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

by Brian Zahnd

The question is not whether God loves us but how we respond to God’s love.

If you don’t know how to preach the gospel without making appeals to afterlife issues, you don’t know how to preach the gospel!

Luther had no use for the book of Revelation, until he used it to preach that the pope was the Antichrist. Pope Leo X returned the favor and used Revelation to preach that Luther was the Antichrist. Protestants and Catholics have been weaponizing the book of Revelation ever since.

If some people admit that the lamb with seven horns and seven eyes is obviously symbolic but insist that Jesus riding a flying white horse is literal, they’re going to have to explain their system of interpretation.

Trying to understand the book of Revelation without understanding the Greco-Roman world of the first century is like trying to understand Don McLean’s song “American Pie” without understanding the rock ’n’ roll scene of the ’50s and ’60s. So here is an important interpretive key for reading Revelation: keep in mind that all the monstrous images found in the book are symbols for cosmic evil working through Caesar and the Roman Empire.

To be faithful to Christ and his kingdom means that the believers in the seven cities of Asia Minor must resist the temptation to accommodate Christian faith to Roman civil religion.

Jesus is King of kings and Lord of lords; he reigns not as predatory lion but as a sacrificial lamb.

battlefield. Armageddon isn’t the end of war; Armageddon is endless war. We cannot war our way to peace. There is no way to peace; peace is the way, and Jesus is the Prince of Peace.

This is the relevance of the book of Revelation. John’s apocalyptic vision doesn’t predict an inevitable war where two hundred million people will be killed in the Middle East; rather, John presents us with our choices. Either we follow the Lamb into the shalom of New Jerusalem, or we follow the Beast into the horrors of Armageddon.

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.

But all this beauty is lost when we imagine Jesus coming back on a flying white horse and literally 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.)

The book of Revelation is where the good news of the gospel finds its most creative expression. 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.

The wages of sin is death—but God is love. War is hell—but God is love. Violence is human—but God is love.

Eternal life is to know God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

God is the eternal light of self-giving love. There is no darkness. No anger. No violence. No retribution. Only love.