intrinsically honest thing but not promoted for its own sake. It is always a sign of compromise and failure. The good thing is ultimately the absolute, the absolute good.

In this respect, apocalyptic aligns with Wisdom Literature. It thinks in terms of polarities. Ultimately in the new heaven and the new earth, there are those who are called “God’s sons.” Then there are the liars, the deceivers, the whoremongers, and the slave owners. That’s the way it’s cast, an absolute bifurcation.

In chapters 12 and 13, you either have the mark of the Son of God on your head, in which case you’re saved from his wrath, but you face the wrath of the beasts; or you have the mark of the Beast, in which case you’re saved their wrath, but you face the wrath of God. The question really becomes.… Whose wrath do you want? Because you’re going to face one of them. No slithering-around sort of moral compromise. It’s an absolute polarity.

What this literature enables us to do, in other words, is to think crisply and clearly about moral absolutes. Now I repeat, if that’s all you do, you tend to turn into a legalist or a person in the bleakest despair, because that does not sufficiently acknowledge our sinfulness, and it doesn’t, in itself, drive you to the cross.

However, if you make those absolutes stark and clear, you see what is fundamentally at issue. Then if you preach the cross powerfully within that framework, you see there is only one way out, and it is not in perpetual moral ambiguity, as if moral ambiguity were an intrinsically good thing.

2. The function and usefulness of apocalyptic with respect to Revelation’s place at the end of the Canon.

I mentioned briefly yesterday how sometimes in biblical theology classes we assign students the responsibility of working through Revelation 21 and 22 and tracking out all of the biblical themes they can find that funnel into those two chapters, in fact, precisely because of this book’s location conceptually at the end of the Canon.

The actual placement in the Canon is not nearly as important as its conceptual location. You could reassign that responsibility, not only for the last two chapters but for the entire book. One of the reasons why the book of Revelation is so richly allusive to earlier biblical texts is precisely because it is drawing everything into the last chapters of the Bible.

I briefly mentioned temple. If you want to track that one out, read Greg Beale’s book on the temple in the NSBT series, but there are a lot of others, a lot of others. Some of them are of the ratcheting-up sort. As early as Leviticus, God says to his covenant people, “I will be your God; you will be my people” or in the third person, “I will be their God; they will be my people.” The entire context in which that is uttered is in the context of the tabernacle, the covenantal arrangements, the mandated sacrificial system, the Levitical priestly structure, and so forth.

Then you start getting those prophecies regarding the new covenant, and there are various ways in which the promises of the new covenant distinguish it from the old. “It will not be like the covenant I made with my people. This is the nature of the covenant.” Then some of the same phraseology is used. Some of it is different, but some of it is the same (“I will be their God, and they will be my people”), but now it’s ratcheted up.

If you work through all the passages on the new covenant in the New Testament, this is a covenant not sealed with the blood of bulls and goats. Jesus himself says, “This is the new covenant in my blood.” Now you have a new priest. Now you don’t have Yom Kippur anymore. Hebrews works out where our Day of Atonement lies.

We have a new priest, a new tabernacle, a new sacrifice, and a new intimacy that is bound up with the Holy Spirit’s coming in some fresh measure (hard to put your finger on exactly what it is) such that the coming of the Spirit in consequence of Christ’s triumph and resurrection is now the down payment of the promised inheritance, with the same power in him operating in us as raised Jesus from the dead.

That is treated in the New Testament as something new and vital. I know you still have to work out the patterns of continuity with the old, but there is a sense of newness in all of that in the New Testament. Then you come to consummating expressions. “I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

In the new heaven and the new earth, at some point, if he is our God, and we are his people, in the unshielded blaze of the perfection of his holiness, there can be no more night, no more sin. The old order is passed away. Thus, even in terms of the locutions used, there is a ratcheting up of intensity, a ratcheting up of (I don’t know what else to call it) proximity to God, a ratcheting up of the experience of God until consummated splendor.

What do you do with the New Jerusalem? Jerusalem becomes important from the time of 2 Samuel 6 and 7. There are adumbrations earlier all right. Melchizedek is King of Salem. There are good reasons for thinking this is Jeru-Salem. You do have the Akedah in Genesis 22 on Mount Moriah, and there are good reasons for thinking that there is a connection with Jerusalem.

However, it becomes historically important when, in 2 Samuel, chapter 6, the tabernacle is moved there, and in 2 Samuel 7, now that David has establish Jerusalem as his capital.… It wasn’t for the first seven years. It was Hebron when he ruled only over the southern two tribes. Now he becomes the king over the entire 12 tribes and moves the capital to Jerusalem.

Now for the first time you have the stable Davidic monarchy, under God’s promise to endure forever, and a stable location for the tabernacle, the priestly line coming together in the same geographical location, the city where God sets his name (“my holy hill, Zion”) as the place where his king is planted. That is teased out in countless ways through the Bible.

For myself, I am persuaded that one of the reasons why David could write Psalm 110 (the superscription specifies that it’s a Davidic psalm) with its double oracle.… On the one hand, David is the Davidic king. David writes, “Yahweh said to my Lord …” Who is this? It has to be a messianic figure. “Sit at my right hand …” Which is language drawn very strongly from Psalm 2, another royal acclamation psalm.

Then the second oracle in verse 4: “The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind: ‘You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek.’ ” “What? A Davidic king and a priest in one figure? You cannot do that under the law of Moses. You cannot do that!” However, I suspect that in David’s own mind, as he’s having his devotions …

Yes, I think he had his devotions. After all, doesn’t Deuteronomy, chapter 17, stipulate that when a person becomes king he’s to “make a copy of this law, write it out longhand, and then read it every day so that you will not think too highly of yourself, so that you will revere my words,” and so on?

David surely, in his good times, had his devotions. Not out of Romans (it wasn’t written yet), but at least the Pentateuch and other bits. Then what would he think as he’s reading through Genesis?

He’s reading comfortably through Genesis, and he comes to Genesis 14. There he finds a priest-king by the name of Melchizedek, king of Salem.

He knows, under the terms of the old covenant, the Mosaic covenant, he’s the Davidic king, but he can’t be a priest. He can’t be a priest of Levi, but it can’t be an intrinsically evil thing for a priest to be a king, because after all, Abraham himself pays homage to Melchizedek, who is king-priest. You can almost hear the gears in his mind turning over. “A priest-king, one who meets all our needs, who rules in God’s name to bring in justice and teach the people, and who mediates … the people to God and God to the people. A priest-king in Jerusalem?”

Now those themes rush forward and connect again in Galatians, where our Jerusalem is the heavenly Jerusalem, and in Hebrews, where we serve one from the tribe of Judah who is a priest, not in the order of Levi (he doesn’t come from Levi), but who is a priest and whose very elevation to priesthood guarantees that the Levitical priesthood is now obsolete, which makes the old covenant obsolete too.

Then you come to the Apocalypse. Priesthood language is not developed there, but the functions of the priest certainly are. He is the one who silences the accuser of the brothers by the appeal to his own blood in chapter 12. He is the one who redeems men and women from every tongue, tribe, people, and nation in chapter 5.

Now the nations come together, and what we find is a New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven. Ah yes, yes, but this is apocalyptic, so there’s going to be a polarity. There is also the old Babylon. Somebody has said the whole book of Revelation could be titled “A Tale of Two Cities.” Therefore, if Babylon is featured in chapter 17, the New Jerusalem is featured in chapters 21 and 22.

Then what shall we say about the sonship theme? Have you noticed this peculiar description of those who enter in on the last day? It’s quite remarkable. Revelation 21:6: “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 without cost from the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children.’ ”

I’m reading from the TNIV. I like it in most places, but “they will be my children” doesn’t quite catch it here, because sonship has a set of overtones that we too easily miss. Look what goes on right after that. “They will be my sons.” And over against the sons are “… the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur.”

You see, after we’ve watched endless CSI programs, for us sonship is something you establish by DNA; but in the Bible, sonship is first and foremost clan identity. It’s where you belong. After all, your father didn’t send you off to school somewhere. If you were the baker’s son, you learned how to bake. If you were the farmer’s son, you learned how to farm. If you were the king’s son, you became the king. Of sons, 97 to 99 percent ended up doing what their fathers did.

Jesus was perceived to be the carpenter’s son and eventually comes to be called “the carpenter.” That’s the way it worked. It’s part of your identity, whereas to us, I’m sure that if we took a hand showing in this gathering, not more than three or four of you are doing what your fathers did. We have a certain kind of freedom. My identity is not bound up with what my father did.

Out of this comes a whole string of biblical metaphors that have to do with the gospel. Not only the metaphors like sons of Belial, sons of worthlessness, but the sons of Abraham? The sons of Abraham are not those who carry Abraham’s genes; they are those who act like Abraham and, thus, have Abraham’s faith. They are the sons of Abraham.

That goes back to the teaching of Jesus. It goes back to the teaching of John the Baptist and is certainly developed and expanded upon in Paul. So who are the true sons of God? Now that expression, son of God, can be tied quite a lot of ways functionally. Sometimes the true son of God is the royal, Davidic king. Sometimes the true son of God actually has ontological status. Son of God is not a term that always has exactly the same force in the New Testament. Context is king, but very frequently, it simply means those who act like God.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.” This does not mean if you make peace, you’ll become a Christian. It’s not telling how you become a Christian. It’s merely saying that God is the supreme peacemaker, and if you make peace, you are acting, in that respect, like God. In some other respect you may not, but in that respect, you’re acting like God. It’s a functional category.

Now we come to the end of time and the dawning of the new age, the new heaven and the new earth, the home of righteousness. Now in perfection, they shall be called the sons of God. That is to say, we will be like God in all the ways that we possibly can be, save for the incommunicable attributes of God.

We will be loving, we will be holy, and we will speak the truth. In our service to one another we will be seeking the other’s good. We will be full of joy, we will love what is righteous. We will be like God. We will be sons of God over against the cowardly, the unbelieving.… Do you see? There’s a culmination even of this son-of-God theme as it runs right through all of Scripture.

Ultimately here then you have some of the most powerful pictures of the return of Jesus. So the book ends up, “Yes. Even so, come, Lord Jesus” and “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let those who hear say, ‘Come!’ ”

3. The function and usefulness of apocalyptic in respect to some specific functions of apocalyptic.

A) Apocalyptic is useful in evangelism.

I’ve already indicated that this is a good book to preach from in a visually addicted age, because even with biblical Christianity’s logocentrism, you can make word pictures. This is a good book to preach from. I have often, in two-part series, preached Revelation 4 and Revelation 5 evangelistically in university settings, often. Likewise, I’ve sometimes preached Revelation 21 and 22 in university missions.

After all, how does it end up? Yes, “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ Let those hear say, ‘Come!’ Let those who are thirsty come; and let all who wish take the free gift of the water of life.” There is a spectacular display of God, of holiness, of redemption, and of the cross in word pictures that fire the imagination. It’s precisely this moral absoluteness that doesn’t allow us to hide and duck under moral ambiguity, but confronts us and demands that either we be sons of God, or we are dismissed with those whom the text calls “vile, unbelieving, and idolaters.”

B) A lot of apocalyptic, not least the book of Revelation, is quite frankly geared to teaching us how to wait.

It’s the setup for teaching us how to wait. Perhaps nowhere more dramatic is found in this respect than Matthew 24–25, the so-called Eschatological Discourse, Olivet Discourse, or Apocalyptic Discourse. Yes, I know how dogmatic preterists take all the way down to verses 35–36 and so on. I don’t think that they’re right, but what I do see is that you certainly have apocalyptic imagery here.

“ ‘The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’ At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky. And then all the peoples on earth will mourn,” and so forth. Then from Matthew 24:36 on, all the way to the end of chapter 25, what we are told is in the light of this expected, triumphant, final return, this is how you wait.

First, wait as those who do not want to be found unready. Verses 36–44. The Lord’s coming is like a thief in the night.

Second, wait as those who must give an account of their stewardship, those who must show themselves to have been faithful stewards in the waiting, not just passive waiting. Verse 45 to the end of chapter 24.

Third, wait as those who know the coming may be long-delayed. Chapter 25, verses 1–13. The parable of the 10 virgins. The whole parable turns on whether or not you are prepared for a long wait or not, pushing for perseverance.

Fourth, wait as those who are charged with improving your master’s assets. Chapter 25, verses 14 and following. The parable of the talents, as it’s sometimes called. A talent is a unit of weight. This is the parable of bags of gold, different quantities of treasure. You can’t simply dig a hole and bury it in the ground.

Fifth, wait as those whose self-identity is bound up with Christ’s people in their suffering, in their abuse, and in their poverty. The last parable is the sheep and the goats. Once you see clearly that in Matthew “the least of these” refers invariably to Christians, you wait as those whose self-identity is bound up with Christ’s people, unselfconsciously so. You’re not doing it in order to win the Master’s approval. You’re a bit surprised when he comes along at the end and says, “Inasmuch as you did it to the least of these, you’ve done it to me.”

In other words, what the apocalyptic setup does is give us a chapter and a half on how to wait, and there are a great number of passages in the New Testament where that is one of the pastoral lessons to be learned. For example, in the book of Revelation, chapter 6, even the martyrs under the throne cry out, “How long, O Lord? How long?” They too must wait until the full number of the elect comes in, until Christ is no longer inviting and commanding people to come.

God’s timing is perfect. If there is a breathless anticipation amongst those who have been martyred to see the end of violence, so that we join with Christians across the ages and say, “Yes. Even so, come, Lord Jesus,” we also learn to wait and trust his wisdom even in the timing, knowing full well, as the apostle Peter says, that with the Lord a day might be like a thousand years and vice versa.

C) Apocalyptic in particular enables us to perceive the true dimensions, the ultimate dimensions, of our conflict.

I’ll close with this one. Why did Joseph suffer? Well, transparently there was that coat of many colors and family jealousy. He went and rabbited on about his dreams. It seemed better to sell him to the Midianites than to kill him, because there was more money in it.

Yet at the end of the whole narrative, Joseph himself testifies to his brother in Genesis 50:19–20, “You intended it for evil; God intended it for good.” Not, “You intended it for evil, and then God came along. He had been snoozing for awhile, but now he came along and decided to fix it.” Rather, in one and the same set of events, they intended evil, and God intended it for good.

In that sense, this is why Joseph went to Egypt. The reason he went to Egypt was that God intended him to go to Egypt to bring about good. What good? Well, not only rescuing many people from famine, but finally rescuing his own extended family of 70 from famine, and thus, in the narrative of the book, preserving God’s promise to Abraham that in him and in his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed.

God intended it for good precisely so that the promise given to Abraham would be fulfilled, and in consequence, Jesus comes. That’s why Joseph was sold and suffered so much before he actually became prime minister of the land. Still, it would have been correct to say that the reason he suffered so much was because of the betrayal of his family. That’s also true.

Why did Job suffer? Well, there were those bands of Chaldeans and the storm that takes down the house destroys all 10 of his children. However, Job himself doesn’t know about the wager between Satan and God. In one sense, you could say Satan did it. In another sense, you have to say God did it. He certainly sanctioned it.

Why did Jerusalem fall in 587 BC? Well, there was the decay of the Davidic dynasty. There was the stupidity of Hezekiah in allowing the emissaries from Babylon some generations earlier to spy out the land and see just how much treasure those Jerusalemites actually had. There was the corruption in the land, the failure to listen to the warnings of the prophet Jeremiah to submit to Nebuchadnezzar.

You can give a whole catalog of all the vices, the evils, the idolatry, the stupidity, and the compromise; but again and again and again through the prophets, God says that he did it. He says through both Isaiah and Ezekiel, one of the reasons why he predicts it is “so that you will know that when this happens, it is I, I the Lord, who is doing this thing to you. This is my judgment.”

So why did we have World War II? Well, once again, one could talk about the criminal stupidity of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. One could easily talk about the rising anti-Semitism that nobody checked in the entire Western world. It wasn’t just in Germany. One could talk about the folly of Great Britain and France in not stopping Germany when they went into the Rhineland.

Could we also say that God did it? A massive “Thus far shall you go, and no farther!” Entire Western culture becoming increasingly arrogant, secularized, proud, and materialistic. I’m not saying that all of those other causes are not real causes. We don’t have direct access to the mind of God in events in history the way we have them in Scripture, but if you can read all of Scripture and not say anything about what God is doing in World War II, you’re blind as a bat! That’s one of the things that Revelation helps us with.

Why do Christians suffer? The proximate causes of Christian suffering vary according to where you live on the earth. The proximate causes of Christian suffering in southern Sudan, for example, have to do with British Petroleum and Shell Oil, with oil fields there that the northern Muslims want, and the southern black people, who largely come from Christian tribes, live on. Therefore, there is tribalism; there is animus of religion; there is Arab versus African-American; there is money; there is persecution, a certain kind of Muslim destruction of the infidels; and there is greed.

How about the rage of Satan? When you read through Revelation 12, for example, and you see the sufferings that Christians face because the Dragon is filled with fury, because he knows his time is short, you are supposed to see we are in a cosmic battle. In chapter 13 he calls forth the two beasts that demand allegiance … first, to the first beast and then to Satan himself. His emissaries, an unholy triumvirate, aping the Godhead.

This is the apocalyptic equivalent of, “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, and the rulers of the darkness in the heavenly places. Put on the whole armor of God that you may begin to stand and still stand, still withstand.” Apocalyptic not only enables you to see the ultimate polarities, it enables you to see the cosmic dimensions of things precisely because it is apocalyptic; it is a God’s-eye view of things.

Which is not to say there are not proximate causes. It’s not to say that the Roman government wasn’t doing certain kinds of things. It’s not to say that if this did take place under Domitian, that Domitian was beginning to crank up. The first round of really severe Christian persecution at the empirical level takes place under Hadrian, and Hadrian himself was trying to defend paganism and the empire. It’s not that there are not all of these causes. Historians are very good at looking at them.

However, our danger today is we read so much history and sociology, we read so much sociology and psychology, not least in our DMin courses, that we begin to get a social-science interpretation of all of reality, which is not wrong, but it’s restricted. It’s too short-sighted. It doesn’t see the cosmic dimensions. It doesn’t understand the sweep of the conflict in which we find ourselves, and so it doesn’t direct us back to God and his sovereignty and wisdom as we wait for a final vindication in the new heaven and the new earth.

You don’t find that in many DMin courses. You find it in the book of Revelation, and it is essential for a stable Christian view of history, eschatology, cosmology, vindication, justice, and theodicy. It’s essential for all of it to bring everything back to God, his glory, and his people’s good secured in Christ Jesus. Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, we see that these are basic, fundamental Christian doctrines, but we do perceive how easily they slip from our grasp. Return us again and again to the fundamentals, we pray. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.