An old Spanish proverb says “We count the faults of those who keep us waiting.” Have you ever done that? Sat there at the restaurant or stood there at the theater or paced at the airport and rehearsed all the things you were going to say when the culprit finally showed up? It’s not just the waste of time that gets you. A kind of
emotional vacuum forms, sort of like disappointment only worse because you don’t know when to give up, stop waiting, and move on to the next thing on your agenda. And of course sometimes you simply can’t move on to the next thing because - like at the airport - the next thing on your agenda depends on getting done with this one, when making the connecting flight isn’t going to happen because this one has blown its schedule.
A lot of people in this congregation have experience with waiting - with delays, disappointment and frustration. Anybody out there not know what I’m talking about? We can fume at incompetence and rail at indifference and write letters to our Congressmen. Sometimes we change our plans and go at the problem from a different angle; sometimes we go after a different goal altogether. How do you cope?
The people back in John’s day had been waiting for Jesus’ return for quite a while already. And they dealt with it the same way we do. Some continued to work and watch and wait. Some dealt with their disappointment by going numb, by caring less and just going through the motions. Still others decided he wasn’t coming and started following a different path through life. Because there are always people who give up on God when he doesn’t fall meekly in with their agendas.
I wonder how the people in Ephesus and Smyrna and so on felt when John’s revelation started circulating around the churches. I’ll bet they read it read it something like Tim LaHayes’ series of novels about the end times... You know, Left Behind and the rest? As soon as the publication date is announced for the next one in the series people start putting in their orders at the bookstores and the libraries. You just have to know what’s going to happen!
I don’t know for sure that John’s revelation was circulated in installments, like a magazine serial or the old silent movie cliff-hangers like The Perils of Pauline, but I wouldn’t be surprised. And so imagine the announcement coming that a messenger has arrived from Patmos, the island where John is living in exile, and word passes from one house to the next, and next morning there’s the congregation waiting with bated breath for the next installment. Remember, we’ve
already opened all seven seals, and six of the seven trumpets have sounded. Famine and disease and war have been let loose upon the earth. The seventh trumpet is the last one, the climax, the final act of God’s whole mighty drama - this must be the moment when it will all come clear! What horrors, what surprises, what calamities can possibly surpass what we’ve already seen?
And at first they’re not at all disappointed. There’s a very dramatic scene coming up. John saw “...another mighty angel coming down from heaven, wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs like pillars of fire. He held a little scroll open in his hand. Setting his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land, he gave a great shout, like a lion roaring. And when he shouted, the seven thunders sounded. [v. 1-3] But just as the curtain is about to come up, revealing the scene, what do they hear? The angel tells John, “Do not write it down." [v. 4c]
What a letdown! It must have felt something like what the disciples felt back in the beginning, when Jesus ascended into heaven forty days after the Resurrection. There they stood on Mt. Olivet looking up at the sky, probably with their mouths open, wondering what to do next. And then “suddenly two men in white robes stood by them [saying] "Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” [Acts 1:11]
Doesn’t this sort of thing happen all too often, though? We chart our path through life and set off on our way, expecting the road to be straight and smooth, with signposts at every intersection, the curves properly banked, and the mileage clearly marked on regular intervals so we know how much longer to the next MacDonald’s.
But life doesn’t work like that. There are roadblocks and accidents and storms and detours and we simply have to be prepared for it. Because even though this delay in reporting what John saw at this point in the revelation does have dramatic effect, it is not just a literary device. It isn’t put in there just to keep the audience keyed up, although that doesn’t hurt. It’s part of equipping them to deal with life.
This is how life is. Uncertainty is just as much a part of life as the wars, famines and plagues that John has already shown us is part of life before redemption.
But there is structure and meaning to this drama. It’s not theatre of the absurd, with Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot as it’s signature theme, whose meaning is that everything is meaningless. No, there’s a lot going on during this intermission.
The centerpiece of this passage is the open book, which is clearly the word of God. But there’s also an unusual emphasis on the angels, the messengers of God. The detailed description underlines the angel’s authority: Where does the angel come from? He comes “down from heaven.” What does he look like? He is “wrapped in a cloud, with a rainbow over his head; his face was like the sun,
and his legs like pillars of fire.” What does he sound like? “like a lion roaring” or like “seven thunders.” The angel is huge; he stands with “his right foot on the sea and his left foot on the land,” which is a way of displaying God’s power over both domains. We have both a dramatic entrance and a dramatic pause, so what this
towering figure has to say must be of supreme importance. And yet John isn’t allowed to tell anyone what it is!!!! What is going on here?
What’s going on here is that what is important for John’s hearers isn’t what God is going to do next, it is what John - and by implication John’s hearers as well - are supposed to do next.
Listen to the angel. He could hardly make a stronger assurance of the utter reliability of God’s promises, since he begins by swearing “by him who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it.” Why does the angel have to underline this point so heavily?
It’s because he knows how quickly people turn from trusting God to complaining that he isn’t meeting their expectations, that he isn’t doing what they want him to do, that he’s capricious or arbitrary or malicious or incompetent. The angel tells John, "There will be no more delay, but in the days when the seventh angel is to blow his trumpet, the mystery of God will be fulfilled, as he announced to his
servants the prophets."
There will be no more delay, he says, and yet - there IS a delay. There’s nothing happening on the heavenly stage, and it sure looks like an intermission. It’s been a couple of thousand years - and counting - since Jesus ascended and the angel told the disciples that he’d be back. So what does the angel mean? How are we to understand what’s going on here?
The point is, first, that we can count on God. There is no doubt that God will do what he says he will do. In fact, God is so reliable that the same verb tense is used in Hebrew for God’s past and future actions, since once God has said he will do something it’s as good as done, whether we’ve seen it yet or not. God’s promises are not in doubt. God doesn’t have to prove anything to us. No, it’s not God’s actions that are up for review here, but John’s, and ours.
And the fact is, there really is no “delay” because we are already in the middle of doing exactly what the angel announced was supposed to happen between the 6th and 7th trumpets. The last act takes place right down here.
The “mystery” that will be fulfilled as part of the events the seventh trumpet heralds is the secret purpose of God, which Paul tells us is the “proclamation of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed, and through the prophetic writings is made known to all the Gentiles, according to the command of the eternal God, to
bring about the obedience of faith. [Rom 16:25-26] And we shouldn’t have to have it explained to us yet again because the proph
ts have already made it quite clear that salvation is for everyone.
The next thing that is supposed to happen, the final act in God’s great drama of salvation, is the proclamation of the gospel to the Gentiles.
God has had one purpose and one purpose alone throughout the ages. From before the beginning of the world he has planned to bring his people to salvation, as we saw this morning in our study of Ephesians. “With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will... as a plan for the fullness of time... to gather up all things in [Christ]. [Eph 3:8-10] And now, here, in the last
great act of history, all of the streams, all the plots and subplots, the turns and twists and suspense and surprises, are coming together in a grand finale in which we play - if not the starring role, then certainly major supporting ones.
The point of this passage becomes clear when John takes the book, the word of God, and eats it. He’s not the first prophet to eat God’s words. Ezekiel did it, Jeremiah did it, the Psalmist who wrote today’s call to worship did it. Now, when we eat our words, it means we have to take back what we have said, to admit error and swallow our pride. But when we eat God’s words, what a difference! The words are as sweet as honey, and the next thing you know, the prophet or the poet is telling everyone they can find about God, about his righteousness and his wisdom and his love. Psalm 119 has 176 verses, and every last one of them is about how wonderful God’s word is. Jeremiah said, “Your words were found, and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart; for I am called by your name, O LORD, God of hosts.“ [Jer 15:16] Ezekiel also ate, and said “in my mouth [your word] was as sweet as honey.” [Ezek 3:3] Each one of them went out and became God’s spokesman to the world. And they hadn’t even met the Living Word, Jesus Christ! That very same task is what John - and we - are also called to do.
Of course it’s not that simple, though, is it. Jeremiah’s words come in the very middle of a long and bitter complaint about how difficult and painful it is to be God’s spokesman. He says, “know that on your account I suffer insult... I did not sit in the company of merrymakers, nor did I rejoice; under the weight of your hand I sat alone, for you had filled me with indignation... Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed?” [Jer 15:15,17-18] Both he and Ezekiel were warned at the beginning of their prophetic ministry, of course, that it would be hard. Ezekiel is told, “The house of Israel will not listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me; because all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart. See, I have made your face hard against their faces, and your forehead hard against their foreheads.” [Ezek 3:7-8] And God tells Jeremiah, “ I ...have made you today a fortified city, an iron pillar, and a bronze wall, against the whole land-- against the kings of Judah, its princes, its priests, and the people of the land... They will fight against you; but they shall not prevail against you.” [Jer 1:18-19] And John is likewise told that although the scroll is sweet to the taste, “it will be bitter to your stomach.” [v. 9] But of course getting warned is not really a whole lot of comfort, is it, when the sticks and stones and hand grenades and so on start getting flung at you. Ezekiel is ignored and laughed at, Jeremiah is persecuted and imprisoned, John is writing from exile.
Being God’s person isn’t a guarantee of an easy life. Even if you’re not actually persecuted, there are some things Christians just can’t tolerate, which can cut us off from our peers or leave us open to mockery and even outright hostility. We really must not remain silent in the face of the sexual immorality which permeates our culture and corrupts our youth, the undermining of marriage and family, the exile of God from the public square, the slaughter of millions of unborn children. the pretense that there is no real difference between good and evil, between right and wrong, the preposterous claim that the God of Islam is the same God revealed to us in Jesus Christ. Silence implies consent!
Jeremiah - “who, by the way, was known as the weeping prophet” complained about social isolation, too! “I did not sit in the company of merrymakers, nor did I rejoice; under the weight of your hand I sat alone, for you had filled me with
indignation.” [Jer:17]
But the resistance of your target audience isn’t the only thing that makes it difficult to be God’s mouthpiece. God seems mostly to send out prophets when bad things are about to happen. Jeremiah presided over the fall of Jerusalem, and Ezekiel over the refugee camps in Babylon.And John is announcing the end of the whole world, not just one corner of it. Doom and destruction, pain and suffering and death, are the flip side of the good news of the gospel. But not
one of them enjoys watching people suffer, not even the wicked. God’s people, God’s prophets, are no more eager than God himself is for anyone to perish. [2 Pet 3:9] The whole point of the so-called “delay” that we - and the rest of the saints - have been complaining about is in order that people should have every possible opportunity and incentive to turn away from their rebellion against God and live.
But this Word John has been called to proclaim is different. This last unfolding of the mystery is not the same as Ezekiel’s and Jeremiah’s. They were called only to the people of the written word. God tells Ezekiel, you are “sent ... to the house of Israel - not to many peoples of obscure speech and difficult language, whose words you cannot understand. “ [Ezek 3:5-6] And as we have already seen,
Jeremiah was sent against the kings and priests and people and cities of Judah. But John, like the disciples at the beginning of Acts, is being sent to everyone. "You must prophesy again about many peoples and nations and languages and kings." [v. 10]
Some people believe that the reason Jesus has not yet returned is because not every nation and language on earth has yet heard the gospel in their own tongue. There was a tremendous push at the end of the 20th century on the part of Wycliff and other missionary organizations to get the Bible translated into the rest of the world’s languages, and a lot of progress was made. But there are still people
in Africa and South America and Southeast Asia who speak languages that haven’t been touched by anyone, much less by the gospel, and in any case there are people who speak English and Spanish and Chinese and Arabic who haven’t yet heard the good news of Jesus Christ.
Have you ever complained about God’s timing? I know I have. But as the angel points out, it’s not God’s actions which are on trial here, it’s ours. The final act of this drama is ours. The proclamation of the mystery of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ is ours. We’re not just extras, folks, we’ve got lines to learn and moves to practice. Are you ready for the curtain to go up? Does God have reason to
complain about your timing? I know I’ve missed my cue more than once. Fortunately, God is still holding rehearsals. Maybe by opening night we’ll have our lines down. I’m working on mine, are you?
