A chapter of lament and rejoicing for the end of Babylon. It comes from two perspectives:
The merchants, the systems of commerce that fed and thrived on the city, lament because no one will buy their goods. Their ships are full of gold, cloth, jewels and “human beings sold as slaves” with nowhere to sail to, wasted. (I appreciated the distaste and compassion that came off that description of the human cargo.)
The second perspective – angels and God’s faithful, rejoicing that justice has come. Babylon is getting what it gave, destruction and ruination. Finally justice has come for the oppressed.
From both angles, the chapter is quite expansive and poetic about just how gone Bablyon is (“The fruit you longed for is gone from you. All your luxury and splendor have vanished, never to be recovered”)
Of course, Babylon was a code, because it was politically dangerous having letters lying around describing Rome as a whore riding on Satan’s back that would be destroyed by the christian God. But Babylon was not only a code for Rome, it’s history was a concrete reminder of just how gone superpower cities can be. By the time of the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, Babylon was indeed nothing. And just the same, the power of the imperial Roman empire would come to an end and be nothing.
The emotional power of this chapter is not just that Rome, or any other bully power, is bad. There is as much lament here by those who needed it to survive, who mourn its passing, as there is rejoicing by those it oppressed. The emotional core is that it won’t last.
You want to be on the Lord’s side.
Heading into Easter, it’s been a long week. I’ve been unwell but I’ve taken extra shifts to compensate for Kelly’s lost earnings. The shifts, the endless driving, felt interminable. And I have two over the Easter weekend too (but how can I turn down public holiday loadings?) No time to think, I’m looking forward to the (hopefully) relative calm of working 3 days a week for the church for the next 9 weeks.
But I do feel a bit of juice coming back into my faith finally. I’ve stuck with the right choice. This world’s tempting sounds and dazzling sights will not last.
Mutually assured destruction of evil. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
This chapter features a distracting vision: the super luxurious and fancy Whore of Babylon riding on the back of the great satanic beast of corrupt political and military power. The vision comes after the woes of judgement – we just had 7 bowls of wrath poured out in the last chapter – and it precedes a final battle at Armageddon.
Wikipedia summarises how numerous people have gone crazy trying to figure out who or what the whore of Babylon is. It’s a catchy phrase, it rolls off the tongue of religious maniacs in many a tv show and movie.
Believers particularly love to say it’s churches other than theirs. Protestant reformers tended to say it was the Catholic church. Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Seventh Day Adventist etc. all seem to have claimed that it was the rest of the so-called Christians.
It’s scriptural! …W.O.B. wearing a papal tiara, from Luther’s Bible
But why would John of Patmos fire off a letter to encourage Christians struggling with the first waves of Roman anti-Christian persecution that talked about “evil” churches that wouldn’t even exist until 100s of years into the future? It’s hardly a pressing issue for his beleaguered audience.
Makes sense that he’s talking about Rome, the latest (at time of writing) of various evil empires that shape the biblical narrative and prophesy. And sure, the message probably applies equally to numerous evil empires that will come after Rome…
Evil empires fall. Evil eats itself.
It’s so easy to get distracted by the setup and miss the denouement of this chapter. The evil powers of this age may seem to align with a general victorious movement of evil, but it’s only temporarily so. They fall victim to the destroyer. Satan would throw everyone under the bus eventually if he could.
It would be nice, as my Bible blog crawls to an end, to have a narrative arc of value-add I could point to from the process. So I could say something like “I read the whole Bible, and it did me a power of good, I was a mess, there were tough lessons along the way, and I’ve come out the other side in a better place”
I’m not going to get it. Everything seems as much if not more of a mess. Kelly’s had to quit her job because of bullying, I’ve lost my professional status and career and am surviving on shift work, I’ve just had a couple of weeks of difficult ructions in church, my daughter is not speaking to me. Inflation is rampant, pandemic, war, natural disasters. Evil seems to go from bad to worse and I feel a bit like Habukuk, who pointed out to God the evils all around him, only to be told “never fear I’m raising up the Babylonians to come and destroy it all for you”.
Revelation is a tough read for a tough life. Clinging to hope as all hell breaks loose. I don’t feel as wounded or miserable as the last paragraph sounds. I’m actually quite calm and satisfied this morning, as I dose up on flu pills to make it through 7 hours of shifts I can’t afford to cancel. But I was discussing with Kelly this sense that as you get older, there seem to be more bad people winning a lot more than you were aware of when you were young.
The fancy ruling power in this chapter, dripping with jewels, holding a golden cup filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries, surrounded by acolytes drunk on her wine. It’s the image of this loss of innocence. This perception that evil is everywhere.
I listened to a podcast to cheer me up, about one of the first abolitionists. Strategic error, because the guy responded to the most horrific sadism against slaves, some of the darkest evil that men do.
But he prayed for this world, he didn’t just accept it. He did what he could and he had influence. And the evil of slavery did largely eat itself. One person’s decency inspired another and another and another.
Don’t be on the side of evil, don’t be daunted by evil. Pray, trust and wait for it to pass, speak and act prophetically against it.
This letter is written to Christians probably suffering the second persecution by Roman emperors. Nero was first, but this was probably written during the rule of Domitian a few decades later.
The first readers would have had little doubt that the beast from the sea that emerges here was a vision of one of those emperors. Indeed the beast is depicted as having recovered from a mortal wound, which could have implied a continuity of both emperors.
The beast is identified as doing the work of the dragon from the last chapter, Satan. And there is a third monster, the beast of the earth. Together they make a kind of unholy Trinity: anti-God, anti-Christ and anti-Holy Spirit.
Daniel spoke of a series of beasts, which equate to the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires. The animals – bear, leopard and lion turn up there and here, so it’s an unmistakable cross reference. Daniel’s prophesy was literally coming true all around the original audience of this letter.
In the vision, everyone is forced to worship the Empire/Emperor as a god, and wear prayers and signs of worship on forehead and arms, as the Jews did for Jehovah. This blasphemy is the notorious number of the beast, 666.
It possibly spells emperor Nero’s name. But also the drama of Revelation hangs off 3 “woes”: 3 seven-stage narratives of judgement that reach their worst at the sixth stage: 6, 6 and 6. If it’s the number of imperfection, it’s a hopeful number. As bad as it will get before it gets better.
This beast can kill though. It also controls commerce. It’s totalitarian. It will destroy you if you don’t participate.
Would that be bad enough? What would it take for my faith to crumble?
The only template of response the Christians have is the slain lamb.
I watched the Bible project summary of revelation again today. How good it is! They keep emphasising that all we have in response to these powerful evils is an attitude of humble sacrifice.
As it says here in verse 10: “This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of God’s people.”
First mine then Kelly’s faith in the Salvos has crumbled. She finally intends to leave her job as a sales assistant at the end of this month.
She has been destroyed partly for not participating in the culture of theft, putting it bluntly. She’s been a true believer in recycling, in using her considerable talent to get the very best return for the Salvos on all the donations given by people in good faith… respecting that position of trust. She’s been a loved community figure, who local people confide in and return to with affection.
For that she’s been bullied and attacked mercilessly. Her co workers have demanded she be fired and she’s been undermined, suffered petty mistreatment, unfairly loaded with all the hard work, mocked for being stressed, treated with appalling sexism and ageism. By the staff! It’s been a horror show.
And her faith has crumbled.
Her Christian faith will survive I think, battered and knocked around. But salvos has become a beast.
And MY faith? Still processing that.
I had a bad experience with salvos too, though I still love what they represent. But why do they keep breaking our hearts?
I put my bad experience down to a weird and specific personality clash. But maybe they dance too close to the beast. Can you partner with the beast? Can you and the beast live-and-let-live? The stores rely heavily on the managers having a sense of mission, and not being ethically challenged. It’s pivotal. Without that (and it’s been notably absent) everything falls apart.
I really don’t think this chapter is mostly about predicting the advent of a specific apocalyptic beast. It’s encouraging a group of Christians to hold firm, humbly, against their beast and remember that God is in control.
I’m starting this post without having read the passage, because I want to remember the six mile creek camping ground. Just woken up on the third morning of our little holiday.
We’re car camping, We’re dodging COVID, which in January 2022, at the height of the Omicron variant, is everywhere.
Also being chased by an unseasonable amount of rain. We’ve driven through a couple of absolutely blinding storms each day. Though there have been enough gaps in the rain that we’ve still managed to have a pretty good time.
Car no longer overheats! So good. We drove down the South coast of NSW to Tuross heads, a return to the first place we ever went car camping. Then to Merimbula, a wonderful beach town with lots of tacky, but abundantly so much more natural beauty that the tackiness is more quaint than offensive.
We’re heading inland today to visit friends who own an old church near Gundagai. We’ve camped in a free bush site about an hour inland from Merimbula.
The mountain road was spectacularly beautiful, but became wetter as it climbed, foggy, surrounded by think forest and the surface went from bitumen to dirt to, at a few points, slippery wet mud. I kept apologising to our valiant car for it not being a four wheel drive. Now we’re ridiculously dependant on its reliability. Road surface is a detail Google maps doesn’t seem to regards as relevant. It was a real adventure.
So we’re next to a creek, in the rain, no internet, middle of friggin nowhere. We debated, quite tensely, whether to move onto the next town, but given the road, that was an even bigger unknown. We had beer, wine and prosecco. Water? Not so much… I’d actually thrown in a tarpaulin, but no rope! Consummate campers!
We made enough of a shelter off the side of the car to light our stove and boil some water. After a good tea, and a downloaded Netflix to chill, the feeling of bedding down in dry clothes was glorious.
Today we battle an unknown amount more winding dirt mountain road towards Brungle, the tiny town our friends fixed upon.
Tuross HeadsMerimbulaSix mile creek
Oh no, woke up and I left the key in the ignition overnight. Last thing I did was adjust the windows to let in some air, forgot to take keys out. Two other campers here at least. Either flat battery, or worse burnt out ignition. So stupid! I don’t have jump leads, neither do the others but one will drive us till we get phone reception and can call NRMA. So cross with myself!!!!
My gosh, what a day! Having got the car started again, we left six mile creek for Bombala. Hit a kangaroo just out of town!!!
I had to put it out of its misery, grisly! And Kelly dragged it off the road by its tail. The car seemed quite drivable, but the radiator was cracked and leaking coolant. Fortunately we found out before it overheated. Don’t want to blow that beautiful new engine I just got put in!
Long story short, the NRMA guy at Bombala lent us his ute to drive to Cooma, an hour or so away, the nearest depot for hire cars. NRMA organised a motel and a hire car to get us back to Sydney. Our car will be fixed by insurance and delivered back to us. We are dazed, exhausted, but glad at least to have a shower!
We both lost it when we hit the kangaroo, though both a bit giggly too at the shock of the gore of the poor thing. I lost it majorly in the Cosmo Cafe in Bombala, where we went for comfort after learning the car could not go on. They didn’t want us, infected Sydneysiders. The owners were pecking away at us the whole time.
I got a call from NRMA explaining what we had to do next. It would only work on the dodgy connection if I stood up and moved to the front of the cafe. The chef/owner would not let me walk around, interrupting to demand I sit at my table. I said “please, it’s the NRMA, and there’s no reception at my table”. He wouldn’t stop hectoring me. I became overwhelmed. I threw my phone down in disgust and left and even yelled, for the whole cafe to hear “how about some of that old fashioned country service you promise on the window!!!”. Wife and phone still in the cafe, I had to return, humiliatingly, and apologise to everyone in sight.
So Colossians.
It’s a church Paul didn’t found, and may not even have been to.
The flow of the first chapter springs off what Paul prays for them:
Thanking God for the news of the faith and love with which they received the gospel, part of a worldwide transformation.
Continuing to ask God to bring them to a mature understanding and worthy life of patience and endurance
Thanking God for their being part of his son’s Kingdom of light
Paul expands on describing Christ’s significance. Jesus was there at creation, at the start. He’s here now, holding everything together, and he is the means of reconciliation with God though his death.
Paul describes his own role, a servant of the gospel, a servant of the church, particularly gentiles, with whom God has now chosen to share the mystery of salvation. Suffering as Christ did to present people fully mature in Christ.
The bit about Christ is glorious, and really helpful for understanding him:
“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”
v15-17
This holiday is being quite stressful, life is quite stressful especially until I can be earning a bit better. I needed to lose the job I had, it was too dangerous, but I’m yet to pick up enough to replace it.
Paul is giving these glimpses of how everything holds together through a loving God, at the same time talking about suffering and difficulty in life, a tension between glory and anxiety.
These are ideas, beliefs about God and Christ. They influence everything you do but it doesn’t mean that’s all you do. Paul had long days making tents. Long boring days in prison or under house arrest. The time of a believer can often largely be spent similarly to the time of a non-believer.
This is time for my relationship with Kelly, our time, and we’ve been put under stress. Our anxiety levels have been through the roof. I won’t beat myself up for trying to have a holiday. The gospel includes holidays. If it’s actually a testing, difficult time, instead of a happy, glamorous affirming time, it’s ok to mourn it. And then let’s at least have and love each other through it. I’ll pray for the love, honesty, humility, tenderness Christ modelled as the visible image of the invisible deity.
What just happened? There have been many times in the bible where the action so far has been recapped. But now these letters include Jesus, so we can piece together the story from the promise to Abraham to the resurrection of Jesus, the great narrative of salvation.
But though it’s exciting to take a step back and think about what it all means, this is not god’s view. These are still letters, written by humans, into a context. As Paul will say, the best I can understand is still dark and obscure. But love shines through the mist.
I wonder if God will be bigger than Christianity? We’re used to the idea that God is bigger than Judaism now. The letters put together the Christian faith, out of the story of the Jewish nation and Jesus’ life. But is that the end of it? Is there even newer wine coming that will burst the wine skins apart again?
I’m not leading anywhere with this particularly, it’s actual speculation.
Paul is saying how much he wants to visit the Roman church, and how it sounds like a strong one. I know that’s where he spends the last years of his life, but at the time he wrote this, he’d never been. Other missionaries than him must have carried the message of Jesus there.
Of course, the church in Rome did end up being quite influential, as it happened.
I won’t be able to finish this today. My mind is in a whirl, because I have these job offers. Yesterday, hireup, the carer agency that I first applied for, put me on the books, giving me approved access to many NDIS jobs.
I’m feeling the loss of time, the pick up in speed and the loss of discretion. I’m a bit panicky. I have no more free days this week, I think. How will I plan deadly warriors?
Welcome back to life, eh! Anyway, I’ll get back to Romans 1 tomorrow. Pray for a calm mind. Pray for my family, all sick, especially Rennie with the HSC. Pray for money management, moving from emergency to boringly hard… Strange feelings, need God help.
A pile of teaching about sheep. I think of John as the shepherd gospel, and this is the shepherd chapter. These images make you feel good, if you are a follower of Jesus.
Cumulatively, they are tender. You are all safe with Jesus, in the pen, he’s looking out for you. No one can snatch you away, ever. That’s always the killer for me.
Jesus is the gate and the shepherd. Anyone pretending to be a leader who didn’t come to you through Jesus is a thief. But as the shepherd, it is ultimately Jesus who cares most.
At times I feel independent, but when things get beyond my control, I’m very glad to be a sheep of this shepherd. Our church has a memorable window of this image, and our pastor has been known to cry under it.
During the chapter, Jesus attends another festival, of rededication of the temple. Remembering a period after the Greeks defiled it, when it was reclaimed. Hanukkah.
Jesus accuses the Jewish leaders of being the thieves who don’t belong, because they refuse to accept him. Look at the works, he says. But some cannot.
I felt a little bit sorry for the invaders who breached the capitol in the U.S. this week, marking a no doubt historic culmination of the lies of Donald Trump. Not a good shepherd, not the right gate into power.
They were mis-led. Many are followers of Jesus who muddled up Trump and Jesus and went down a dangerous path.
Jesus is all you need to face the uncertainties of life.
It’s about scale, about the kingdoms and evil of this world having more grip, for a longer period, and with more power, than we could imagine. But also it’s point is to emphasise the larger scale of hope. That God’s presence and his plan, the now and the future, are stronger.
It’s set when things were about as bad as they could be for Israel. Daniel is a talented Israelite marked for success in Babylon, who have destroyed and pillaged Jerusalem’s temple. The assumption is that he will lose his Jewish identity and faith, as a symbol of it being vanquished in general.
So he and his other Jewish friends don’t, a model of encouragement and God’s protection. In three stories the theme recurs in the book: his refusal to eat unclean food in the palace, the fiery furnace and the lions den. God is present honouring those choices. In the fiery furnace, God walks around in human form, a striking incarnation.
There is also the battle of earthly Kings and God. Nebuchadnezzar is depicted as a gleefully impossible narcissist until the fiery furnace experience, and then a dream and it’s fulfillment of his complete madness so he became like a beast. He accepts God’s dominion and praises God.
His son sees the writing on the wall (“your days are numbered”) at a feast devoted to desecrating the artefacts plundered from the temple, but will not acknowledge God and is assassinated that night.
So there are concrete stories of God’s presence and dominion despite Israel’s low state in the book. But dreams and visions weave through too. And they are bleak as well as exalting. The hard times of evil kingdoms will last much longer than the exile, and be far worse than Babylon.
BUT God’s victory will be total, and a “son of man” will be present with us, and then prove to be God, leading the way to glorious resurrection of the dead for all God’s people to be with God of forever.
God promises to be present now and in the future and forever, as he has been in the past; despite things seeming impossible and getting dramatically worse.
This prophetic book is not at all about Israel’s sin. It has inspiring examples of people trusting in God, and of kingly pride being broken. It’s full of promises that the oppressive rule of powerful nations and men are no match for God. It’s one of the most deeply weird, in the reading, but the most optimistic of the prophets.
I’m summarising it a long time after I read it. The are no biographical notes at all, it records simply my impressions of what the book tells me about God without relating it to my life at all. It was 2016, second year of working at Fredon constructions. Good money, secure job. Boring 9-5.
2020, two redundancies, drought, fires and global pandemic since then, I’m feeling it a lot more. I liked how I summarised it in chapter 12. Daniel just wanted Jerusalem and the temple back, but has to struggle with how inadequate that dream was andhow much worse the world could be even if it came true. But also how much bigger God’s plans and love are. I clinging to that promise right now.
This quite a personal prayer, David reflecting on God while preparing for war. He not on the run, he’s a king now. But he’s still the same guy, the sum of so many complex parts.
He returns to some of his favourite themes, ideas expressed over and over in his poetry. I felt like we are getting a lot of David in this psalm.
He calls God a rock, a solid basis for his preparation to fight, and a refuge, his safe fortress.
How often has he returned to calling God his refuge? God as a safe place to escape must be his number one image.
Such a helpful thought pattern to learn… Stressful times turn you closer to God, not further away. He learned as a fugitive in his youth to hide in God as he hid in caves.
He’s still the same David inside, though he’s a brave king and warrior on the outside, he does not do bravery in his own strength.
He talks about scale and perspective. Man is so insubstantial, like a breath, a shadow. Yet God thinks of him. He paints a grand picture of God’s heavens to contrast the teensiness of man, as he’s done many times.
And this time God will be active, splitting the clouds, reaching down in lightning and power to intervene in his war and scatter the enemies. But beyond God’s help or otherwise in the current fight, he’s thinking about God’s mindblowing capacity to care for mankind at all.
Then the image of himself playing a new song to God the deliverer on the 10 stringed lyre. The warrior, happiest playing music and singing.
The song will be of abundance and blessing.
It’s a bit of a greatest hits, we’ve done psalm 40 (he set my feet on a rock), psalm 8 (oh what is man, why do you think of him?) and ended where psalm 23 does (goodness and mercy will follow me all my days…)
I feel like this psalm is a peak into king David’s head when he spends all that time in God’s presence. I’ve commented before about how in the thrilling narrative of Samuel he reacts to stress by slowing down and filling his mind with God.
The thoughtlines here have all the time and space they need to go where they want to go, though he also has the economy of a poet in the way he evokes them.
It starts and ends talking about being searched by God. I love how he reverses the tenses from what you would expect. He starts by saying God has searched him, and ends by asking God to search him. Its open ended.
He first chases that idea of being known by God into his daily activities… His going out and coming in, God is before him and behind him. He finds it mind boggling. And it is.
I mean, he’s a VIP, king David, so maybe it would make sense that God would give him special consideration, but it’s the same for me, for every soul, including the ones we haven’t the time or energy to care about ourselves. The last shall be first. Each flower of the field more glorious than Solomon, all known, each of us of infinite value.
Then the vision of God goes into scale: forget the daily movements, look beyond the village. You could zoom to the highest, furthest; be hidden in the darkest where you’d think no one or nothing could see, and God would be higher, further, and exposing the darkness like day.
Then the God who is eternal. The idea of God knowing and planning our days before he knits us together in the womb. I’m not a medical man, or indeed a philosopher, but I can appreciate that much is evoked in the phrase “fearfully and wonderfully made”.
He considers the number and value of God’s thoughts… infinite, like grains of sand, but hugely valuable.
These are the sorts of places David’s mind goes when he hears assassins are out to get him. This depth of love and certainty about God is why he can trust him so decisively.
So this is a psalm to go to in distress, when you need to pursue your own thoughtlines about the presence and control of God.
And people do, I feel like most of the lines of this psalm have turned up on posters, or on Facebook image memes!
David ends it with a capper we are used to by now… He’s not actually in a situation that lends itself to being relaxed and ruminative, he’s in a serious pickle. Hence, I guess, the dramatic shift from thinking about the delicate preciousness of God knitting us in the womb to asking God to side with him in the coming fight and slay his enemies.
That’s why the fiddling with tense: you have searched me God, please search me! Expose and calm my anxious thoughts, purify my motives to align with your character.
We go forward into the mess, as messy people with God’s spirit: in front and behind, highest, farthest, deepest, forever.
The Israelites define themselves by what they have survived here, more than what they have achieved. It’s bonding and powerful.
From slavery, to wandering, to splitting up and then losing the promised land, and getting it back again, they survived. And as world history rolled on, they continued to survive a lot.
It is very short, and great for chanting. “You oppressed me, you oppressed me, but I won!” Is the opening cadence.
The rest is a vivid harvest metaphor. The Israelites compare the whips of slavery to ploughing… Their oppressors ploughed their backs with deep furrows, but God cut the whipping cords and released them.
Having seen many empires pass, and survived, they can compare the oppressors to useless grass grown in the wrong place, on a roof, that will wither and be useless.
It ends with a happy picture of a proper harvest day, which is blessed work. Passers by would shout God’s blessings on the work back and forth with the reapers.
Those who ploughed the Israelites backs with whips, only to find their harvest withered, will never know that blessing.
It has that confidence, arrogance even, of faith that feels sorry for those who may seem to be the winners in life, but challenge God.
I’m feeling a little overwhelmed this week so, though I can’t claim anyone is ploughing my back, I can use a booster shot of resilience. A cheery chant to get me through.
inheriting the earth 