Bible

Finishing Revelation

…they couldn’t all want Archetypes coming down on them, not if they were like most of the religious people he had met. They also probably liked their religion taken mild — a pious hope, a devout ejaculation, a general sympathetic sense of a kindly universe — but nothing upsetting or bewildering, no agony, no darkness, no uncreated light. (Charles Williams, The Place of the Lion)

Our pastor is preaching on Revelation, and this morning I finished reading it. The sermons have been very helpful and illuminating, but to be honest, if they did nothing but get me to read Revelation, that would be a significant accomplishment. I think I read it quickly for my New Testament class in college, but aside from that I’ve studiously avoided Revelation. It’s been twisted and used in so many unfortunate ways, and it’s so full of incomprehensible symbolism, that I’ve simply been afraid of it.

Or am I just a spiritual wimp, who “likes my religion taken mild,” as the excerpt above puts it?

It’s been interesting to start this novel, my first Charles Williams read, the same week I finish reading Revelation. The Place of the Lion is about Plato breaking in on a peaceful British village. More specifically, it’s about Platonic ideals and forms erupting into a time and place and re-absorbing created things. The leader of a little philosophy/Bible study group is the focal point of what’s happening.

It’s interesting because Revelation is, in a sense, about the same thing. It gives visions into a reality existing in another dimension. So reading the novel is providing me with an imaginative medium for continuing to meditate on some of what I’ve read in Revelation.

Here are my thoughts about Revelation:

  • As for times and details about the end of the world, I have no clue. I have no clue how anyone else could read the book and say anything with certainty about such things.
  • I come away with a firm sense of a grand God who has, above all, a plan.
  • I don’t understand the plan as it’s conveyed through all the symbolic events. But it goes in phases. There is a defeat of evil, then a resurgence, then another defeat, etc. Finally it is defeated once and for all.
  • I don’t understand why it goes this way, but the one on the throne is truly glorious. There’s no question that he’s in control. There’s no question that he’s good. There’s no question that his ways are higher than mine. I can trust him to have his reasons.
  • These visions are grand and strange. They can’t be plotted out and translated into parallels in reality as I know it — in time and space and through my senses and rationality. I am still thinking about something said in the sermon on Sunday — that these are attempts to communicate not what God looks like, but what he is like.
  • Somewhere, it has struck me that I will meet the Lord. I’ll look at him face to face, in the same plane of being. He will look at me, at my face, at my life. It will come. It will not always be like this — “belief in things hoped for, assurance of things not seen.”

It will not always be like this.

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