King of kings and Lord of lords

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Title

King of kings and Lord of lords

Teacher

Peter Hubbard

Date

February 23, 2020

Scripture

Revelation, Revelation 19:11-21

TRANSCRIPT

If you will turn to Revelation 19, right near the end of your Bible. And if you need an outline, raise your hand, and we’ll get you one.

A caricature is an exaggerated picture or description of someone. An exaggerated picture or description of someone. It is where certain characteristics are overstated, and others are understated. Caricatures can present a cartoonish, comical image of someone. They’re meant as visual parodies. All famous people are victims of caricatures. And if you don’t want to be “caricaturized,” don’t become famous. Certain features are magnified, others are minimized. Caricatures can be dangerous, not when they’re used in a cartoon or necessarily in news. But they can be dangerous when they begin to shape the way we think or more specifically, when they begin to establish or express our values. This is especially true when it comes to God. Our theology can become a caricature of who God really is.

Rob Bell illustrated this, I think, in his book, “Love Wins,” many years ago. He draws a caricature of what Christians believe, specifically about hell, but more broadly about who God is. He told of a time when his church, back when he was a pastor, when his church had an art show. There was a particular piece that featured a quotation from Mahatma Gandhi. And on that piece, someone stuck a note that said, “Reality check. Ghandi’s in hell.” And so, Bell responded rightly, I believe,

“Really? Ghandi’s in hell? He is? We have confirmation of this? Somebody knows this? Without a doubt? And that somebody decided to take on the responsibility of letting the rest of us know?”

Thus far, I think he’s highlighting an important point. None of us knows what is happening in someone’s soul. But he goes on in his promotional film to expand on this.

“Will only a few select people make it to heaven? And will billions and billions of people burn forever in hell? And if that’s the case, how do you become one of the few? Is it what you believe or what you say or what you do or who you know or something that happens in your heart? Or do you need to be initiated or baptized or take a class or converted or be born again? How does one become one of these few?”

All good caricatures are formed on a representation that is fairly accurate, somewhat. So, there has to be some truth. These are really good questions. But then he keeps going.

“And then there is the question behind the questions. The real question [is]: ‘What is God like?’ because millions and millions of people were taught that the primary message, the center of the gospel of Jesus, is that God is going to send you to hell unless you believe in Jesus. And so, what gets subtly sort of caught and taught is that Jesus rescues you from God. But what kind of God is that, that we would need to be rescued from this God? How could that God ever be good? How could that God ever be trusted? And how could that ever be good news?” You see what just happened? This image of God is now being “cartoonized” and the answer would be that it couldn’t, implied is that it couldn’t be good news.

“This is why lots of people want nothing to do with the Christian faith. They see it as an endless list of absurdities and inconsistencies, and they say, ‘Why would I ever want to be a part of that?’ See, what we believe about heaven and hell is incredibly important because it exposes what we believe about who God is and what God is like. What you discover in the Bible is so surprising, unexpected and beautiful, that whatever we’ve been told and been taught, the good news is actually better than that, better than we could ever imagine. The good news is that love wins.”

So, here Bell is magnifying a part of who God is, his love, but to the point where any sense of justice or holiness, purity or truth, is shriveled up. And the problem with the caricature is then it sets us up for the opposite caricature to be formed.

One writer contrasted Rob Bell’s caricature this way.

“Several years ago, I was touring a holocaust museum, and I was deeply moved by the images of suffering and inhuman brutality that I saw there. Near the end of the tour on the wall was a picture of Hitler standing in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris. I and many who were with me were struck by the idea of Hitler enjoying the beauties of Paris while at the same moment one of the greatest genocides the world has ever known was being carried out on his orders.”But apparently not everyone saw it exactly the same way, for somebody had attached a handwritten note to the picture, and on the note they had written, ‘It’s okay because God forgave Hitler, too.’

“God forgave Hitler? He did? And someone knows this for sure? And he felt the need for the rest of us to know? Do the most evil and unrepentant people in history, remaining what they are, still make it to heaven?

“And then there’s the question behind the question. The real question is, ‘What is God like?’ because millions and millions were taught that the primary message of the gospel of Jesus Christ is that God is willing to forgive everybody no matter who they are or what evils they have committed against the rest of us. So, what gets subtly sort of caught and taught is that God is willing to forgive the perpetrators of evil, regardless of whether or not their victims ever see justice. That God is willing to let all things fly. Everything. But what kind of God is that? Can a God so uninterested in justice be good? How can that God ever be trusted? How can that ever be good news?

“This is why lots of people want nothing to do with the Christian faith. They see it as an endless list of absurdities and inconsistencies, and say, ‘Why would I ever want to be a part of that?’ See, what we believe about heaven and hell is incredibly important because it exposes what we believe about who God is and what God is like. What you discover in the Bible is so surprising, and unexpected, and beautiful, that whatever you’ve been told or taught, the good news is even better than that, better than we can ever imagine. It means pure and perfect justice, no wrong accusations, no punishments that don’t fit the crime, no hidden motives, no unaccounted pains or sorrows, but overflowing compensation for anyone who’s ever been hurt or betrayed. The good news is that God’s ‘justice wins.’”

So, you see, lopsided images of God, caricatures, are the raw material of heresy. We create caricatures of God when we exaggerate one aspect of God and we minimize another. We exaggerate his love to the expense of his justice or his justice at the expense of his love. And we do this for several reasons. There are at least five primary influences as to why we come up with these caricatures.

One is our upbringing — whether we were loved well or mistreated as kids, whether we grew up in a church that just preached justice or holiness or just compassion or love. So, however — in our home, in our church, in our experience — that shapes the way we view God.

Secondly, our personalities. Some are wired for justice. Everything is black and white, right and wrong. Others are wired for compassion. Let it slide. Have a heart. Give it a break.

Third is our selective reading of Scripture. We see what we want to see. We experience what could be called “biblical confirmation bias.” We go to the Bible expecting one thing, and we end up finding it. We ignore the thing we did not want to find.

Number 4, our culture. Our culture pressures us to exaggerate certain aspects of God and minimize other parts. If you grew up in Greenville. You might be tempted to think of Jesus as a gentle teacher. You know, kind of khakis-and-collar kind of guy, concerned about truth. But if you grew up in Portland, he is an eco-friendly hipster. He’s got the frankincense essential oil in his beard. He’s got a “coexist” tattoo, sipping on a cafe mocha, marijuana-laced latte. He’s concerned about love, not so much about truth. So, the culture we are raised in … And everyone is this way, right? Our culture puts intended and unintended pressure on us to create a God in a certain image, and it’s important that we’re aware of that.

And then finally, our enemy’s deception. This covers them all. He will work through the way we were raised, our personalities, our selective reading of Scripture, our culture, and he is a father of lies. From the beginning he tried to “cartoonize” (Is that a word?), cartoonize God’s word. Did God really say that? That’s ridiculous. We create a caricature of who God is.

But see, the real Jesus is not a product of our upbringing or our personality or our culture. He is transcultural and will not fit our caricatures. And you see this everywhere. Let me just show you a couple examples before we jump into Revelation 19. John 1:14,

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory.”

What is glory? Glory is the splendor of all God is. It’s not just one aspect, but it’s every angle of the diamond. It’s all God is, the splendor or radiance. We have seen the radiance of his glory.

“The glory as of the only Son from the Father, [and notice his glory is] full of [what?] grace and [full of] truth.”

Not just one or the other, but both. John 3:16,

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God, did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

It’s very clear. Why did God send Jesus in the incarnation? Why did he come? Not to condemn, he came out of love. But don’t stop reading there. Verse 18,

“Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil.”

So, do you see right in this passage, and it’s the most well-known passage about the love of God through Christ, and yet, right in the midst of that, there is a warning. You reject his love at your own peril. Do not. This passage, and many like it, smashes caricatures. We see here an unimaginable love and an absolute justice. And in the passage we’re about to look at in Revelation 19, you see both. Notice how last week in verses 6-10 we saw the beauty and love of a wedding. But then look at the very next passage, verses 11-21, the one we look at today, you see the horrors and justice of a war. You move from the marriage supper to, a few verses later, a supper of war and carnage. E. P. Peterson has rightly said,

“Salvation is the intimacies and the festivities of marriage; salvation is aggressive battle and the defeat of evil. Salvation is neither of these by itself. It is the two energies, the embrace of love and the assault on evil, in polar tension, each defined by the other, each feeding into the other.”

We need to let that fall on us, because for some of us, we would rather never think of this horrible assault on evil that Jesus Christ will bring. And others of us are uncomfortable with the embrace of love. Which one is Jesus? He is full of grace and full of truth. We’re not picky. And our prayer tonight, (and we’ve been begging God to do this in all of our hearts) is that we would see a vision of Jesus so clear, so powerful. And we would say, “Jesus, I want you. I need you. No matter how uncomfortable it makes me feel, no matter how many unanswered questions I still have, I need you as you are, not as I want to conform you to be.” We need a fresh vision from God by his Spirit so that we see Jesus for who he really is, not a little puppet that we create that fits.

Last week we looked at the wedding feast. Today, we will look at the war on justice in Revelation 19:11-21. And the way we’re going to look at this, and the reason we’re going to do this is because this is what the text does. The text does not give us a lot of details about the battle, this assault on evil. You’re going to notice very few. What the text gives us is a lot of details on the King of kings and the Lord of lords, who’s executing this battle. So, we want to see five things about Jesus that give us this full, rich, powerful, overwhelming, life-transforming vision of Jesus. Look at verse 11 of Revelation 19.

“Then I saw heaven opened.”

Heaven opened. This is the same heaven being opened as Matthew 3:16 when Jesus was baptized. He came in weakness. He identified with us to the point of being baptized. And the heavens opened, and the Father said,

“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

And now the heavens opened at the end of time and Jesus, the same Jesus that came in weakness to identify with us, to ultimately pay for our sin to communicate the love of God for us, that if rejected, the same Jesus will come when the heavens open as a warrior. Notice, he comes on a white horse, not a donkey, like he came before. And the one sitting on it is not like the Greenville Jesus or the Portland Jesus. He is the Jesus Jesus. Let’s see five things about him.

Number 1, he makes war on all that is wrong. Jesus makes war. Verse 11,

“The one sitting on it, [that white horse at the end of the verse] … makes war.”

Jesus makes war. Does your view of Jesus include this? See, if we read the Bible selectively, we will not see this. We will skip passages like we’re looking at tonight. We will focus in on passages like in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus said in Matthew 5:43,

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

We just saw a vision of that, an example of that, with the pastors in India. This guy is throwing dung water on them, and they’re just blessing him, walking away, not responding, not counter-attacking, because Jesus called us to live this way, to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute you.

But it’s interesting that in the same passage he said that, a few verses earlier, Matthew 5:29, he warned that the unrepentant adulterer is in danger (and these are his words) of being thrown into hell. The same Jesus that said these words in Matthew 7:13 warned us that the size of the gate that leads to destruction is what size? Wide. The same Jesus in Matthew 7:21 warned us that not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom. The same Jesus who said love your enemies; this is the posture of God toward your enemies. He is shining his sun on them. He’s pouring out his rain. He’s giving and giving and giving to the people who curse his name. This is the time of grace; you love in that same way. But know that one day Jesus will make everything right. And the reason those pastors can respond with kindness is they know one day Jesus will make everything right. He makes war.

Verse 13 describes him as,

“He is clothed in a robe dipped in blood.”

That does not seem like it’s his sacrificial blood. It seems like it’s the blood of his enemy, because this seems to be a quotation from Isaiah 63:2-3.

“And the name by which he is called is The Word of God.”

Jesus, the Word of God, he is the fulfillment of every prophetic promise. All those warnings all throughout the Old Testament, all throughout the New Testament that at times seem like they’re going unfulfilled, will all culminate, climax, find their fulfillment in Jesus Christ. He is the Word of God. And he’s not alone. Verse 14,

“And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, were following him on white horses.”

Jesus makes war on all that is wrong. Secondly, Jesus fights for the right reasons. This is where many of us get confused because even the idea of making war or fighting, we have no category for someone described in verse 11.

“The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war.”

This is the ultimate just war. He is called Faithful and True. We have seen this before. Revelation 15:3, “Just and true are your ways.” 16:7, “True and just are your judgments!” 19:2, “For his judgments are true and just.” Here he is called Faithful and True because his justice is never reactionary, arbitrary, capricious. It’s never volatile or erratic. He’s not like these tyrants that are trying to find an excuse to go to war. He’s not even like a good democratic leader who goes to war but just doesn’t have precise intelligence. He has perfect intelligence, a perfect understanding of why, an absolute righteousness in his execution.

Number 3, Jesus sees everyone and everything accurately and fully, everyone and everything accurately and fully. Verse 12 tells us “His eyes are like a flame of fire.” And skip down to verse 18, “and he calls [this angel calls] the birds for his supper of flesh.” Why the birds? Seems like a horror movie. Birds are a symbol of uncleanness and they contrast, this “supper of flesh” contrasts the marriage supper of the Lamb. We’ve moved from a wedding feast to a war feast. Verse 18, they are to “eat the flesh of…” And now there’s this extensive list. Why? Kings, captains, mighty men, horses, riders, all men, free, slaves, small, great. Why all these listed? Because they illustrate the range of his all-consuming vision. His flame of fire eyes burned through all our facades — all our makeup, all our masks, our resumes, our status symbols, the images we portray. All of that is wiped out. All of these are laid low, exposed, known fully, judged righteously by Jesus. Everything that differentiates us, whether you have money to lawyer up or you simply curl up, his vision is perfect. He sees us as no one else can. He knows we are victims, but he also knows we are villains. And his bunker-bursting vision burns away all of our justifications.

All through the gospels, we get glimpses of this when Jesus (like in John 2) knew the people who believed in him and who was just playing a game. John 6, the same thing. He knew what was in them. Have you ever had a friend who really knows you? When you get with that friend, they can almost finish your sentence. They can ask just the right question to get at what’s bothering you. They know when you’re faking it. Get that feeling, multiply it by infinity. Imagine someone who knows your every motive better than you know. Knows parts of you and why you do what you do and what you really love and what you fear more than you could even articulate. In some ways, that’s kind of creepy. If this person is not trustworthy that is scary. But what if all that omniscience, that flame-of-fire vision that burns away everything we try to put up in our defense, right now is manifested in nothing but love. His love is being poured out on us. He’s given us the Spirit of truth who sees right through the fake. Why would we not want to respond to him and say, “Yes, Lord. Why am I hiding? Why am I covering up? Why am I running?” But remember that same flame of fire vision that is burning down on us in nothing but love right now will one day, if rejected, be an all-consuming, exposing vision of judgment. Come to him. Say yes to him.

Number 4, Jesus defeats his enemies with a word. Look at verse 15.

“From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations.”

If you look below at verse 19,

“And I saw the beast and the kings of the earth with their armies gathered to make war against him.”

Jesus is making war because evil is at war. Verse 20.

“And the beast was captured … with the false prophet [skip down] … thrown alive into the lake of fire that burns with sulfur. [Verse 21] And the rest were slain by the sword that came from the mouth of him who was sitting on the horse, and all the birds were gorged with their flesh.”

This is breathtaking. Jesus, the One who created all things with a word can uncreate with a word. Notice, there’s no battle going on here, is there? This is the ultimate battleless battle. The battle begins in verse 19, and then it’s over in verse 20. This is like “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” 5 minute version, all the battle scenes gone. There may be an actual battle. There are some passages that communicate that. But what’s communicated here is that when wrong rises up, when evil rises up against Jesus Christ and his time of compassion, patience, waiting is over, with a breath his enemies are gone. With a word, the battle’s over. There’s no contest here. This isn’t like two dueling powers and we’re wondering, “I don’t know who’s going to win.” This is Jesus described in 2 Thessalonians 2:8,

“And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will kill with the breath of his mouth and bring to nothing by the appearance of his coming.”

Whatever you think of Jesus. If he’s just a man. He’s just a man … But you can’t think of him as just a good teacher or a nice guy and still good. He has a power that none of us can imagine. It makes nuclear weaponry seem small and weak. A word. He defeats his enemies with a word.

Number 5, Jesus will rule over everyone who thought they were in charge. Jesus will rule over everyone who thought they were in charge. Verse 12, “on his head are many diadems.” Diadems are crowns. Throughout Revelation, the diadem has been mentioned. For example, the dragon in 12:3 had seven diadems, or the beast in 13:1 had ten diadems. But now Jesus is described as having many diadems, communicating that while their reign was limited, his is unlimited. Verse 12,

“He has a name written that no one knows but himself.”

Now, to name someone in the Bible is an act of authoritative insight. I’m telling you, this is who you are if I’m naming you, biblically speaking. So, the fact that he has a name that no one knows but himself doesn’t mean he’s shy and won’t wear a name tag, because there are names that are given here of Jesus. But the point is, as Beale points out, the absolute authority of Jesus extends to the

“experiential access [we have] to a true understanding of his character.”

In other words, what does that mean? If we’re going to know him accurately, he is going to tell us we are not going to figure it out. It’s not about, “If I’m going to have a savior who’s going to save me, I’ll tell you what he’s going to be like.” This decimates that. “Oh, yeah, you can worship that kind of savior, but I’m going to create a different savior.” No, that may be a figment of your imagination, but it’s not THE Savior, THE Lord. “He has a name written that no one knows but himself.” In other words, you’re not going to put him in your little cultural box. He reveals his identity. Verse 15,

“From his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations, and he will rule them with a rod of iron. He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty. [So, Jesus is actually manifesting the wrath of God.] On his robe and on his thigh [The Portland people are right. He does have a tattoo.] he has a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.”

We may not know everything about him, but we know this much. Everyone who thinks they’re in charge is under the authority of THE King and THE Lord. He is over everyone who thought they had no one over them. And that includes us when we think we can run our own little kingdoms as mini kings and queens.

Joy Davidman learned this. She is best known as the wife of C.S. Lewis, the woman who brought so much joy to the Oxford professor and so much pain when she died of cancer. But as a young woman, she was a very different person. She was a Jewish American poet, a child prodigy. Just to give a couple quick examples. She scored over 150 on an IQ test. She was brilliant. She could just glance at music like Chopin. A score music — glance at it, memorize it, go play it, never look at it again. She finished her master’s from Columbia University at age 20. She became a communist, married a fellow writer named Bill. But Bill was a workaholic and alcoholic, repeatedly unfaithful. At the time Joy would have described herself as an atheist. She wrote this:

“Of course, I thought atheism was true, but I hadn’t given it quite enough attention to develop proof of it. Someday, when the children were older, I’d work it out.”

One day she got a call from Bill. Bill said he was having a nervous breakdown and then just hung up. Joy was frantic. She called him back. She called a bunch of other numbers. She called the police. She called everybody she could think of to call to try to find out if he was okay. And eventually she had to come to the place where she realized she could do nothing. He may end up coming home, he may end up dead. So, she put the kids to bed, and she waited. And as she waited in the silence something happened. She writes this.

“For the first time in my life, I felt helpless; for the first time, my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, ‘the master of my fate’ and ‘the captain of my soul.’ All my defenses — all the walls of arrogance and cocksuredness and self-love behind which I had hid from God — went down momentarily — and God came in … There was a Person with me in that room, directly present to my consciousness — a Person so real that all my previous life was by comparison a mere shadow play. And I myself was more alive than I had ever been; it was like waking from sleep.”

She goes on to describe Jesus as the Redeemer who made himself known. Now notice what happened in that experience of Joy’s. And all of our experiences of coming to know Christ are different emotionally, and experientially we will describe them differently. But there is a commonality and that is, when we come face to face with Jesus, we go down. Notice she described herself as being humbled, exposed, no longer in control, don’t have all the answers, can’t figure it all out. There is this humility of hope. “God, what have I done? What have I become? Who am I? I need you!” There is that down. But then there is that up that is far higher than the down could ever be! She described it as coming alive, looking at everything as a shadow play in the past, coming to this new life. The Bible would describe it as the newness of life. And again, all of our experiences will be different. But we will, like Christ, go down to go up.

But if we refuse to see Jesus as he is — the lover of our souls, but the Lord of heaven and earth. If we refuse to humble ourselves, we won’t go up, we will go down and never up. Revelation 19 is describing, in one sense, a terrible vision of who Jesus is here. We don’t take it in isolation. We take it in the whole Bible as the vision of Jesus. We see his love on the cross. We see his holiness and justice. And we say, “Jesus, I don’t want the caricature I draw of you. I want you, in all your justice and all your compassion. And I know that if I stand before you in my own reasoning, in my own religious attainments, then I will be consumed. Your flame of fire vision will expose me. But I come to you as you are. And I humble my heart like Joy did. And I receive you, not the caricature I have of you, but you, with all my questions, all my doubts, all my failures. I come to you.” And Jesus does take us down, but he takes us up. Will you pray with me?

Jesus, we need you. We don’t need more of what our own reasoning draws you or imagines you to be. We need you. So, Father, even as we continue to cry out to you now in prayer and praise, as we cry out in song, may these be prayers. May there be hundreds of prayers saying Jesus, maybe for many for the very first time, I need you. I trust you. I believe in you. Melt away the puny vision of you and give us a big vision of who you are. Pour out by your Spirit faith on us so that we will trust who you say you are. You are the glory of the Father. You are full of grace, full of truth. We need you. And you have washed away all our sin on your cross. You have paid for it so that we won’t, in the future, be under your judgment or now. There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in you. May no one leave tonight outside of you, Jesus, please. May we all leave lighter because we’ve met the real Jesus and you’ve washed away our sin, our bitterness, our resentment, our anger, our fear. Oh, Jesus, do your work tonight. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.