Revelation 9:13-21
June 2, 2019
I.
In my first church there was a young woman whose father died when she was 16. Apparently, when the minister came over to comfort the family, he said her father’s death was “God’s will.” To her mind, this made God a murderer.
It is possible for someone to hear these alarming and violent stories from the book of Revelation and have the same opinion about God. Who wants a deity who would release this kind of grotesque catastrophe upon people? We want a nicer god! Where’s the forgiveness? What happened to the love? Should not a God who asks us to have compassion for others, also be expected to, well, have compassion for others?
These kinds of questions lead people to atheism or at least agnosticism. In the 18th century, the French philosopher, Voltaire, decided God was not worth much because of the death and devastation people suffered in an earthquake that hit the city of Lisbon. Like him, many refuse to accept a God who lets bad things happen. And a lot of bad things have happened since then. It is, and has been, the go-to argument of non-religious or anti-Christian people to point out how messed up the world is. If God is so great, why doesn’t he fix all this?
It doesn’t seem to help when a pastor solemnly pronounces how this or that disaster is God’s will. Or when insurance companies refer to natural catastrophes as “acts of God.” Or when someone decides that your dad’s death, or that of your grandmother, or best friend, or baby, was God’s will.
I know what that minister was thinking. He was trying to bring comfort and reassurance into a situation of sharp grief. I know that, from the perspective of faith, saying something is God’s will is supposed to help you see that God is in charge and “all things work together for good.”
This assumes that people have a modicum of theology and understand that at the core of everything God is good, God is love, God is always bringing life out of death and light into our darkness. To say something is God’s will means that, in spite of how it feels now, everything is really going to be okay. God is in charge, and nothing can ever separate us from God’s love, and God’s will is always to heal and to save and to deliver and to redeem.
But for people who don’t know this, then the very idea that someone’s death or any other cataclysm is God’s will makes God out to be a very bad force in the world. God becomes this evil monster sitting in heaven throwing lightning bolts at people, punishing us for every transgression, or even just for the heck of it, like a boy who tortures bugs and animals, even abandoning and demanding the blood of his own Son to appease his mindless, pathetic honor. According to one perverse piece of traditional theology, unfortunately often identified with Presbyterianism, God even created some people just to torture them for eternity. Nice guy….
II.
Is it any wonder that people find other ways to spend their Sunday mornings? Take a walk in the park. Play with your kids. Read a book. Workout. Watch Netflix. Anything seems way more edifying than worshipping a great psycho-killer in the sky.
What people often fail to notice is that bad things are still happening. You don’t become exempt from them just because you stopped believing in God. These things are a part of life. And what faith seeks to do is not to escape or avoid those things, which is impossible. But to help us to frame them and interpret them in the most positive and helpful ways we can. It’s not about how to get out of the challenges of existence, but how we get through them. How do we grow from them? How do we adapt and learn and become better able to handle them, especially for the next time?
To say something is God’s will means that it is part of a much larger and very good purpose. Doctors do not prescribe drastic treatments like amputations or chemotherapy in order to kill us or purely to inflict pain. They do it because they know that if some part of us or something inside of us is killing us, it has to go, and removing it can be very traumatic.
The plagues that God sent upon Egypt in the Exodus story are always behind John’s visions. Those events, violent and lethal as they are, are not gratuitous, cruel, and meaningless. They have a point. And the point is the liberation of the people from an even worse situation of slavery, which is about the worst condition a person can be put into. God didn’t put them in bondage; the Egyptians did. But it takes a lot of energy to break a destructive and oppressive cycle like that.
The fact is that the things we do in this existence have consequences, just like sticking your hand in a fire is going to burn you. Do we get angry with God because God doesn’t suspend the laws of nature for our comfort and convenience? The laws of nature are designed to keep alive the most beautiful and abundant planet in the universe as far as we know. The only place where life is even possible. God’s been working on it for 13 billion years or so. Do we expect that we will be allowed to mess with it with impunity?
No. If we do stupid, selfish, and destructive things, expect appropriate results. If we threaten the balance of life, expect the balance to be restored at some cost to us. If we do evil we will get evil back on ourselves in spades.
We matter to God. And the “we” that matters to God is everyone, all of life, all of creation. If one part of that “we” starts harming and destroying some other parts, well, the larger, more inclusive “we” is going to be protected. If we have decided to exist according to egocentric, personality-driven, selfish values, spawning idolatry, injustice, oppression, pain, and misery in others, we should expect to get clobbered when we encounter the Truth. The evil we put into the world will come back to bite us. Because God’s love for everyone is more important than God’s love for some who think it’s all about them… which is the root of idolatry.
III.
And that’s what’s going on here. There is a beautiful verse in Ezekiel that I quote a lot. Ezekiel is also a book full of horrendous catastrophes; John knows it well. At the end of Ezekiel 18, God calls on Israel to repent and get a new heart and a new spirit. “I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord God. Turn, then, and live!”
The message for that girl whose father died is: God didn’t kill your father; that’s not what God’s about, really. God is about life! God is about love! God is about joy and goodness! So cherish the good memories. As much as you miss him, your dad is free, and light, and, in other more subtle ways, he is still here with and in you.
This is important because we tend to view death as the worst thing. But when death starts, back in Genesis, after the disobedience of Adam and Eve, God says they will now return to the dust from which they were made, and even sends an angel to keep them from accessing the Tree of Life. This is not a punishment so much as a mercy, because the debased new existence the humans dug themselves into would be intolerable if it lasted forever. They are allowed out of it; they are permitted to die and move on.
In the meantime, God has to see that the balance in the good creation is restored. God is cleaning up our mess. God is purging the creation of our injustices, our inequalities, our proclivity to violence, our selfishness, and our destruction. God is destroying the destroyers so that the people and the creation may be restored. In this case God is doing what Jesus predicts when he says that “those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” Those who lived by war, will die by war. And empires have always lived by war.
Last week we witnessed the cloud of demon-locusts. Today it is a horde of demon-horses, cavalry. If the locusts represent the ravages of wanton consumption, the cavalry brings the ravages of war. In those days, that’s what cavalry meant: war.
To the Romans, cavalry brought one thing to mind: Parthians, the great enemy of Rome who lived on the other side of the Euphrates River, famous for their invincible cavalry. They were the enemy tribe that Rome could never defeat.
Only, the cavalry that John sees are not normal; they are nightmare cavalry where the horses have lions’ heads spewing a deadly fire, smoke, and sulfur — like napalm dragons — that kill a third of the people. And for tails they had poisonous snakes.
And even this does not move the survivors out of their debilitating addiction to self-serving idolatries. They continue to engage in murder, drugs, sexual abuse, and theft. Part of John’s point being that the so-called “living” are not any better off than those massacred by the demon-cavalry. They are still stuck in a cycle of corruption, ignorance, and violence, as they wait for the next trumpet to sound.
IV.
God desires the death of no one. Yet, in the course of the Creator’s preserving and protecting life on earth, many die because of the ignorance, selfishness, and violence of humans. But this is not the end either. There remains way more to life than we can know and see from our mortal, temporal vantage point.
Remember in that Ezekiel passage, God says, “Turn, then, and live!” There is always in Revelation this undercurrent calling for repentance and discipleship. No matter how bad it gets out there, we can still “turn and live,” which is to say, turn our lives over to the Lamb who is overseeing this whole mess, who has been through it and borne its worst, and who yet lives forever.
It’s like God is saying, look, I don’t like this anymore than you do. You can go through this horror you have brought on yourselves if you like. Or you can follow my Son, the Lamb, and live in peace, justice, compassion, forgiveness, hope, joy, sharing, equality, and love. That’s what’s going to win in the end anyway. Why not start now?
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