0310339162 (CNTY) by Rachel Held Evans

Author:Rachel Held Evans
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2014-02-01T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

John the Revelator

Sometimes I think that John the Revelator might have been a crazy old man whose creative writing assignment for the Patmos Learning Annex accidentally made it into the Bible. There’s a lot of strange stuff in the book of Revelation, stuff about dragons and “creatures full of eyes” and whores of Babylon and Middle Earth – style battles — the stuff people like to use to sell books about the end of the world and to launch websites about how Barack Obama is the Antichrist.

While I suspect that much of John’s letter served as a coded allusion to the church’s tumultuous relationship with the Roman Empire during the reign of Domitian, there’s one apocryphal vision that I really hope he got right.

I bumped into it late one night after Dan had gone to sleep and I’d been awake for hours, worrying about what had happened to the hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children who perished in the Boxing Day tsunami. I couldn’t force from my mind the haunting images of beautiful brown-skinned widows crying in agony as they clung to framed photos of their husbands and children, or the video footage of village after village lying in ruins from the unstoppable floods. Why would God allow something like that to happen in a part of the world where people had such limited access to Christianity? Didn’t he promise never to flood the earth again? Had the population of hell just swelled to include the poor fishermen whose boats had overturned, the pregnant women who couldn’t run fast enough to reach higher ground, the elderly who couldn’t swim?

So, as I often do when I need to read but don’t want to wake Dan, I grabbed my Bible from the nightstand, stumbled in the dark toward the bathroom, turned on the light, and sat on the toilet to await God’s illumination of the text.

Normally, I wouldn’t choose the book of Revelation as 2:00 a.m. reading material, but all night long I’d been chasing the broken pieces of a prophecy around in my head — something about tribes and tongues and nations, verses I knew but couldn’t quite remember, like a poem with missing syllables or a song with forgotten words. After scanning John’s messages to the churches at Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea, I finally found what I was looking for in Revelation 7, where the author describes a world without a cosmic lottery, a kingdom in which the suffering are not forgotten. Writes John:

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