Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

by Brian Zahnd

patriotism. Christians are called to practice responsible citizenship but to renounce religious patriotism.

God’s contention with empire is one of the major themes of the Bible. From Egypt and Assyria to Babylonia and Rome, the prophets constantly critique empire as a direct challenge to the sovereignty of God.

Rome isn’t evil only when it persecutes Christians; rather, Rome is always evil because of its idolatry and injustice.

Lamb power.”

chapter 5

The scroll seems to represent God’s good purposes for humanity. To open the scroll and read its proclamation is to implement God’s salvation for the world. But after searching all of humanity, the living and the dead, not one person is found worthy to execute God’s redemptive program.

With the horrible news that God’s plan for saving the world would remain sealed, thus sealing the world’s fate to its miserable status quo, John begins to weep inconsolably. Indeed, what could be more depressing than the idea that world history is the only possibility for the world’s future? It is the antigospel! Who wouldn’t weep over that?!

If I startle you by saying “Look! A lion!” but then point to a lamb, it’s a kind of joke. But in Revelation it’s a divine joke, and the joke is on Caesar! Rome will be conquered not by another superpower beast but by a little Lamb. As this slaughtered Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes takes the scroll, a song is raised. First the elders sing, then millions of angels join in, and finally all of creation sings the anthem of the Lamb.

he reigns not as predatory lion but as a sacrificial lamb.

Jesus is referred to as the Lamb twenty-eight times in Revelation.

Jesus is the Lamb 7 × 4, which is to say God’s divine Lamb is given dominion over the four corners of the earth.

An eschatology that rejoices over earthquakes and causes people to want another war in the Middle East is not a Christian eschatology! Christian hope is for the peace of New Jerusalem, not the horrors of Armageddon.

A fatalistic eschatology requiring end-time hyperviolence that slaughters hundreds of millions is more befitting of ISIS than the followers of the Prince of Peace.

The One called the Word of God is not riding the red horse of war but the white horse of triumph. Jesus doesn’t overcome evil by war but by his word.

The perennial ruse is to glorify war so that we accept it as a proper means of achieving goals. But it is evil. It is opposed by Christ. Christ does not sit on the red horse, ever.

Jesus combats evil by cosuffering love and the word of God. This is the righteous war of the Lamb. Christians are called to believe that cosuffering love and the divine word are all Christ needs to overcome evil. A fallen world addicted to war does not believe this, but the followers of Jesus do, or should!

The war of the Lamb looks nothing like the war of the beast. Jesus is not like Caesar. Jesus does not wage war like Caesar.

This is not a literal war; this is a symbolic war. This is not a future war; Christ is waging this war right now. I know Christ is waging this war right now because I am among those who have been slain by the sword of his mouth and raised again to newness of life! Jesus slays me. He slays me with his divine word. And in slaying me, he sets me free. This is salvation. John the Revelator is showing us how Jesus saves the world.

Why does John set his symbolic war of the Lamb in the Jezreel Valley? This is where a bit of historical information goes a long way. Before and after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, the imperial Legio Sexta Ferrata (“Sixth Ironclad Legion”) was encamped in the Jezreel Valley. This may very well have inspired John to set the Lamb’s war here. The legion was known as the Fidelis et Constans—“Faithful and Steadfast.” But John, with a wink to the reader, says that the rider on the white horse is called Faithful and True. This kind of playfulness, where John applies the motto of a Roman imperial legion to Jesus, is something that could be easily recognized by people living in the Roman Empire at the end of the first century, but it is completely missed by readers today. John certainly doesn’t believe that Jesus is going to conquer the Roman legion by killing them. John knows that Jesus will conquer the Roman legion the same way he conquered the demonic “legion” in Mark 5: by his word.

killing two hundred million people. (It’s interesting to note that two hundred million was roughly the population of the known world in the first century. John may be trying to communicate that eventually the entire world will fall under the word of Christ.)

If it doesn’t sound like good news, it’s not the gospel!

Through inspired dreamlike images, John the Revelator dares to imagine a world where the nightmare of endless war finally succumbs to the peaceable reign of Christ. Revelation is where the Lamb is victorious as a lamb! The Christ who is victorious in Revelation is the same Christ who preached his gospel of peace in the Sermon on the Mount. John calls his Christian readers to believe the audacious claim that it is the way of the Lamb that rules the world.

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 seems to say it this way: the tragic

divorce between heaven and earth is now reconciled by the Lamb.

It’s a new Jerusalem because, though it’s a new thing in salvation history, it has continuity with what God was doing all along through the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets.

began. Out of the husk of the old Jerusalem was born the new Jerusalem. From the city of David on Mount Zion would come the global city of the Lamb. With Easter and Pentecost, New Jerusalem began its slow but inexorable annexation of the old empires of death. 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.

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. That a little more than two centuries after his composition of Revelation most of the Roman Empire had converted to Christianity shows what a remarkable prophet John was!

Today it is the task of every local church to be a kind of suburb of the New Jerusalem here and now.

Wherever churches enact a healing presence in broken communities, New Jerusalem is there. New Jerusalem is both a symbolic prophetic vision and a tangible present reality.

This is why we must venture forth from the city of the Lamb to bring hope and healing to those suffering on the cruel shores of the lake of fire. How thirsty must they be who live in the land of the burning lake! There must be many who are ready to hear and accept an invitation to enter the city of the Lamb.

“faith is ordered primarily to the inconceivability of God’s love.”

what we are to believe in above all things is the greatness of God’s love.

The Bible is not flat terrain. The honest reader of the Bible readily admits that the Levitical prohibition against eating shellfish does not reach the same heights as the lofty Christology in Colossians.

God is not wrath; God is love.

I believe in hell. I believe in hell here and now, as Jesus taught, and I believe in the possibility of self-exile from the love of God in the afterlife, as Jesus indicated. But the notion that God, out of personal offense and infinite spite, inflicts eternal torture upon his wayward children is completely incompatible with the revelation of God in Christ.

To believe in the sufficiency of God’s love to save the world is not naive optimism; it’s Christianity.