-I HATE scary movies! Thrillers I can handle (and often enjoy, even when they keep me up late because I need to find out what happens)

-Even though I don’t watch them, I know all the tropes that come with scary movies: don’t go near the basement, stay away from windows, make sure you stay in a group. Good lessons to be learned if you ever find yourself in a horror movie!

-One of the pieces I hope you’re taking away from our study in Revelation is similar – that there are only 2 options to how you’re going to live your life: either worshipping God or worshipping the dragon. Today’s text is meant to be like a horror movie where we run away from these consequences and run towards God. See sometimes God tells stories that are repulsive to serve as models for us so that we run away from sin and death and run to Him. 

-C.S. Lewis “Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.”

-Part of the reason we (and the 7 churches) need to read about true justice is because we need the encouragement to remain faithful in the midst of this difficult world. When you’re used and abused, sometimes the only encouragement is to keep your eyes on Jesus, knowing that He will bring about perfect justice.

READ/PRAY

-Same section as last week, interlude between judgments, we’ve looked at 7 seals and 7 trumpets, then we’re in this interim leading into the 7 bowls where I believe John is given a glimpse of the arrival of Jesus through a heavenly perspective. 

-Jesus, the Creator of everything, came into creation as a baby. Didn’t appear out of nowhere, didn’t float down out of the sky, didn’t crash to earth on a spaceship like Clark Kent, he was born the same way you and I were born, which meant Satan thought he had the perfect opportunity to finally destroy God’s plans, but each time he’s thwarted! He gets angrier and angrier and works to destroy God’s plans and bring praise on himself instead of praising God, that’s why there’s this repeating theme of worshipping and praising God throughout this book, Satan’s aim is to steal that worship.

-Today we see 2 stories of reaping, but before we dive in there’s some debate about this section (much like the rest of the book) 3 options as to what this refers to:

-Both are negative judgments against those not following God

-1 is positive (grain) and the other is negative (grapes)

-Both are positive judgments referring to salvation.

-Yes, every interpretive option is on the table! Personally, I don’t find the first option convincing, and only found 1 person who argued that these both refer to negative judgments from God, and I’m currently leaning toward the middle option that this is recounting 2 separate harvest that serve 2 different purposes, as I’ll explain when we go through.

1. The Grain Harvest (14-16)

-The next thing revealed to John is one like the Son of Man, some debate about who this could be referring to, some angel that looks similar to Jesus? Jesus himself?

-I would argue it’s Jesus. This title (taken from Daniel), last time referred to Jesus in 1:13, so it would make sense that when it’s used again it’s referring to the same person, this time instead of standing among lampstands (the church), he’s seated on a cloud. Jesus says his return will be “on the clouds” which is being realized in this vision to John.

-Golden crown on his head, connects back to the elders, signifies his rule and reign. Last time we saw the Son of Man, he had 7 stars in his hand, this time what does he have?

-A sharp sickle. This time he’s not standing sovereign in the church, this time he’s standing sovereign in harvesting.

-This would have been a common theme in the 1^st century. Think of one of the pivotal scenes in the Gladiator: walking in the wheat field. When’s the last time you took a stroll in a wheat field? This is part of where we can miss some of the stories or implications in the Bible because we live in a different day. In the 1^st Century their lives were dominated by the changing of seasons, and if the fields weren’t taken care of, death was immanent. When I need food it comes in saran wrap that I rip open! 

-So when John sees Jesus with a sharp sickle in his hand, we tend to miss the implications, too. My mind jumps to something like the grim reaper, or a horror movie (doesn’t help that people already have Halloween decorations up). Not a positive idea. What John’s readers had in mind was more like this: farmer’s out in their fields reaping their harvest, that means it was another successful year, they were going to continue having enough food, it’s a positive connection.

-Then “another angel” appears. Remember from last week, we’d seen 3 angels who delivered various messages: eternal gospel, fall of Babylon, the cup of God’s wrath. This angel comes out of the temple.

-The temple is where God lives, so this angel is sent from God with a message that it’s time to reap. This is where people have attempted to argue that this Son of Man couldn’t be Jesus then, because angels are sent from God, angels don’t tell God what to do. I would disagree with that sentiment, because it doesn’t say Jesus is submitting to them, all the angel is doing is sharing the message from God, and if you remember, one of the things Jesus said while He was on earth was that He didn’t even know when He was going to come back. How that works when He is God is a mystery, but we know that in everything Jesus does, He submits Himself to the will of the Father. 

-Why is it time to reap? Because the harvest is ripe. This is full of a bunch of previous imagery John would have heard from spending time with Jesus! Just a couple examples:

-Jesus tells a couple parables about sowing and reaping in Matt. 9, one is very well known where the seed is sown on all sorts of different soils which leads to different outcomes, but the second parable is applicable for today’s passage. 

-He shares a story of a good farmer who’s taking care of his field and plants his seed faithfully and lets it start to grow, but during the night one of his enemies throws a different kind of seed into the field to compete with the wheat. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to us, think of this like 2 businesses who are in constant competition with each other and continually look for ways to undercut the other. When the plants start to come up, they notice that wheat and weeds are growing together! The servants come to the master and ask if they should pull up the weeds, and he responds:

-This is a picture of what happens all around us all the time! Just as the eternal gospel is being sown and people are being saved, Satan (the enemy) is continuing to work to fight against God, just like this image shows us. Friends, this should give us hope because it means there is hope, even if it feels like the world is just getting worse!

-The second passage that illumines this text is from John 4 right after he met a sinful woman at the well and told her that He is the Messiah. His disciples come back very confused, and here’s how Jesus answers their questions:

-His disciples can read the signs of the seasons, as can we! As the temperature drops at night, we know the leaves will start changing colors, and then the first frost will come and kill all your plants. But how good are we at reading the signs of the spiritual seasons? See, we’re supposed to be looking for opportunities to share the gospel indiscriminately, we’re supposed to be like the Sower who doesn’t care what soil we’re in we continue throwing out seed.

-Because here’s the other reality: the harvest is abundant. Friends, spiritually it’s harvest season all year long! You don’t need to wait for pumpkin spice season to invite people in!

-What we see in Revelation is the implication of the gospel going out. As the seed of the gospel takes root in people’s lives they continue to grow and produce more fruit in more people and eventually will be harvested into heaven. Jesus uses so many different harvesting illustrations that John would have remembered and picked up on as he saw this vision from the Lord. 

-And because Jesus talked about this so much, I don’t want us to miss one of the applications for us today. Look at vs 38 here:

-Friends, this means we need to actively be praying that the gospel continues to go out, that more people are called by the Lord to go out and share the gospel. But this message isn’t just for others, we’re included in that “workers” word. There’s a reason we end every service saying: “you are sent.” God welcomes you in each week, and then God sends us out each week to live as his witnesses and to share the gospel in our words and our lives.

-But that’s only 1 harvest, John is given a glimpse of another harvest:

• The Grape Harvest (17-20)

-Differences: first is done by the Son of Man, second by an angel. This one has some connection to the altar and the fire on the altar. This second one talks about the implication of the harvest, first one just mentions that the earth was harvested, so it seems like a bit of a stretch to argue that this is exactly the same as the previous one.

-First thing is an angel with a sickle, we’ve seen a sickle before! He’s ready to go, but he’s waiting for the call, so yet ANOTHER angel comes with a message.

-“Authority over fire” connection back to 8:3-5, judgment coming because of the prayers of the saints, which I think is also signified by “came from the altar” which also connects us back to the saints in Rev. 6:9 There the martyrs are begging God to return in judgment and avenge them, but they’re told to wait a little longer. Now we’re seeing that time has come.

-Instead of wheat, this time he’s to gather clusters of grapes because they’re ripe, and this is where the story diverges from the previous harvest. The grapes are successfully harvested, but then they thrown into a great winepress of God’s wrath.

-This connects to last week’s text again, 10 “he will also drink the wine of God’s wrath,” so John is saying where this judgment is coming from. Wine pressing is an interesting phenomenon in the 1^st cent. The way wine was made was stomping on the grapes in a winepress until the juice flowed out, that juice was collected and preserved to let it ferment and create wine. 

-This idea is actually picked up in Rev. 19 in a description of Jesus. The one who’s enacting God’s judgment is Jesus. We talked a bit last week about God’s wrath, but don’t miss that Jesus is also wrathful. So often Jesus is pictured as a hippy who walked around with long flowing locks and told everyone to just get along, but that couldn’t be further from the truth, the difficulty is Jesus just doesn’t play by the same earthly rules that we tend to get so bogged down in. He doesn’t have to play the power game because He’s already reigning supremely. And while His first coming was in humility, His second coming is with a vengeance.

-But there are some things for us to note about this pressing of the wine. First: outside the city. We have an opposite idea of the city today than the 1^st century would have!

-City provided protection and safety from the oppression of the wilderness where you could be robbed or attacked by wild animals. I have a friend who lives in downtown St. Paul and anytime he offers to host a meeting I ask if it’s safe to come in there from the burbs! Outside the city is where you were left to fend for yourself, and this is even more true when you realize that coming up in Rev. 21, the city of God will come down to be the place where God’s people can live securely, so being pressed outside of the city is a terrifying reality.

-And even more terrifying: what flows out isn’t juice but a river of blood up to about 5’ for 1,600 stadia (which is approximately the length of Palestine 1,664 stadia), symbolically it’s 4×4 by 10×10 – if you can think back to 7:1 we saw the 4 corners of the earth, thinking back to Rev. 4 there are 4 living creatures, so 4 is often referring to all of creation, then 10 refers to completeness, so what’s signified is the way God’s wrath extends to all of creation.

-One of the most significant things we’ve seen through this book is the reality that there are only 2 ways to live: either for God or against God, and everyone is moving closer to one of those realities with each decision they make.

-One of the incredible things about this section in Revelation is the judgment only comes after the eternal gospel has been proclaimed. Look back in your Bibles to 14:7 “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come. Worship the one who made heaven and earth.” How do we do that? 

• Blood Enough?

-Throughout this section there has been this idea of wine and blood almost intermixed. Those who have the name of the beast will drink the wine of God’s wrath, here we see that wine is actually blood and condemnation on those who are opposed to God, but even in the midst of this, there is good news because someone has drunk the entire cup of God’s wrath, and now stands willing to welcome us in with open arms where we won’t need to drink that cup or be crushed in the winepress of God’s wrath, someone who took all of God’s wrath on Himself and now gives the freedom to live a new life: Jesus.

-The reality is this description of brutality described here could also be seen as describing the payment Jesus made. Do you know where Jesus was crucified? Outside the city. And think of how Isaiah describes the crucifixion in Isa. 53 Jesus was trampled so that we don’t need to be, his blood poured out so that ours doesn’t need to be.

-And what about the 1,600 stadia? Quote from Discipleship on the Edge What an incredible blessing that we have! Jesus was crushed on our behalf, His blood ran freely so that ours wouldn’t. His blood is enough to cover every sin of those who repent and believe in Him.

-Jesus talks about this idea on his last night before the crucifixion, He pleads with His Father to take the cup of wrath away, but submits Himself to His Father. Friends, Jesus drank the whole cup, not a drop of wrath needs to be given to any of us IF we trust in Jesus as the one true Messiah, the Savior of the world.

-Salvation is both the most difficult and easy thing in the world. Difficult because it meant someone had to die, someone’s blood had to run, someone had to drink the full cup of wrath. But easy because now you don’t have to, now the Bible says salvation requires 2 things: confess and believe. Confess with your mouth that Jesus Christ is Lord, that He reigns over everything and is worthy to be worshipped and praised, and then believe that truth in your heart which means focusing your life in a different direction, and this is true for all of us, whether you’re a brand new believer or you’ve been a believer for 100 years, if you believe that Jesus Christ is Lord, do you live like it? What step do you need to take today to better live in Jesus’ kingdom here?