Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son… (Hebrews 1:1-2a)

Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia! In the resurrection of Christ, the world has changed forever. Death is defeated! Satan’s fate is sealed! Sin is atoned for and holds no power over us! The world is under the rule of Christ’s almighty, risen, nail-scarred hands! The old is gone, the new has come! Alleluia!

With the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we have entered a new era. As the writer to the Hebrews says above, it used to be that God spoke to His people of old by the prophets. But now, in these last days, God has spoken to us by His Son. This simple sentence from the beginning of that epistle tells us that we are in a new time, a different time, the end times. Of course, when we think about “the end times” we often turn to God’s source for the end of time: Revelation. The last book of the Bible may not have been written last, but it deals with last things, end-time things, so the church fathers saw fit to put it at the end. 

The book of Revelation is the most misinterpreted book in all the Scriptures. For millennia, people have been trying to decipher and decode Revelation to determine when exactly Christ will come again and what signs in the world will clearly and certainly point to His return. This is not the purpose of Revelation.

The four Gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are like a photograph of Jesus. They tell us what He said and what He did at specific moments in history. They are intended to tell the salvation history of Christ Jesus. Revelation, on the other hand, is a completely different kind of writing. Revelation is called “apocalyptic literature,” which is a genre that tries to explain things by hiding them. Revelation is not a photograph, like the Gospels; it is an abstract stained-glass window that is not easy to understand at first glance but grows deeper in meaning the more you ponder it.

Throughout the Sundays of Easter, our Epistle Readings will come from the book of Revelation. Therefore, this a perfect time to explore the images of this book and what Jesus is trying to share with us through St. John’s Revelation. This year we’ll embark on a sermon series entitled, “Resurrection and Revelation,” that will help us to understand these end times in light of the resurrection of Christ. We’ll take some of the images that are shared in our weekly epistle readings and show how they point us to the resurrected Christ and how our lives are different because of Him. In addition, we’ll spend more time in our adult Bible study between services diving deeper into these lessons to find more of what St. John has hidden there.

Please make it a point to join us on this brief journey through Revelation this Eastertide.

In Christ,

Pastor Tom Vanderbilt