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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Brian Zahnd
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July 17, 2019 - December 15, 2020
God’s will is never Armageddon; God’s will is always New Jerusalem.
Tragically, those who refuse to embrace the way of peace taught by Jesus use the symbolic war of Revelation 19 to silence the Sermon on the Mount. This kind of hermeneutic has disastrous implications;
Perhaps John of Patmos is asking too much of modern readers, but he assumes we will keep in mind that Jesus is ever and always the slaughtered Lamb.
Christ always rules from the cross, never from an Apache attack helicopter.
Jesus’s robe is soaked in his own blood. Jesus doesn’t shed the blood of enemies; Jesus sheds his own blood. This is the gospel! The rider on the white horse is the slaughtered Lamb, not the slaughtering beast.
If we combine all of John’s creative symbols, the message is clear: Jesus wages war by self-sacrifice and by what he says. Jesus combats evil by cosuffering love and the word of God.
We are human, but we don’t wage war as humans do. We use God’s mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and to destroy false arguments.
This is not a literal war; this is a symbolic war. This is not a future war; Christ is waging this war right now.
If it doesn’t sound like good news, it’s not the gospel!
The final eschatological vision in the book of Revelation is the answer to the church’s constant prayer: “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
The big story the Bible tells doesn’t end with people going off to heaven but with heaven coming to earth.
Just as Jesus began his earthly ministry at the wedding in Cana, now the ascended Christ presides over the marriage of heaven and earth.
John tells us that New Jerusalem is fifteen hundred miles long and fifteen hundred miles wide,*4 not coincidently the same dimensions as the Roman Empire.
It’s important to understand that John doesn’t depict New Jerusalem as belonging purely to a distant future but as a present reality in the process of becoming. New Jerusalem is both present and still arriving; it’s now and not yet.
Today it is the task of every local church to be a kind of suburb of the New Jerusalem here and now.
What Ezekiel saw wasn’t the second temple that would be built by Zerubbabel and later expanded by King Herod but a mystical temple.
And where do we find New Jerusalem? Wherever we find people banding together with the intention of following the Lamb in the new way of being human.
With nations raging and warring, with a planet melting and burning, it’s time to live as citizens of New Jerusalem.
God is not wrath. Though we may rightly understand and describe the consequences of divine consent to our own self-destructive will as the wrath of God, the truth remains that God is not wrath; God is love.
