Another Book

There are three sequences of judgments in Revelation: the seals, the trumpets, and the bowls. I think that we can understand them by comparing them to the three calls issued to the great banquet in Luke 14. The seals are the invitation to know God to those whom we expect to receive such a call—the Church people, the Christians, and the Jews. So, once Christ opened the scroll, whenever in history or the future we think that might be, the knowledge of God became available to anyone who cared to read the scroll. The scroll presented Christ as the conqueror, the judge, the warrior, and the one with power over death and hell. But as the fifth seal tells us:

When He opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony which they held. And they cried with a loud voice, saying, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” Then a white robe was given to each of them; and it was said to them that they should rest a little while longer, until both the number of their fellow servants and their brethren, who would be killed as they were, was completed. (Revelation 6:9–11)

The number of people who came to His party, who traded in their lives for His death was insufficient for the party He had planned. The group who was first invited to Christ’s party—the religious, the Jews, us—are kept out of the place He has gone to prepare for us. We are not kept out by a judge who finds us lacking; rather, we are kept out by our own works, our own plans to build His kingdom and our kingdom, our own righteousness. The picture that we should have of the judgment is not of people beating on the doors of Heaven and Christ picking and choosing who can enter, but people determinedly, eagerly running into hell and the rider of the white horse vetoing our evil wills at His own discretion and with no cause but His Father’s good pleasure, and dragging us to Heaven kicking and screaming. And the sixth seal gives us the reason why we will not trust Him or His offer of mercy:

I looked when He opened the sixth seal, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became like blood…And the kings of the earth, the great men, the rich men, the commanders, the mighty men, every slave and every free man, hid themselves in the caves and in the rocks of the mountains, and said to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of Him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb! For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand? (Revelation 6:12–17)

When He invited us to resurrection, we saw only the death that is the door through which we must pass to that resurrection. When He invited us to enjoy Him, we saw only that we must lose ourselves. He offers us Heaven, and we are too busy grasping this world with a death grip to appreciate the offer. And don’t imagine that you and I aren’t in that number for, as it says, “the kings, the great, the rich, the mighty, every slave and every free man.” It is hard to find an exception to that set. This is the judgment: that we prefer our life, which is death, to the death of Christ, which is life, our darkness to His light.

There is a sort of understated irony that is very characteristic of the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth, which I find in the phrase “wrath of the Lamb.” Although sheep are much more common in the Old World than they are in the American South, the word used here is a little lamb, and the reference would have felt much the same to the first readers of this story as it does to us. There is a clear portrayal of passive helplessness, and of course Jewish readers would have felt the sacrificial tones of the word lamb quite as much as we do. What animal could be less inclined to show wrath than a little lamb? Of course, as John has already pointed out in chapter 5, this lamb is dead—dead to wrath and alive to grace. It seems to me that there is a bit of irony in the word translated throughout Revelation as “wrath”. It describes feelings so strong that they can’t be contained. An alternate translation is “passion.” Hide us from the Passion of Christ. When this was written, the end of Christ’s life hadn’t yet come to be called His Passion, as far as I can tell, but I think that that illustrates the problem we have with the apocalypse rather nicely. His way of salvation is a way that features a guilty verdict for us, suffering, death, and hell. It has all the external characteristics of wrath. It is only when you get inside that you can perceive it as passion, which, I think, is why, at the seventh seal, there is silence in Heaven. Christ has stooped down to open the knowledge of God to us, and we have made excuses not to take Him up on the offer. He set the scroll that is the Express Image of God right before us, and we were too attached to our own notions of who God is to take a look. It is the silence of shock and awe—not shock and awe, though, at our stubborn mistrust, but at the lengths which Christ is about to go to get guests at His party.