“The End of the Story”

A sermon by Dr. Jim Somerville, Pastor
Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
November 1, 2009
All Saints Day

Revelation 21:1-6

Last Tuesday afternoon I met with the members of the Worship Planning Team to see how we could make this All Saints Day especially meaningful.  We spent a good bit of time on that part of the service where Lynn Turner was going to read aloud the names of those church members who have died in the past year.  And a good bit of that time was spent wondering what we should call it.  We finally settled on “Remembering the Saints,” which was a good choice, but one of the resources I had suggested that we might call that part of the service “The Naming of the Honored Dead” and nobody liked that one. 

Why is that, I asked, why do we have such a hard time with the word, dead?  We say that our loved ones passed away or that they went home to be with the Lord, but we rarely say that they died.  Why is that? 

Well, it sounds so final, someone said, like it’s not only the end of their earthly life but the end of them somehow.  And we don’t want to believe that.  No, we don’t want to believe that, but what would lead us to believe anything else.  Where do we get the idea that death is not the end of our loved ones.

Back in Old Testament times people believed that when their loved ones died they went to Sheol, the place of the dead, which was down there somewhere.  It wasn’t hell, it wasn’t a place of everlasting torment, but it was somewhere down there underground, a kind of huge, underground warehouse of the dead.  The best commentaries I can find suggest that people believed that their loved ones continued in some sort of conscious, shadowy existence down there forever and ever, but it was not the same as life.  If you had asked somebody in those days where their great-great-grandfather was they would have said, “Down there.”  Sheol.  That’s where he would have been.

Sometime in the second century BC people began to talk about the resurrection from the dead.  You get the first hint of this in the Bible from Daniel, chapter 12, verse 2 which says, “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”  Whereas Sheol was understood to be simply the place of the dead, both the righteous and the wicked, the book of Daniel suggests that the dead who are raised will be judged and will receive everlasting reward or punishment based on what they did in life.

So, the important thing would be to know how do I attain righteousness.  How can I ensure my inheritance among the saints?  The Pharisees who came about at the same time, that second century BC, began to think that the way to achieve immortality was by being better and more righteous than everyone else, being holier than thou, and thou, and thou, that’s the way to assure that when you die you receive your eternal reward instead of eternal punishment.

It wasn’t until Jesus came along, really, that people began to understand God as a good and gracious God who wanted to give the gift of life.  All it took was a little faith.  Jesus said, “God loves the world, doesn’t want anybody to die.  So, whoever believes in his Son will not perish but have everlasting life.”  The apostle Paul picked up on this theme in his own writings.  Paul, who had been a Pharisee among Pharisees, who had struggled to show himself more righteous than anyone else, who had done everything to fulfill the works of the law, began to change his tune.

In Galatians 2:16 he says, “We know that a person is not justified by works of the law, but through faith in Jesus Christ.”  In Romans 10:9 he says, “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”  In the space of a few hundred years people went from believing that death was then end to believing that death didn’t have to be the end at all, that it could be the beginning of a whole new life.  In fact, some of them began to say that this life that comes after death is even better than the life that comes before death, which was good news to them especially under the circumstances.

Today I am preaching from the book of Revelation which is, without a doubt, the most misunderstood book in the Bible.  Because it is full of signs and symbols, some people try to decode it as if it were the latest Dan Brown novel.  It’s not.  But I remember that when I was in my early teens someone brought a book to our house called The Late, Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey and I read it.  Everybody was reading it in those days.  It was the best seller for a full decade.  It spoke of how the world was going to come to an end and, in that book, Hal Lindsey unraveled all the mysteries of Revelation. 

I don’t remember everything that was in the book, but I do remember that he spend a good bit of time talking about the anti-Christ, a word that is not even found in the book of Revelation.  Did you know that?  It’s mentioned only a few times in the Bible, and only in the epistles of John.  Hal Lindsey talked a lot about the rapture, again a word that is found nowhere in the book of Revelation, nowhere in the Bible in fact.  The idea is referred to only once and that in 1 Thessalonians, chapter 4.  Hal Lindsey talked a lot about the battle of Armageddon, this great battle and in that cold-war era believed that the armies of Russia were going to assist the devil in fighting against Jesus and his armies.  It was going to be a terrible thing, he said, terrible.  It was going to lead to the end of the world and he predicted with confidence that the world would end in 1988.  Well, it didn’t.  He was wrong.

In recent years, the “Left Behind” series has picked up where Hal Lindsey left off as Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins have mined the book of Revelation for the stuff of pulp fiction.  It’s a wonderful read, exciting, thrilling, but it has very little basis in reality or even in the book of Revelation.  It is only another version of The Late, Great, Planet Earth. 

Now it’s true that the book of Revelation is full of signs and symbols.  But the signs and symbols would have been readily understood by the people for whom that book was written near the end of the first century.  Revelation is apocalyptic literature.  It comes from that Greek word which means “to take the cover off, to reveal.”  It is an effort to reveal to people in a time of intense persecution how things are going to come out in the end.  Just like the second half of the book of Daniel and some portions of the  gospels, it is meant to be a comfort to God’s people in times of trouble, not meant to be so hard to read that no one touches it. 

At the time Revelation was written, Caesar Domitian was the emperor of Rome and he was persecuting Christians just as Caesar Nero had before him.  According to church historians Nero used to soak Christians in kerosene and set them on fire to light his garden parties.  Domitian used to have Christians beheaded or, worse, boiled in oil if they did not bow down to his statue and say out loud so everyone could hear it, “Caesar is Lord.”  I’ve even heard that, if they didn’t take his mark on the back of their hands or on their foreheads, they could not buy or sell in the marketplace.

Under those circumstances the writer of Revelation begs Christians to stay true to their faith and assures them that even if the worst happens, even if they are killed for insisting that Jesus and not Caesar is Lord, it will not be the end of their story.  Earlier in the book he has written about how the beast, Caesar Domitian, rose to power and how he began to persecute the people of God.  But then he begins to look to the future and, in the vision God has given him, he sees how this beast will come to his end and how the Roman Empire and the city of Rome itself will go up in flames.  And then it gets worse, or better, depending on your perspective, as he talks about a time when God’s wrath will be poured out upon the earth in great bowls, when the last battle will be fought.  Dead bodies will be stacked in heaps as far as the eye can see and blood will run as high as a horse’s bridle.  Only then, he says, will this cosmic conflict be over.  Only then will the kingdom of the world become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ and he will reign forever and ever, hallelujah, hallelujah.

I try to remember that sometimes when people come to my study wanting to talk.  Sometimes they are in dire straits, facing trouble so deep they don’t know how they will get out of it.  They talk to me with tears on their cheeks, explaining situations that seem impossible.  And often in those sessions I am led to say, “You know, this is terrible.  It sounds impossible, but we don’t know yet how this story will end.”

A good storyteller will tell you that every plot has to have some complications in it, some problems that seem impossible to resolve.  A good storyteller will resolve those complications in front of an audience in such a way that they are amazed and astounded by how impossible situations have become possible.

“We don’t know yet,” I say, “how this story is going to end but let’s keep praying about it.  Let’s keep asking God to help us see the way.”  Seems like good advice and people often seem comforted by that.  They dry their tears and go out of my study saying over and over to themselves, “We don’t know yet.  We don’t know how this story is going to end.  It could end beautifully, better than I ever expected.  We don’t know yet.”

Yesterday afternoon, when my family got email from an old friend letting us know that her father had died, I wanted to tell her something else.  I wanted to say, “You know, we do know how this story will end.”  The writer of Revelation has told us.  I picture it like you would see it acted out on a stage, all that carnage and bloodshed there on the stage, all those battles being fought, all that smoke going up.  The story is at its worst in that moment and you wonder how it can ever have a happy ending.  But then the writer of Revelation talks about the curtain being closed, the stage being cleared, and in the darkness we sit and wait to see what the next act will bring.  There is silence in the theatre for some time and then the sound of music, maybe only a single flute, as the curtain begins to open and you see the stage bathed in light, heavenly light. 

And the writer of Revelation says, “I saw a new heaven and a new earth.  The first heaven and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more.  And I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven like a bride adorned for her husband.  I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them as their God.  They will be his people.  God himself will be with them.  He will wipe every tear from their eyes.  Death will be no more.  Mourning and crying and pain will be no more for the first things have passed away.’”

I wanted to say to this family friend yesterday, “We do know how this story is going to end.  We know that a time is coming when some things will be no more.  Right now you feel pain.  You are mourning, and crying, and grieving.  The tears are falling freely.  But one of these days, God will be distant from us no more.  God will be absent from us no more.  God will make his home among us.  He will be our God.  We will be his people.” 

And then I pictured the Lord God himself welcoming her father into that place, holding his face in his hands, looking into his eyes, and then with his thumbs wiping away the tears from his cheeks, folding him into a life-giving embrace, and welcoming him into the kingdom of heaven.  All those people who have suffered and died for their faith in Jesus Christ will share that same destiny.  All those members of this church whom we have loved and lost and who loved and served the Lord will be welcomed into that embrace.  All those saints who have gone before us, all those you know and love, all those saints will come to the end of God’s story.

—Jim Somerville © 2009