The Lake of Fire.

Revelation 20

November 10, 2019

I.

For people in recovery from addiction, no matter how clean and sober they may have been for many years — and I personally know people who have maintained their sobriety for decades… and they still attend regular meetings — they know that they will never be in this life so totally cured that going back to substance abuse is impossible.  This illness will be a part of their life until they die.  They never get over it.  

I thought of that when I read this chapter about the thousand years.  Why does John’s vision include this puzzling interregnum, a long period of time when the dragon, Satan, the Accuser, is locked up and immobilized?  And then the even bigger question: Why not just leave him there?  Why does he have to “be let out for a little while”? 

The reason is that Satan has weaseled his way into human existence and infected us with the fear, shame, and anger that totally flavor our consciousness, resulting in selfishness, rebellion, violence, and cynical hatred of God and God’s creation, especially other people.  Even when he has been neutralized and removed from our lives, there remains a sense that the Accuser is still out there — or down there.  And the time will inevitably come when his temptations erupt again, and we will feel his gnawing, sour seductions again in our souls and in our world.  

We don’t have to be addicts to understand this dynamic.  All of us have slavery to sin somewhere in our consciousness.  We may not suffer from chemical addictions, or even compulsive bad habits.  But we all do suffer from the more general form of this disease: we are all liable to fall into a deep egocentricity that cuts us off from others, from God, from creation, and even from our true selves.  We are all susceptible to the suggestions that we should devote our lives to getting and keeping money, fame, and power, and relying on the violent, self-serving, self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, self-gratifying practices that follow from them.

It is like a bad gene in our interior make-up that, even if it gets turned off, may still be turned on again.  There is always this potential for us to fall into evil and start thinking and acting as if we were separated from, and at enmity with, God.  We may start imagining ourselves at the center of creation at any time.  We may resume thinking that it is all about us.

That’s the downside of this, that we always carry this tendency within us.  That’s the bad news.  But the upside is that we also carry even more deeply within us the ability to turn to God and witness to God’s love in Jesus Christ.  We may also let God’s compassion, generosity, forgiveness, and acceptance flow through us into our world.  This is our true nature.   

For when we have emerged from the cruel regime of the one who is always our Accuser, feeding us negative and destructive stories about ourselves, and when we live instead under the beneficent, forgiving, and gracious judgment of those who are seated on God’s thrones, and live with those witnesses in the power of the resurrection, we get restored to a life of freedom and dignity, authenticity and joy with and in God.

II.

Even when the Accuser is released and does become an influence again within and among humanity, even to the point of seeming to threaten the very life of those who trust in God, God never abandons the people.  The image that John uses is rooted in the prophecies of Ezekiel 38, about these symbolic enemies of Israel, called Gog and Magog, coming down from the north, as did almost every conquering power.  

Gog and Magog are, of course, not “Russia” or any single, particular historical power, as many who waste their time disobeying Jesus’ warning about not trying to figure out the day or the hour have dreamed up.  Rather, they represent the gathered ignorance and violence of the nations which have in every age sought to snuff out God’s people, the witnesses to God’s truth.  Gog and Magog fill the role of the Beast, or  Empire, in the story, now that the Beast has already been dispatched to the Lake of Fire

On them at the last moment the pure fire of God’s holiness descends from heaven.  It consumes all who would hurt or destroy, and only then does the dragon, Satan, the Accuser, himself get thrown into the Lake of Fire forever.  This does not happen until now because God has to point out with persistent consistency the futility of relying on our own devices to save us.  The last temptation is that thousand years of good times.  Exactly the kind of situation in which people would start to imagine it was due to their own virtue and industry, and become susceptible to the Accuser’s temptations again.

People do not save themselves.  People do not save the planet.  People do not save each other.  God does that and only God.  Our job is to be open to God’s work and let God work through us.  

Having been cast into the Lake of Fire, the Accuser, like his proteges the Beast and the False Prophet, receives as recompense the stored up pain and horror that he brought into creation.  And since he is not mortal and cannot die, he gets all this misery back on himself for eternity.

The Lord Jesus also bore the sins and pain of the whole world on the cross.  He is the perfect vessel through whom the infinite grace of God passes into the world, healing, forgiving, and washing away all this death, pain, and guilt, dissolving it in the ocean of God’s love.  It is not this way with the Accuser.  The Accuser never lets go of anything!  He is never about giving up or renouncing or divesting.  Satan always grabs, takes, controls, keeps, collects, stores, and hoards.  He’s all about what he can gain.  Which means that here, in the end, he has no choice but to consume and digest the horrors, terrors, and acute misery he so cruelly doled out when he could, when people were listening to his condemning voice in their heads.

III.

The final scene here is the Last Judgment in which everyone who ever lived is assessed according to what they had done in their earthly existence.  It is the same story that Jesus tells with different imagery in Matthew 25, where he explicitly spells out the criteria for salvation.  People go to live forever with God who served the needy, because in serving the needy they were actually serving Jesus Christ.  The ones who get dropped into the Lake of Fire are those who failed to provide for the needy, and thus failed to serve Jesus.  

I mention that because it is apparently very easy for some to assume they are among those whose names are written in the Book of Life, who like to prognosticate about Gog and Magog, and the thousand years, and the lake of fire, and the rapture, but who fail to see and minister to Jesus Christ, the truly human One, in the bodies of suffering people.

If you make excuses about why we should not feed the hungry?  If you say we should not give water to the thirsty, in places like Flint?  If you say we should not help but harass and deport strangers, immigrants, and asylum seekers, even though the Bible and Jesus are absolutely direct and unequivocal about that, repeatedly?  To date over 5400 children have been separated from their families at our own border for no stated reason but the imagined deterrence value of cruelty.  If you’re content with a system that leaves 47% of our own population in economic and financial stress, with half a million homeless?  If you’re trying to actually keep people from getting the health care they need?  If you’re about building and filling prisons, when we already have the highest incarceration rate in the world?   These are just the categories Jesus mentions.  I wonder if there aren’t others.

If you do these things, or excuse and defend leaders who do them, how are you not agents of the Beast?  How are you not yourselves like Gog and Magog, oppressing God’s people?  How is that a witness to Jesus Christ, exactly?  How will you avoid the fire?       

This whole book, with all its pyrotechnics, mayhem, spectacular imagery, and cliff-hangers, is about the gradual, continual, inevitable collapse of the false and brutal world we have generated — both within ourselves and extended into our time and space existence in society and institutions.  That world of bigotry, inequality, injustice, and violence is finished.  Our job now, in the midst of this chaos, is to live as witnesses to the truth of God’s love, revealed in Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, who gives his life for the life of the world.  

Witnessing to Christ is not a merely verbal thing.  It has content in what we do, in how we act, in the way we relate to each other and to God’s creation.  It says here twice that we are judged according to what we have done, our works.  Our behavior is what ratifies whether our name appears in the Book of Life.

IV.

In the end, Death and Hades also get personified and thrown into the Lake of Fire that consumes and annihilates all evil.  The Lake of Fire means that nothing opposed to God’s reign of goodness, love, peace, justice, hope, joy, and healing is allowed to roam around at large, destroying God’s creation and people.

I’m not going to say that it is not John’s purpose to scare us; I’m pretty sure that it is.  Just like it is a parent’s role to make sure children have a healthy respect for the street, the stove, the lawnmower, and other dangers.  There are consequences for messing around with some things, and love means issuing a warning.

But John’s purpose is mainly to inspire and to strengthen.  Because as awful as much of what we have been reading for the last year has been, starting next week, he starts telling us about the promise and the delight, the deliverance and the deep peace of God, which is the ultimate goal of our witness and of the whole creation.
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