This is where Revelation starts to get good and strange. We’ve spent time with the churches and the throne room, all of which is far more “preachable” than bowls of judgement, stars falling from heaven, and those two witnesses (that is - unless you turn it into a fiction series of course).
However if we can stick with Revelation here and remember its apocalyptic intent to reveal truth about politics and the very real mechanisms of power - there is much to be gained from these complex images.
As I was wrestling with these texts in the year 2020, the pressures of anxiety and the politics of fear felt especially heavy. These pressures of course haven’t entirely gone away in the year 2025.
My hunch was that the images of these chapters we’re necessarily meant to be “applied” in some traditional “bible application” sense. But they were meant to be read in prayer. The practice of prayer, at its best, resists the politics of fear. It re-orders reality by insisting upon openness and expectancy.
So my curiosity still is… if the world goes mad, would it make a difference if we were a people who prayed? Who focused our being in the world to return to the throne room of the slaughtered lamb. To re-situate our hopes in God capable of shifting the cosmos and sending witnesses.
I think our prayer would be its own form of protest to the politics of fear and anxiety that surround us.
To that end, may we be a people who continue to read and to pray these words of Revelation 8-11.
With hope,
John
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