Where’s the image?
This was our second
Sunday morning after 9/11. The first Sunday I had a handout for the
congregation that listed Bible passages and bullet points, I didn’t preach a
sermon that first Sunday because it was more a time of reflection for us than
anything else. How does a person or a people process and respond to such a
tragedy? I wanted to guide our dear people to Jesus and away from the reactions
of the world, as well as away from cheap popular Christian thinking. I wanted
our people to see themselves as “citizens of heaven” (Phil. 3:20) before
anything else – our calling was to display Jesus and bring others to Him.
A companion passage, which I do not refer to in this message, is 2 Thessalonians 2:1 - 12. If we grasp the essence of this passage we will "see" that self-exaltation, both individual and collective, is a hallmark of Satan; and rather than embrace it and justify it, we will flee from it and from all who propagate it. The "man of lawlessness" exalts himself and works to pull us into drinking the poison of that cup...woe to us that we see and flee from this evil.
Can you see what I
was doing in this message?
This is lightly edited.
September 23, 2001; Revelation 13
Becket, MA
Bob Withers
When
I was in property management, a lady worked for me who was the manager of a
cooperative community of 400 families just outside Washington, D.C. One year I sent her to a conference in San
Antonio, Texas, thinking that it would be a great experience for her and help advance
her career. When she returned, she
walked into my office and cursed me up one side and down the other, she was
really upset.
She was
upset because I’d sent her into unfamiliar territory, unfamiliar people, and unfamiliar
subject matter. She was frustrated,
highly frustrated. Though, all in all,
she came out just fine.
A number
of people who worked for me over the years had that same experience to varying
degrees, that experience of frustration, because I would not dumb down for
them, I wanted to bring them up, not allow them to remain where they were.
And so,
my dear friends, you have lots of company, your frustration has been shared by
many over the years, I love you too much to dumb down.
Last week we looked briefly at a number of questions that
have been raised as a result of the attacks in New York and Washington and the
tragedy in Pennsylvania. Among the
Biblical references on last week’s handout were the books of Daniel and
Revelation, and in reading them I suggested that you ask yourself the question,
“What patterns do I see in these passages?”
God
communicates to us through patterns and images.
Yes, He also gives us commandments and principles to live by, but much
of His communication is through images and patterns. Sometimes we’re apt to think that the idea
that we’re a visual people only came about with the advent of movies and
television, but we’ve been visual from the beginning of our existence. In fact, in the beginning we were God’s
visualization of Himself to the universe in that He created us in His image;
now He is about the restoration of that image through and in Jesus Christ.
We are
told that Jesus Christ is the perfect image of God. Yes, Jesus taught many things, but He first
and foremost lived among us and, as the apostle John writes, “He is full of
grace and truth.” This is why Jesus
could say, “I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the Father
except through Me…He who has seen Me has seen the Father” This is why the
primary issue with Jesus is not His teachings, but His Person, Himself. He is God, God manifested in the flesh, God’s
perfect representation, His perfect image.
The other
day as I was channel surfing, I happened upon one of the religious channels on
which the preacher was talking about Biblical prophecy. Behind him on the platform was a massive
chart that took up most of the wall. The
chart showed this preacher’s conception of history from the dawn of time
through the last chapter of Revelation.
I’ve seen charts like this since I came to Christ as a teenager. Those charts used to fascinate me with all
their knowledge and detail and Biblical references, I was intrigued by
them. After all, for many of us, knowing
the future and having the answers is important, it’s a natural tendency within
many of us.
A few
weeks ago, I was at a house party when the hostess walked up to me with another
woman and said, “Bob, do you know Mary Scammon?” And I replied, “Of course I know Mary, but
Mary, I didn’t recognize you.” And the
fact was that I hadn’t recognized this woman who’ve I’ve seen and talked to on
a number of occasions. In spite of the
fact that she had a wide brimmed summer hat on, and that I don’t recall her
ever wearing a hat before, I still think I should have recognized her. But why didn’t I know who she was when I
first saw her? Why did someone have to
remind me who she was? Because I saw her
out of context.
Has this ever happened to you? You’re accustomed to seeing someone in a
particular context, perhaps work, or church, or school, and then you see them
in an aisle at Walmart, and you draw an embarrassing blank and don’t know what
to say? I was accustomed to seeing Mary
Scammon in the context of my relationship with her husband, pastor Warren
Scammon. Since the function we were both
at had nothing to do with church ministry, I didn’t recognize Mary.
By the
same token, when people draw elaborate charts about Biblical prophecy and
insist that the future is going to follow the detailed path they have laid out,
they leave themselves and their students open to the almost inevitable
experience of not understanding what is actually occurring because they can’t
recognize events outside of their pre-determined context.
If we’ll
study and understand the patterns and images of Scripture, then we’ll have the
tools that the Holy Spirit can use to help us understand events, otherwise
we’ll be like the baseball player at the plate who is looking for a particular
pitch, maybe a 95 mph fast ball but he gets a 70 mph change –up and swings long
before the ball reaches the plate.
If you’ve read the book of Daniel, you’ll
know that God showed Daniel a number of visions concerning the prophetic flow
of history. Daniel saw some pretty weird
images and patterns, in fact, some were quite frightening. Therefore, we might rightly think that if we
could discover how Daniel responded to the contemporary flow of events in his
own life, especially if he thought the events were in accordance with Biblical
prophecy, that then we might have a pattern to follow in our lives and in our
time.
Well, we do have an outstanding example of this and it is found in Daniel chapter 9, so
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