Scary Stories in Scripture: Revelation Week 3

The Book of Revelation is often misunderstood as a frightening prediction about the end times, but its true message is one of hope and redemption. Many people abandon reading it halfway through, missing the beautiful conclusion where good triumphs over evil. After describing battles and judgment, Revelation reveals God creating a new heaven and earth where He dwells permanently with His people. In this renewed creation, there is no more death, pain, or tears—God Himself wipes them all away. The scary story transforms into the ultimate story of hope, reminding us that no matter what difficulties we face today, we already know how God's story ends: the Lamb wins.

Transcript

Okay, Church. This morning we're going to continue on our discovery of the Book of Revelation by opening up to the Book of Revelation, chapter 19. And we're going to start in verses 11 through 21. I invite you every week if you have an opportunity to bring your Bibles. I've got some in the extra.

Some extras in the back that our youth use on Wednesday nights. If you'd like to grab one and, I don't know, underline something, whatever. If you want to read it and feel it tangibly, you're more than welcome to grab one of those. But if you don't have your Bible, the Scripture is going to be on the screen for us today. Here is the word of the Lord from the Book of revelation.

Verse 11 says, I saw heaven standing open, and there before me was a white horse whose rider is called faithful and true. With justice he judges and wages war. His eyes are like blazing fire and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but himself. He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God.

The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. Coming out of his mouth is a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule them. With an iron scepter he treads the wine press of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. On his robe and on his thigh.

He has this name written, king of kings and Lord of Lords. And I saw an angel standing in the sun who cried out in a loud voice to all the birds flying in midair. Come gathered together for the great supper of God, so that you may eat the flesh of kings, generals and the mighty of horses and their riders, and the flesh of all people, free and slave, great and small. Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to wage war against the rider on the horse and his army. But the beast was captured, and with it the false prophet who had performed the signs on its behalf.

With these signs, he had deluded those who had received the mark of the beast and worshiped. Worshiped its image. The two of them were thrown alive into the fiery lake of burning sulfur. The rest were killed with the sword and coming out of his mouth of the rider on the horse. And all the birds gorge themselves on their flesh.

This is the word of the Lord for the people of God. Okay. All right.

The reason, friends, that we are going through the book of Revelation because there's always so much in there that I think that oftentimes gets misinterpreted. Oftentimes it's misapplied. Oftentimes people think it's some sort of coded message and how they could decipher it and they can predict when God is coming back. Hallelujah. That's not what the book of Revelation is meant for.

I've talked about it with Erica as we're kind of walking through these sermon series, sermons together. You know, we have this feeling around Advent, right? Advent is that season that leads us up to the birth of Jesus. This feeling of it happened once, right? Christ came to Earth as an infant born in a manger in Bethlehem.

And then we have this understanding that Christ is going to come again. So we have this sense of a mysterious in between in which we live. And I kind of view this particular book as this triumvirate of Advent. So there's this feeling of it happened when John was writing, he wrote a lot of what he was talking about to the church of the first century, the church that was being persecuted and harmed and fought against. And there's also this sense that eventually Christ is coming again like this, this beautiful, mysterious have happened will happen.

But I think that there's also this third sense about the book of Revelation that talks about how in every age there's this sense and this feeling that evil has arisen and God is going to fight against it, right? Like every. We've all talked about it, how there's always been the Antichrist, whoever this is. It's been Pope John Paul, it's been Oprah Winfrey, it's been Barack Obama. I mean, we have ascribed this sense of fear about the end times to somebody in political power in every single age.

So it's kind of this triplet, right? Of this same kind of mysterious adventy feel.

I want to tell you something I learned as a child. And many of you might already know this, I'm not for sure, but if you watch a scary movie with your eyes closed or like this, it's a lot less scary. Did you know that you see just enough of the film to kind of know what's generally happening, but you don't see enough that gets you into the state of panic, right? I have to tell you the first scary story or, sorry, the first scary movie I've ever seen that I can remember, right? So as a young person, my parents, or let me just say this, I don't think it was my dad.

As a matter of fact, I bet he didn't know. But My mom took my sister and all of my siblings. So there were the six of us together in the Morgan family conversion van. And we went to the Admiral Twin Drive in when I was 8 years old in 1989 to see Friday the 13th Part 8, Jason Takes Manhattan, right? Everybody's favorite, right?

I remember, you know, getting out of the van as we're setting up camp, right before the sun goes down, before the movie starts up. You get the sleeping bags rolled out, you got the lawn chairs out. You got your cooler with the inevitable one can of coke that all six of you have to share. Anybody remember that?

I think that's part of why I don't share drinks with anybody. My wife, my children. I just don't do it now. But I remember very little about the movie because I spent most of the movie with my eyes clenched tightly. What I do remember about the movie is that it ends with the series bad guy Jason Voorhees ending up being conquered.

Right? Evil is destroyed until the next one. But there's always this kind of moment where you get the feeling that good triumphs over evil.

Did you know that there are a lot of people who go to scary movies? And then at some point in the midst of the scary movie, they will get up and they will walk right out of those scary movies. They might get about halfway through the movie before they just decide, you know what? This movie is awful, and I can't do this anymore. And they'll just.

They'll leave. I cannot imagine being in the midst of a scary movie and not seeing its resolution at the end, right? If you get up and leave in the midst of the scary movie, you are leaving in the midst of something that leaves you hanging. And I want to say this because I feel that sometimes people who begin to read through the Book of Revelation start out with good intentions about how they want to learn about what the plan of God is and how the end is to come. But often they never make it all the way through the Book of Revelation because it gets too confusing or gets too hard to understand.

And so they leave in the midst of Revelation, and they never see the goodness that happens at the end. For many people, the Book of Revelation is a book of scary stories. And if we don't finish it, we never get the resolution that God is planning to bring. How many times have you read through the Book of Revelation? Anybody read through it one time?

Anybody read through it two or more times? Anybody stopped halfway through because they just didn't get it? Okay, Right. And that's okay.

But, friends, I don't want us to be people who give up trying to understand what the word of God is for us in the Book of Revelation because it offers us hope that we have to see.

I don't know how you guys feel about it, but out of all the movies based on the Book of Revelation and the Left behind series of books, I don't know that I've ever watched any of those movies to the end. I think my recollection of the Left behind series is that Kirk Cameron at one point got into a plane, and then at some point, oh, what's his name? Nicholas Cage kind of picked up where he left off. These are movies that were based on books that were based on Revelation that I think kind of inhabits our understanding of what the end of time looks like. And none of it is good.

Just the acting is awful in itself. But none of them ever made it to the end of the Book of Revelation. When you reach chapter 21, it's like walking out of a horror movie and knowing that good conquers evil. If you don't do that, you miss the part where light breaks in.

If you don't finish the story, you miss the place where a scary story becomes a story of hope. So over the last few weeks in our sermon series, we've talked about the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. We've talked about the Antichrist, the false prophet, the dragon that ancient serpent called the devil. John's vision here in Revelation gives us monsters and chaos and cosmic warfare. But then eventually, everything begins to shift.

The scene begins to change what was war and pain begins to give way to peace and hope, wholeness. It's that idea of God's shalom. As we read earlier this morning in the Book of revelation, chapter 19, there's a new horse, right? It's not one of the four horse horsemen of the Apocalypse. It's a new horse.

And that new horse has a new rider. This white horse appears, and Scripture says that his name is faithful. Revelation 19:16 goes on to say, on his robe and on his thigh, he has the name written, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. There should be no doubt at all who this scripture is trying to point us to. It's the Lamb of God.

It's Jesus Christ. And I want to take a second to talk about a few of the differences between the Lamb and the Antichrist that we talked about a couple weeks ago. If you remember just a couple weeks ago, when we started talking about the beast of the sea, also called the Antichrist, we talked about his seven heads and his ten horns. On each horn was a crown, if you Remember. Revelation chapter 13 tells us that the Antichrist figure has on each of its head, each of its heads, a blasphemous name.

Something opposite of faithful and true. King of Kings, Lord of Lords. So let's talk about robes here. His name, the name of the writer, is written on the robe. In ancient times, robes often bore insignia, maybe an embroidered crest that identified the wearer's rank or their name, or the fact that they are royalty.

Having the name King of Kings and Lord of Lords written on this robe verifies who the Lamb is. There should be no mistaking that it's Jesus because his robe is marked with royalty. Likewise, having his name written out on his thigh was important too. Think about it this way. If you are walking up to a warrior on a horse, what's the thing that hits you right in the face?

His thigh. Right. The rider of the horse. His thigh is about eye height. And if his name is written on his thigh, you know exactly who he is.

Scholars suggest that the reason that John writes about the phrase King of Kings and Lord of Lords in places that he does is that. Tyler. Tyler. That sounds like.

Anyway, scholars suggest that the reason that John writes about the phrase King of Kings and Lord of Lords being written in the places that it does is that seeing the title of the Lamb in those places would have expressed undeniable authority. You couldn't miss it. Not only is it on his robe somewhere it's very, very visible, but it's also written on his leg right in your face. You should be able to see it. So John here is doing this beautiful thing where he is comparing Revelation 13.

When we see the introduction to the beast of the sea and the final battle with the ram, the Lamb. In Revelation chapter 19, John is showing his readers and us today that the Antichrist is actually seeking power by mimicking what. What the world thinks is powerful. Right, Because Jesus has these beautiful names written all over him. Right?

And the Antichrist has blasphemous names written all over him. It's like he's trying to emulate power, but being evil. The name on the robe of the Lamb isn't just a decoration, it's actually declaration. It tells the world that the war is over and the true king is here and arrived. And when we see here that the King has arrived after the world has been kind of turned upside down with turmoil and suffering and war and famine and political chaos and hunger and death, King Jesus rides in exactly the way that they had prophesied it about in the ancient Old Testament.

He becomes this rider on a white horse who brings justice. Revelation tells us that it's not the beast who's going to win, not the false prophet, not the devil. It's the Lamb of God. The Lamb will win. And the scary story that we've been reading through eventually comes to an end.

Church, I want to remind you of this. God does not leave us in the nightmare. He rewrites the ending with the hope of resurrection. So let's keep reading so we can see how the story ends. Right?

So as we transition From Revelation chapter 19 to Revelation 20, we see this huge battle ensues between the righteous on the earth and those who have been deceived, those who took on the identity of this false prophet, this Antichrist. And after the battle, Satan is defeated and he's taken captive for a thousand years. So that the Earth, for the very first time since the Garden of Eden, is without evil. And I want you to think about that for a second. We often talk about world peace, right?

It's in every single pageant. I just want world peace. We all want that. But could you imagine what that actually looks like for us?

Could you imagine a world where all the wars are ended? Think about how many wars have been fought since you were a child. And there are wars that we don't even know about because of our news coverage, right? There are things that have happened in this world that are evil and despicable. Imagine all the places where warlords have controlled the population and brought in chaos.

Imagine all the death at the hands of political despots. Imagine the famines that have been created by displacement and destruction. And all of those evil, terrible things are going to be gone, eradicated. Because God will no longer tolerate the deception of the world at the hands of the devil and those who follow him. And after all, the evil is eradicated from the earth.

Revelation 20 goes on to tell us that God is going to judge his creation. Revelation chapter 20, verses 11 through 15 says this. Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne.

And books were opened.

Another book. Sorry, hang on. What did I miss?

I lost it. And books were open. Another book was opened, which is the Book of Life. The dead were judged according to what they had done, as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it.

And death And Hades gave up the dead that were in them. And each person was judged according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The Lake of Fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the Book of Life was thrown into the lake of fire.

John sees what we recognize today as what is called the Great White Throne. The dead stand before God. The Book of Life is open, and all people are judged. And eventually, death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire. And everything as we have known it changes in an instant.

That's it. It's the end of evil. The dragon, the beast, the false prophet. Gone. Sin, death, hell, all of it, gone forever.

But here's what's remarkable. The Book of Revelation continues on, right? It could end there, and it might look relatively hopeful. Evil is gone. Cool.

We win. The end. But no, it keeps going on. Judgment is not the final word. God's righteous judgment becomes a doorway to something new.

Think of everything scripture talks about here in this moment as a wildfire, right? So just as there is a wildfire as it ravages the forest, death, pain, disease, harm, and evil have plagued our world since the beginning of time. If you've ever looked off in the distance at night to see a glowing red fire just over the tree line, it is terrifying. Many of you probably remember the fires we had here just a few years ago in 2016. I remember standing in my front yard and ash raining down on me like snow.

It impacted thousands of people and burned over 40,000 acres here. And as you drive between here and Oklahoma City, there are still scars from those fires. Dead treetops can still be seen along the Turner Turnpike. But often after a wildfire, everything that looks dead changes.

It usually lasts for just a few months, and then green shoots start to emerge. Life returns. What looked like total destruction was actually the beginning of renewal. That's the same rhythm as we see in the book Revelation that John is painting for us here. Destruction becomes renewal.

Judgment gives way to joy. God doesn't just end evil. In the Book of Revelation, he begins something better. So what comes after the fire? John tells us it's a new heaven and a new earth.

In Revelation, chapter 21, verses 1 through 7, it says this. Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the holy city and the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud Voice from the throne saying, look, God's dwelling place is now among the.

I'm sorry. Now among the.

And he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. The old order of things has passed away.

He who was seated on the throne said, I am making everything new. Then he said, write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true. He said to me, it is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty, I will give water without cost.

From the spring of the water of life. Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God who. And they will be my children.

Nothing in the book of Revelation is destruction for destruction sake. This is the end of the old order of things. This is the end of a world that is scarred by sin, death and brokenness. And then John adds in here, as we read it, there was no longer any sea. Do you remember why that's important?

We talked about it on our first week. We talked about what it means to be from the sea. For ancient Jewish readers, the sea symbolized chaos, right? For John's community, it represented the empire's threat, the uncertainty of persecution, and the fear that death was always for them, just right around the corner. When the sea is gone, it means that chaos and fear have lost their grip.

They don't have to worry about what's to come anymore. It's like watching an old collapsing house. The foundation might be cracked, the roof begins to leak. You could try to patch the foundation. You can work to renew the holes in the floor or the collapsed places in the ceiling.

But sometimes the best answer is to just build something new in its place, something better, something stronger, something that will last. And this is what God is going to do. When the time is right, God's going to create something for us that's even more beautiful and more perfect than what we've experienced in our whole lives. That's what God does with us and with his creation. The old story of scripture might look broken, but God's story will still be rebuilt.

John Wesley talked a lot about what it meant for us to be going on toward perfection, right? John Wesley believed that we as believers in Christ could be perfected in. In Christian love. When he talks about going on to perfection, it's not just in personal holiness, but it's in the renewal of all things. Revelation 21 is the ultimate picture of what God is doing.

By perfecting through his grace, everything becomes restored to the goodness God intended from the beginning. And the best part of this new creation is that God doesn't just create this beautiful new world and then step back and say, there you go. God moves in. Revelation 21:3 says, and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, look, God's dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be sorry, will be with them, and be their God.

There's no more distance, no more separation. God doesn't just visit. He doesn't just stop by and say, hey, I'm just coming to check on things. He's not our landlord. He moves in with us.

The Greek word here for dwelling is skin, and that means tent or tabernacle or dwelling. It recalls this time in the book of Exodus where God's glory dwelled with his people. The places where the ancient Israelites once offered their worship in the wilderness was in that tabernacle. Before they built the temple. They could take their tabernacle, their, their skenae with them wherever they went, all throughout the desert, until they were able to.

To inhabit a land of their own. It was in the tabernacle that the priests prayed and offered their incense and sacrifices to the Lord. It was mobile. It was temporary, a burden to be carried on the backs of the people as they went from place to place. And here it's invoking that kind of imagery.

The world for us that was supposed to be God skene, his place where he dwelt among people, has been a burden for us. Our world is broken, but God is going to fix it. He's going to create this new skein where he's going to move in and be a part of our lives.

The scripture that we just read shows that what was once temporary becomes permanent and universal. God will dwell with us, his people, because there is no more sin to separate us from God. Think about a long distance relationship. You ever been in one of those before? For some of you guys, those long distance relationships might have meant mailing letters.

Today it's as simple as a video call or an email.

But after years of these video calls and letters and emails and text messages, one day the person finally says, you know what? I'm moving in. Hopefully you've talked about that before that happens. But they say that, and then the longing that you felt is fulfilled. Presence replaces distance.

That's what revelation chapter 21 promises for us. God is telling us that he's ready for us to be a part of Him. He will be here with us. I'm here to stay for us, I think. So often we think that our goal is to make it to heaven to get up to God.

But the good news is, is that God is eventually going to come down and be with us. Every time we celebrate communion, we echo this truth as I offer up the prayer of the Great Thanksgiving over communion elements each week here at Community Brookside. I hope that you hear these words as I say them, make them these beautiful communion elements. Be for us the body and blood of Christ that we may be for the world the body of Christ redeemed by his blood. Part of our job as believers in Jesus is to be the body of Christ at work in the world around us.

Until Christ comes again, we are his ambassadors. Communion for us each week is a foretaste of the final feast where God dwells among us, his people in full.

And when God moves in, something beautiful happens. Scripture tells us that the tears dry, that the pain ends, the nightmare finally gives up, and there is no more mourning. Revelation 21:4 through 7 says this. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death, no mourning, no crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

He who was seated on the throne said, I am making everything new. Then he said, write this down. He said to me, it's done. I am the alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty, I will give water without cost.

Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my people.

This image invokes intimacy, the idea of God himself stepping in to wipe away tears. Death and pain aren't just delayed for some other time. They're destroyed. They're just destroyed and gone. For the persecuted believers of John's time, these weren't abstract words.

They prayed that God would wipe away their tears. They literally had loved ones who they had to bury. They had watched their neighbors being taken away in chains. Many of them who were in John's community of believers bore actual physical scars and disfigured bodies because of the testimony of their faith. Every day for them was living in hell.

This book of Revelation gave them a picture not just of escape, but of redemption. Revelation became, for its earliest readers, the hope that death itself would be undone, brokenness would be restored, and scars would be healed.

The scripture isn't supposed to be for us, a denial of suffering. Instead, it points to the transformation that comes after suffering. God doesn't erase tears by pretending that they never fall. He wipes them away with his own hand. It's like a parent comforting a child after a nightmare.

There's two ways you can do it. They don't just say, hey, quit your crying. Get over it. It was just a dream. Or a loving parent who pulls the child close to him or her and whispers, it's going to be okay.

I'm here. I have you. That's what God is doing. In the Book of revelation, in chapter 21, the scary story ends with scarred hands wiping away every tear.

Have you ever heard of the Book of Common Prayer? So the Book of Common Prayer was first compiled in 1549 during the reign of King Edward VI of England. It was a book of prayers of liturgies and rituals for the English speaking, sorry, English speaking churchgoers of its day. It was actually a book that helped inspire John and Charles Wesley to become priests. And it influences many of the rites and rituals that we still have here in the United Methodist Church to this day.

Our communion liturgy, our baptismal rituals, and even our burial services in part, are based on this Book of Common Prayer. And in this book, during the burial celebration at the moment of commendation, the priest or pastor stands near the body and says something like this. Give rest, O Christ, to your servant with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more. You only are immortal, the creator and maker of mankind. And we are mortal, formed of the earth.

And to the earth we shall return. For so did you ordain when you created us, saying, you are dust and to dust you shall return. All of us go down to the dust. Yet here's what I want you to hear. Even at the grave we make our song.

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia. We don't sing at the grave because death wins. We sing at the grave because death doesn't win win. Death may knock at the door, but Christ answers with resurrection. And for us as people who believe in this Jesus of resurrection, there is nothing for us to fear.

We've read a lot through the Book of Revelation and we have barely just skimmed the surface. But the good news is the Lamb wins. The tears that we have shed are wiped away. The story ends in resurrections. And you, yes, even you, are written into the ending of God's story.

So friends, whatever scary chapter you are living through in your own lives, it might be grief or fear or experiencing injustice, uncertainty. I want you to remember this.

We've already read the final page. It's been written and God himself will speak it over you. As I mentioned before, a couple weeks ago, as John Wesley was lying on his deathbed, his last words were simple but potent. He said, the best of all is God is with us. That's revelation in one sentence.

The beast may rage, death may knock on the door, but Christ answers with resurrection. And we are all called to live that life of resurrection. Now, let's pray.