VI. The Joy of Revelation: The Beatitudes of Revelation - 2 of 7

1.     14:13 Then I heard a voice from heaven say, “Write this: ‘Blessed are the dead, those who die in the Lord from this moment on!’”

Generally, especially when we look at one verse of a biblical passage, we do well to consider its context so as to see better what it is attempting to tell us. Now, as I might have already stated, Revelation is not always written in such a way that this is as important here as in other scriptures that present, for example, a story. Revelation is not a book written in a linear fashion. As we have begun to see, Revelation is somewhat of a compilation of pictures, visions, as much as stories. Indeed, some present the same picture/vision or ‘story’ again in a different way, from a different perspective or vantage point, sometimes even seemingly from a different time.  

Here is one saying, described as coming from heaven. It is actually preceded by the appearance of three angels, each with a different message (14:6-11). These and a following comment directed to ‘the saints’ along the lines of other messages to God’s people, are dealt with in part III of this blog on Revelation, Messages to the Churches.

At first reading some might wonder, how can one be blessed when dead. Most of us want to live as long as possible, or at least as long as we are well enough and finding some joy in life. Indeed, many fear death. By this time though, if we have read the whole of Revelation especially, we can understand that death might have been seen as a welcome reprieve from the suffering and persecution Christians were experiencing at the time Revelation was written. We have also begun to see positive images of what is in heaven. So, to be taken from this earth with all of the problems they were going through, to die, for the believers could indeed be seen as a blessing. The blessing aspect of dying for and in your faith is emphasized by the positive attention, the recognition, given to martyrs in some of the visions in Revelation. To be a martyr was indeed coming to be considered a blessing.

This might be true for some of us in today’s world too. We might be suffering from cancer or some other debilitating illness and long to be freed of our affliction, knowing too that only in death would that occur. Christians, more in other parts of the world than here in North America where I write from, who are being beaten, burned, put in prison and even killed, would surely long even more strongly for escape. 

Then there is the second part of the beatitude. The preceding passages suggest Christ has already come to redeem his saints but that God’s actions are still bringing some to repentance. Needless to say, in a world deprived of the salt and light of Christianity, their lives could be unimaginably difficult. There is in this blessing also a call to them to endure, as the preceding verse had said, to be faithful. Only then, if they maintained their faith in the face of the tremendous odds of the time, the tribulation, would they die in the lord and receive this blessing. May that be true of all of us, that we keep the faith till we have passed from this life. 

The Joy of Revelation VI. The Beatitudes of Revelation - 1 of 7

After the initial 3 posts on Revelation, the last of which was put up three weeks ago, I thought it was time to add to them – before you lose interest. I am working on the whole book but that takes time. I am not, as you will notice, posting these chapters in the order in which the material appears in the text. It is more of a topical division of the book, posting a topic, or even a part of a topic when there is a lot of text covering one area, at a time. Some of those subjects, by reason of both the quantity of material and its complexity, take longer to work through. So, I am posting here part one of one topic or theme that is easier to deal with: The Beatitudes of Revelation. 

Many of us will be familiar with the Beatitudes Jesus delivered as recorded in Matthew 5:3-11, a brief summary of which also appears in Luke 6:20-22. When the word beginning each of those, “blessed,” is taken as a cue, commentators have singled out seven passages in Revelation as being Beatitudes. Seven, of course, is a commonly used number in the book and we know it stands for completeness and perfection. The passages are:

Ch. 1:3; 14:13; 16:15; 19:9; 20:6; 22:7, 14.

Let us look at them in order.

1:3 reads “Blessed is the one who reads the words of this prophecy aloud, and blessed are those who hear and obey the things written in it, because the time is near!”

Just a couple of comments about the actual words of the text first.  It is stated that the person who reads this book aloud is blessed. In our day, when we all have our own Bibles – if we want – this does not seem remarkable. Some might have read that there is something different, perhaps superior, in terms of how our brain processes things read aloud as opposed to silently. However, that is not the concern here. 

In the days when this was written few had copies of these writings. It is stressed several times in the book that the messages contained herein are important for the target audience, the Early Churches. The time is supposedly short, so it is important that the message get out to as many as possible as soon as possible. Reading this text aloud was the best way to do this, likely to a house church congregation or in a synagogue, as part of worship or teaching. That is why the person who reads this aloud gets a special blessing; he is spreading The Word to as many as possible with the best available means at the time.

The message is that “The time is near,” referring in the short term to a time of persecution, in the longer term to Christ’s return. To best arm believers to endure the suffering to come, they will do well to hear the encouraging message of Revelation. It is incumbent on the reader to share this message. To begin with, book contains reassuring examples of where the saints are especially singled out for protection (see Protection of God’s People, another section to come in these postings). The other significant positive message is that the Jesus they serve as Lord has in some measure already defeated Satan through his sacrificial death and resurrection. More to the point, he will in the end be victorious over all those evil powers that are making life difficult for them and even taking some of their lives in martyr deaths. The Caesars of the day might demand allegiance, but the Christian’s allegiance is to Christ. He and his kingdom, of which they are a part, are more powerful than any earthly ruler or kingdom.

The same time-urgency of getting this message out underlines the blessing given to those who not only hear the word, but obey it. The obeying part is that the listeners are not to be cowed into denying their Lord by doing such things as yielding to receiving “the mark of the beast.” Nor are they to be lured away by the charms of the age as personified in the whore, named Babylon (both of these pressures to be dealt with further in the coming sections on Judgments and The Wars of Satan). They are to read the signs of the times with wisdom, and, secure in the hope the message of this book should bring, endure. Those who do so to the end will receive the rewards frequently pictured in this book (some of this is dealt with in the previous post Messages to the Churches). They will ultimately arrive safely at their eternal and blessed prize for their faithfulness and devotion, even their deeds. 

CHRISTIANS IN THE HOLY LAND

When I write about the Holy Land I am referring to that strip of land largely between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, from the southern border of Lebanon and western border of Syria extending south to the Gulf of Aqaba and the border with Egypt and Jordan, including a little of Jordan east of the river and Dead Sea.

When I write of Christians here, one could refer to them in two ways – those of the past and those of the present.

Christians, of course, have been here from the beginning. The first ones were of Jewish background, as was Jesus. I am not sure whether any of their descendants remained after Rome was done with the Jews in AD 135. However, there are Palestinians who appear to trace their origins to those beginning days. Interestingly, some of these seem to have maintained the same non-violent way of life all along that our Lord demonstrated during his time on earth. Just the same, their life has never been that easy. There was persecution from the Jews, then from Rome. When Rome adopted Christianity as the state religion in the 4^th century, the new Christians began to come and assert their authority in these lands, building churches at holy sites and controlling access. Then, in the 7^th century, the Muslims came. There was not always persecution during Muslim times. Much of the time the two faiths lived a peaceful coexistence. When the Crusaders surfaced from the 11^th to 13 centuries, things did not always go well for local Christians either. The European invaders really respected no one. Since they were especially after the Muslims, and understood to be Christians, there was sometimes negative fallout for the local Christians from their Muslim neighbours because of Crusader action. Subsequently, things went back more to the status quo under the ongoing Muslim domination until the first half of the 20th century. Clashes with newly arriving Jews began to occur.

Then, there was what the Palestinians call ‘the Catastrophe,’ the Naqba. In many instances the Jewish terrorists who spread through the countryside in anticipation of the formation of the Jewish state and immediately after, in their campaign to force the Palestinians out to make way for Jewish settlers, did not discriminate between Muslim and Christian occupants of the land. Thus, Christians and Muslims equally suffered everything from being massacred in some instances to having their homes destroyed in many cases. If their homes were left standing, they were still forced out, or ran in fear. Some 450-500 villages of 900 or more were ‘depopulated’ in these ways by the end of 1948, creating some 750,000 refugees, most in neighbouring Lebanon and Jordan. When Israel drove Jordan and Egypt out of the West Bank and Gaza respectively, a further 460,00 souls were made refugees. To be sure, a minority of these were Christian, but the same fate befell them as their majority Muslim compatriots, not to mention the much smaller Druze and Samaritan minorities.

Presently, the Christian population in Palestine is unfortunately declining. It is not, as some would like to have you believe, because of persecution by Muslims. It is more because of oppression from the Israelis. So, whereas in the past we talked of a Jewish Diaspora, now we have a large Palestinian Diaspora. In fact, there are many more Palestinians abroad than in the Middle East. According to the UN, in 2010 there were nearly 790,000 refugees in the West Bank, over a million in Gaza and close to 2.9 million in surrounding Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. This does not include the hundreds of thousands living abroad. And, just as with many of those displaced Jews who yearned for their ‘promised land,’ many of these Palestinians would love to return home. Indeed, at one time they were promised they could do so. Many still clutch the keys to their homes. However, that promise is going on 70 years old and there is no sign of it being fulfilled any time soon. Nor have they ever been compensated for their losses.

One source [Sabeel 2011, Contemporary Way of the Cross] states that 9% of Arabs in Israel are Christian, making up only 2% of the overall population of the country. Most of these are Orthodox, members of the Melkite Church. Melkite refers to ‘royal’ and indicates that this church remained loyal to the Byzantine Monarch when there was a split in the church. A sizeable portion are either Roman Catholic, Lutheran or Anglican. In Israel itself, there is also a small faction of Christians, some of whom are Messianic Jews.

There is a division amongst the Christians in terms of their understanding of the place of the Jews in God’s plan, just as there is in The West. However, here it is basically only a small portion of Messianic Jews who subscribe to the Zionist understanding, contrary to the large numbers who do so in The west. The majority of Christians, especially the Palestinians, only see Zionism as a source of trauma and oppression. They have difficulty understanding how the Church in The West can swallow the Zionist narrative and abandon them to the mercy of the Israeli forces, government, courts and bureaucracy.  So, what, fellow believers in The West, is our response?

THE BEATITUDES XI

THE BEATITUDES XI

Today's text continues somewhat the verse from the previous beatitude. It really just expands or builds on it:

5:11 “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you and say all kinds of evil things about you falsely on account of me. 5:12 Rejoice and be glad because your reward is great in heaven, for they persecuted the prophets before you in the same way.

Whereas verse 10 talked about being persecuted for righteousness, this verse is more specific. A person can be fairly good, some might even say righteous, in the eyes of the world. This might even be said of a non-believer, a non-Christian. A person who is so good might make others jealous and 'persecute' them.

However, we have talked about true righteousness, complete righteousness, being only that which God can give us. We can't earn it on our own. To attain, to get that, requires, necessitates, belief in Jesus and what he did. So, Jesus ties this together by adding here to verse 10 that it is when we are persecuted because of our connection to Him that we will be blessed. Furthermore, it is when people tell lies about us, accuse us falsely, because of Jesus, that he is talking about. As Jesus' chief disciple Peter wrote later (2:20): "What glory is it if, when you are criticized for your faults, you take it patiently? But if, when you do well and suffer for that, you take that patiently, that is acceptable to God." In other words, if you get in trouble for your own wrongdoing, there is no merit, nothing praiseworthy in that. It's only if you get in trouble for doing well, that God rewards you.

You see, when you do well, do what is right and others around you have not, it bothers their conscience. It points out their ways of error. It gets on their nerves. They understandably don't like it. They don't like to be 'shown up' as we say. So, they get angry and want to get back at you. They can't really say anything bad about you because you have done nothing bad. So, they turn to insulting you, or saying things falsely, lying, about you. They have no other option, no other way to express their anger. This is what happened to Jesus and his earlier followers as we can read in our Bible. Time and again it is recorded that their persecutors brought false charges against them because they really had nothing actually negative to say about them.

Jesus then goes on to try to comfort his hearers by saying they are in good company if this happens to them. The prophets, the religious leaders of Israel's own past, were also persecuted for doing God's will, doing the right thing. Jesus refers to this more than once. Just a few days before his own death, he looks over the city of Jerusalem, the city of Zion, and accuses its inhabitants of killing the prophets and other messengers god sent to them and then says (Matt. 23:29-39 but especially vs. 37), "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets, and stone those who are sent to you, how often would I have loved to gather your children together, just like a hen gathers her chicks, but you would not let me! Look, [because of that] your house [your temple] is left desolate [empty]."

There is another way of looking at this. If we never get persecuted, if no one is convicted enough by our behaviour or our words to make false accusations against us, we should perhaps be asking ourselves, Is our life really showing the Light of Jesus?' Are we speaking out against the wrongs of this world, for what Jesus wants done in this world? If we really were, we would probably sooner or later get persecuted.  Then we will be rewarded for really doing what we ought. Then we can be glad and rejoice because we will know we are making an impact, we are having the effect on our world that Jesus wants us to have on it. We are being the salt and light that he wants us to be. Those are figures of speech that come from a subsequent passage in Matthew.

THE BEATITUDES X

THE BEATITUDES X

As some of my readers know, I have been to China twice for two weeks each trip, traveling to three or four different cities. We met Christian brothers and sisters; some of you are reading this. We also went to Christian churches every Sunday. Now, we hear Christians are still being persecuted in China. So why did we never hear about that in our visits? How come we never heard about all the terrible things the Falun Gong members say the government is doing to them? Here in Vancouver, this being the democratic country of Canada, the Falun Gong has the right of free speech. For years they protested in front of the Chinese Embassy. You could see their posters on the walls of the embassy all the time when you drove by, as it was on the main street from the airport to downtown so almost everyone coming to Vancouver saw it.

Jesus said:

5:10 “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to them.

I think the Falun Gong came under persecution because they protested about something and the government became worried about how much power they seemed to have. How were they able to stage, to put on, such a big protest? Governments are always worried about power. They only think in political terms so they could not conceive of people actually banding together for other purposes.

Are Christians being persecuted for their faith, their righteousness? I think many times nowadays, both in China and elsewhere, so-called Christians may not be persecuted if they keep their faith to themselves. They can talk about it with one another. They can even have a church. However, if they begin to speak out because of their righteousness, because of their Christian beliefs, about bad things the government is doing, or problems in society, they will be persecuted.

A Chinese lawyer was once arrested because he was defending the underprivileged in China against the government. His clients had problems like being evicted from their homes to make way for developers, or for becoming ill because of pollution from state sponsored industrial and chemical plants.

I have to wonder if some of the churches we attended in China are allowed to be because they don't do or say anything that offends the government. Is that how it should be? In fact, some are saying that the totalitarian government in China (it is really not communist anymore) accept people being Christian because they realize they are good citizens. Good citizens, in their terms, means not disturbing the peace. If we really stand up for what we should believe as Christians, if we would really and totally follow what Christ taught, we would probably be persecuted. Even in North America. 

Jesus said, "Whoever therefore shall confess me before others, that person I will also confess before my father in heaven. But whoever shall deny me before others, that person I will also deny before my Father in Heaven" (Matthew 10:32-33). Those are strong words. We can all do better at speaking out for our faith.  Speaking out for our fait does not just mean telling people 2 repent and be saved. It also means telling them how to the disciples, how to live as Christians. That is a whole different story and expectation. If we do that, then Jesus and the father God will truly say the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to us.