Hope Blog

▶ 1:00:10

Matt opened the letter to Ephesus — the first of the seven letters Jesus has
John write down in Revelation — and then immediately postponed it. Before reading the letter,
he wanted to know where its furniture came from. A theme has been running through these
chapters: lanterns, lamps, menorahs. “I think today’s the day we should go back and look at
what’s up with the lamps.” The place to look was the Old Testament.

Why we start with two discouraged men in a ruined city

▶ 1:01:51

The backstory is short. Judah is carried off to Babylon, eventually allowed to come home,
and comes home to a temple in ruins, a small population, and no money. A prophet named
Zechariah is sent to tell them to stay faithful and rebuild — not everyone wanted them to, and
the people themselves were more interested in their own farms and houses. Haggai, preaching at
the same time, names the two men who have to lead it:
Zerubbabel the
governor and Joshua the high priest. One holds the civil authority, the other the
religious. Both need encouraging.

1. Joshua, and a change of clothes

▶ 1:04:12

Zechariah dreams, and sees the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord with
Satan at his
right hand to accuse him. It is an intense scene, and Joshua does not speak in it. What
happens is done to him.

Filthy garments and clean ones are a theme readers of Revelation will recognize. And Matt
pressed on who is being clothed. A high priest represents the people to God and God to the
people; here he and his friends are explicitly called “men who are a sign.” The forgiveness is
not a private favor to Joshua. It is God’s posture toward a whole people — and it is tied to
two strange images:
a servant
called the branch, and a single stone with seven eyes, after which “I will remove the
iniquity of this land in a single day.” For the branch, he pointed to
Isaiah 11
and left it there. One day of forgiveness for a whole land, a branch, a rock. Something is
being promised that no rebuilt temple could deliver.

2. The lampstand, and whose power builds a temple

▶ 1:08:22

The next vision is the one that matters for Revelation. Zechariah sees
a solid gold
lampstand with seven lamps, and two olive trees beside it, and admits to the angel that he
has no idea what he is looking at. Matt admitted the same — he would rather have the picture
than the description. But the explanation is given, and it is not an explanation of the
hardware:

That is a pointed word for a governor. Zerubbabel has a police force, resources, authority —
every reason to think the project stands or falls on his competence. God tells him the mountain
in front of him becomes a plain, and the capstone goes up “amid shouts of Grace, grace to it.”
Then the seven lamps Zechariah has been staring at are named:
“These seven
are the eyes of the Lord, which range through the whole earth.”

▶ 1:11:48

What eyes ranging over the earth are for is spelled out elsewhere:

So the lamp is not a warning light. It is support. Stay faithful, be a light in a dark
place, and God’s presence will be with you — because this was always his work and his Spirit.

3. The one who walks among them

▶ 1:13:27

Now the letter. Revelation
1:20 has already told us the lampstands are the churches, and with Zechariah in hand that
lands differently. Jesus is the light of the world, and he turns to his disciples and says they
are too — and the ministry expected of them will be accomplished by God’s Spirit, not their
might. That is as true of a church as it was of a governor.

It also matters that Jesus is described as walking among the lampstands. In each of these
letters he introduces himself with the detail that fits what he is about to say — to Smyrna,
the one who
died and came to life, who then asks for faithfulness unto death. Here, the one who is
already among them. He knows their thoughts, their troubles, their successes.

▶ 1:14:56

Matt slowed down on the commendation. Toil is not activity; it is costly service. Patient
endurance is not what you have when nothing is going wrong. And the testing is genuinely
impressive — Paul had warned these very people that
wolves would come
in among them, and they held. A discouraged church short on numbers, offered a partnership
with a charismatic, credentialed newcomer, is exactly the church that takes the deal anyway.
Ephesus cared more about the gospel they had received than about the help. “I would love for
Jesus to be able to say this to us.”

4. A lamp is a witness

▶ 1:19:39

Before touching the love question, Matt wanted the lamp traced forward. In
Isaiah 42
God gives his servant “as a light for the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring
out the prisoners from the dungeon.” Light in this vocabulary means liberation — someone in the
dark gets out. And when Revelation introduces
the two
witnesses, doing exactly that to the kingdoms of darkness, it calls them the two olive
trees. Which is where we last saw olive trees: standing beside Zechariah’s lamp, attached to
the sentence about the Spirit.

▶ 1:22:27

Jesus talks this way too. Do
you bring out a lamp to put it under a basket? Obviously not. And in the same breath: “from
the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” Matt noted the echo and let it sit.
Was that a threat to take away a lamp?

▶ 1:23:43

Then he stopped and voiced the objection himself: “You might feel like I’m shoving the lamp
stuff into this letter that’s really all about that love and feeling.” His answer is that the
imagery is load-bearing. The lampstand says God is the light of the world and is accomplishing
that through his people by his Spirit; the light is God’s own ministry among people, seeking and
saving. The letter opens with Jesus among the lampstands and closes with the threat of removing
one. That is not decoration around a message about feelings. It is the message — which is why
the remedy he actually gives is
remember,
repent, and do the works you did at first. Read it carefully, Matt said, and you notice “he
doesn’t say drum up an emotional feeling again.”

5. Finishing the letter: the Nicolaitans, and the tree of life

▶ 1:25:40

“I want to continue, so we’ll finish the letter and we’ll come back to the love stuff.” The
last two verses do two things at once.

Who the Nicolaitans
were is not spelled out, and Matt did not pretend otherwise — are they the same crowd as the
false apostles? “I don’t know.” But the parallel movements in the neighboring letters are
explained, so we do not have to be too curious: to Pergamum he names
the teaching
of Balaam and to Thyatira
Jezebel —
both ancient names used as labels for a movement, and both times Jesus says what the movement
teaches: food sacrificed to idols, and sexual immorality. Same old stuff under a new name, and
the Ephesians knew exactly what he meant. The part Matt found striking was the commendation
itself: “there are occasions where Jesus would really like it if we hate certain things, because
he does too.”

And then the letter does not end on the threat. It ends with an invitation to whoever has
ears — to the one who conquers, the tree of life in the paradise of God. The lampstand can be
removed; the tree is what is being held out.

6. What Jesus is not saying about love

▶ 1:27:22

“Okay, back to the love thing.” Matt started by conceding something nobody in the room would
argue with: the world around us does not consistently hold a pure and godly view of love. “If
you want to contend with me on that, that’s fine, just talk to me later.” Dysfunctional versions
are as common as McDonald’s, and our culture mostly uses the word for the positive way we feel
inside. Is the warm fuzzies the core of what Jesus is asking for here? Maybe it is related.
Maybe it is not.

▶ 1:28:02

The text itself does not prescribe an emotion. It prescribes three verbs: remember, repent,
do. And when scripture does explain love, it goes the same direction:

He walked it a phrase at a time, and every phrase came out as a verb. Patience is not sitting
still because everything is easy — “patience is actually when you’re eagerly waiting for
something you don’t have, or when things are difficult and you’re engaging actively in
long-suffering.” Not envying or boasting counts especially when you are tempted to. “This is
active behavior that’s engaged in choices.” When the Bible outlines love it does not camp out on
a positive feeling unconnected to behavior — which makes it make more sense that Jesus says
remember, repent and do, or I will remove your lampstand.

▶ 1:29:55

And that lands the whole Zechariah detour. “All of that was really good parallels to
Zerubbabel,” Matt said — this light-to-the-nations project is God’s own project and he will
accomplish it. “It is not on our backs to toil hard enough to make the church project work.” So
the point of the verbs is not that we out-work the problem. We should not camp out on whether we
worked hard enough; that was never the main thing.

▶ 1:30:29

Here he flagged a bunny trail, and it is worth the detour. It mattered enormously that
Ephesus cared which gospel they were preaching — that they siphoned the truth off from the
falsehood and kept the true. Some people find it baffling that doctrine would matter to a God of
grace. It is a kind of color blindness, Matt said, and there is a matching one on the other
side: the person who signed up because Christianity is true and correct and we do the right
things, and cannot see why love would be the thing Jesus brings up. He cares about it enough to
threaten a lampstand over it.

▶ 1:31:35

Back to verse four, and Matt noticed what is missing. “He doesn’t even say love to him, or
love for him, or love for the outside world, or love for the brothers.” The object is left open;
it is genuinely a little ambiguous. What is not ambiguous is the instruction that follows —
remember, repent, do. So there are a couple of ways forward. Maybe returning to your first love
really is centered on affection and positive feeling; that is possible. Or maybe love is the
loyalty and faithfulness and endurance themselves, with the warm feelings along for the ride.
“I’m not even sure how important those differences are,” he said, “because it’s obvious from what
I’m seeing that Jesus does care about the remember, the repent, and the do.”

▶ 1:33:02

Then he named the move he distrusts, including in his own preaching. Jesus says they have
abandoned their first love; the preacher supplies an obvious definition of first love and builds
from there as though Jesus had said it. “I would hate for the warm fuzzies version of this letter
to be the back door that false versions of love sneak into my understanding of Jesus.” He said it
twice, in two ways, to make sure it landed: you can hold back the floodgates of what the world
says love is everywhere else, and then accidentally let it in right here. “I don’t want to take
just what the world says love is, and then put a Jesus sticker on it, and then just keep it.”

Infatuation is real — “I love your socks, I love the way you make toast.” The mature version
is forty years later, in sickness and in health. Matt did not rule out that affection is part of
what Jesus means. His point was narrower and harder to dodge: whatever it is, if it is real,
according to Jesus it will look like remember, repent, and do.

▶ 1:34:50

And he pushed on why it matters practically. Imagine the alternative actually enforced: you
endure faithfully through hardship, but unless you are emotionally hot at all times, Jesus is
ready to reject you. What about the morning you wake up sick, or the week after someone you love
dies? What about someone autistic? “Are you not a Christian that day until you get over it?”
Would you have to live under judgment for having had a regular day thinking about regular things?
That is a nightmarish scenario, with Jesus “constantly hovering,” and it is not the letter.

7. The love at the center of it is his

▶ 1:35:26

An action-oriented definition of love raises the bar, and Matt granted that immediately:
“there’s a greater expectation from me if what it means to love Christ actually involves the way
I live.” It would land as a heavier demand — except that one of our worst diseases is running
everything through a lens of ourselves. Jesus never said he would be unhappy until we loved him
back in the same measure. “He didn’t say, look, I’m going to come to your church and just wreck
you unless you pay me back in love the same amount I’ve given to you.” The foundation everyone
here is standing on is his love, and the same logic applies to it: if love is action, then his
love is action. His works are complete and never lacking.

▶ 1:38:00

Which is the relief. It is “not just a thoughts and prayers hashtag that he sends from really
far away.” He is near — the one who walks among the lampstands. Matt listed the evidence,
starting with what he called the minor things, which is why we love the gifts of the Spirit:
prophetic encouragement, the dead raised, sight given to the blind, the sick healed, the
brokenhearted encouraged, people visited in dreams who do not yet know him — Muslims all over the
Middle East. And then the major one: he showed his love by self-sacrificially dying and giving us
his life, and that was not half-hearted, not a flare of emotional zeal. It was real and true
commitment.

▶ 1:39:44

So the wrong way to read this letter is to use it as an occasion to beat yourself up for
insufficient zeal and then resolve to manufacture more. That source runs dry immediately. “If we
want to grow in love, we should stop thinking about our own love and ourselves generally, and
start thinking about the wonder and the awe of his love for us” — the love that
came first,
that is complete, that did not cut corners. “He gets off his throne. He comes near. He comes near
you when you’re depressed or brokenhearted. He is God with us.” It is absolutely crucial that we
read this letter and ask what the Spirit is saying — and there are broken ways to do that which
will not be productive at all. So Matt ended by doing it the other way, out loud: Holy Spirit,
come; what are you saying to Hope Chapel in this letter; help us walk in your love abundantly.

▶ 1:04:35

Matt has been working through Revelation for several weeks, and he admitted
that when he first announced the plan he felt defensive before anyone had said a word. The
book carries odd associations. So he keeps re-laying the foundation, and he did it again
before reading a line.

Whose book this is

▶ 1:06:30

“This is part of the inheritance of the saints,” Matt said. “This is no specific fringe
group or political motive group — this is not their property. This is ours.” Its first phrase
names its subject: the
revelation of Jesus Christ. As best he can tell, the book exists to inspire faithful
endurance in the saints whatever their circumstances, and the engine driving that endurance is
a greater and greater sense of how thoroughly Jesus is at the center of everything — which
matters enormously to a church that is cowering, or tempted to.

How to read a book full of strange pictures

▶ 1:08:15

Before opening Revelation the church spent time asking how the Bible itself handles bizarre
imagery. Pharaoh
dreamed of cattle coming up out of the Nile, and the years of plenty and famine really
arrived — but nobody had to watch for amphibious cows. The pattern holds: God shows something
strange, and where he supplies the interpretation, that interpretation is solid. Matt counted
roughly fourteen such places in Revelation. Everything else he holds open-handed.

▶ 1:09:18

“There were people who memorized the Torah and were super expert in Hebrew and Hebrew
customs who stood right in front of Jesus and missed him,” he said. It is not a matter of being
smart enough. Two things anyone can do: find where the text explains itself, and notice where it
deliberately reaches back into the Old Testament, then go ask what that meant the first time.
The call for discernment that closes each letter — he who has an ear, let him hear —
belongs to the same tradition as
Isaiah’s
commission to a people who hear and do not hear. Strange imagery is part of how God gets the
attention of people who are not paying attention.

The shape of a letter

▶ 1:10:51

Each of the seven follows a rough outline: John is told to write to the angel of the church
— a job description, Matt noted, not a species, since Scripture lets a man, a celestial being or
even a donkey speak on God’s behalf. Jesus then describes himself in terms that fit what he is
about to say. Then the commendation. Then the accusation. Then a call to repent or to hold fast,
a call for discernment, and a promise to the one who conquers. Not every letter carries all
seven parts — some get no commendation, some get no charge laid against them.

The letters are the whole book in miniature

▶ 1:14:25

This was the part Matt said he needed help to see. False apostles are named in the letters;
the true apostles’ names are on the foundations of the New Jerusalem. Churches are faltering
lamps here; there God himself is the light. Here the church struggles with purity; there the
bride is stunning. Promises made in the letters — the tree of life, dining with Jesus, a place
in the temple, a new name, white clothing, protection from the second death — all come back
fulfilled in the visions.
“Here
is a call for the endurance of the saints” is stated plainly twice in the middle of those
visions, in case the pictures lose you.

▶ 1:17:56

His clearest example: Thyatira is rebuked for tolerating
a
false prophet Jesus calls Jezebel. The queen of that name married into Israel, brought her
idolatry, killed prophets, and at the end
painted
her face, looked out a window, was thrown down and eaten by animals. Later in Revelation a
woman decked out in finery says
“I
sit as a queen, I am no widow”, feasts on the saints, and meets the same end. The letters
and the visions are saying one thing in two registers.

Smyrna: poor, and rich

▶ 1:20:34

▶ 1:22:05

The tribulation and the poverty are named together, and Matt thinks they are connected.
Smyrna was devoted not only to Rome’s empire but to Rome’s religion, emperor worship included,
and the city’s Jewish community had stopped sheltering Christians under its own respected
antiquity. If you would not worship as your trade guild worshiped, you could lose the guild —
and with it your work, your customers, your pension, and anyone who might help you in a bad
month. Add looting and mob violence with no authority who cares that you were robbed, and
poverty arrives fast.

▶ 1:23:15

“Synagogue of Satan” sounds like fighting words until you hear the word. Satan is
Hebrew for accuser, slanderer, opponent. These believers were being accused and slandered, and
Jesus opens by telling them he sees it. “Sometimes it’s really encouraging to know that the
authority figure you care about most understands when someone’s lying about you,” Matt said.
“People might slander you, but God knows what’s real.” His books are what everything will
finally be graded by.

Ten days, like Daniel

▶ 1:24:35

▶ 1:25:52

Daniel and his friends were heroes of the faith to the early church, and “ten days” is a
hint back to them — the kind of echo that is obvious if you live in the Old Testament and
invisible if you do not. Taken to Babylon, pressed into the king’s service and the king’s food,
Daniel asked to
be
tested for ten days so that everyone would know where his loyalty lay. His friends said the
rest of it in front of the furnace:
our
God is able to deliver us, but if not, we still will not bow. That, Matt said, is the
comfort and the warning together: “Be faithful whether I rescue you or not.”

It is all right to want a reward

▶ 1:27:07

Jesus never motivates by failure and loss. He motivates by treasure, honor and reward — he
simply insists the treasure be his kind, in his economy:
“where
your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” The crown of life is not handed out
lightly. To have Jesus stand before the Father and speak your name would be an incomparable
honor — a true riches moment, and by his accounting Smyrna is not losing at all.

Sardis: a reputation for being alive

▶ 1:28:38

▶ 1:29:41

Jesus fits his self-description to the church. To Smyrna, facing death, he is the one who
died and came to life — not asking them to go anywhere he has not already been. To Sardis he is
the one holding the seven stars, which
chapter
one has already identified as the angels of the seven churches. “I am the top CEO of this
whole operation,” Matt paraphrased. “These are my lampstands. This is my church. I am running the
show.” And then: you have a reputation for being alive, but you are dead. Matt was honest that
he is not sure he could have taken in the rest of the letter after a line like that.

▶ 1:31:38

Wake up means pay attention, watch out — which is not what you say to a lost cause.
Perhaps there had been a remarkable beginning, a story everyone still tells, and things changed
spiritually without anyone admitting it. Strengthen what remains. Even the prophets, who
regularly announced that it was too late, kept calling for repentance anyway, because God is
generous.

Soiled garments and the book of life

▶ 1:32:13

▶ 1:34:58

White garments are later explained as the righteous deeds of the saints; the contrast is
soiled cloth, something meant to provoke disgust. The book carries its own history. After the
golden calf, Moses told God
to
forgive Israel or else blot him out of the book he had written — forgive them, or take me
with them. The same book appears in
Psalm
69:28 and
Daniel
12:1: to be in it is to belong to him, to be alive, to be able to stand in front of him.

An odd couple

▶ 1:35:46

Smyrna gets only commendation; Sardis gets none. And notice that Sardis has no reported
trouble with its neighbors — possibly because it found a way to live more safely among them.
Opposition comes either way. The difference is the source: Smyrna’s opponents are pagan, and
Sardis’s opponent is Christ. Matt reached for David after the census, given his choice of
judgments:
“Let
us fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is great.” If Christ says he opposes you,
the instinct is to hide. Walking straight into his arms is the right move.

“It doesn’t matter what was a long time ago. It doesn’t matter what our reputation as a
church was in the past,” Matt said. “What good did it do the church in Sardis that they had a
great reputation? Who cares. In fact it might have done some negative, because you could cling
to it and lie to yourself.”

How do you get the attention of people who aren’t paying attention?

▶ 1:39:05

This was the question Matt kept circling, out of his years as an algebra teacher and his
years as a parent. Make a general announcement and the people who comply are the people who
were already listening. Send the company-wide email and the ones who needed it did not read it.
So he asked it of himself: what would it take for God to speak to me where I am not listening to
him?

▶ 1:41:05

He declined to supply the applications. We want to be Smyrna even though it is harder —
motivated by his approval, his glory, his reward. The pull toward Sardis is the pull toward
coasting on reputation and easing into whatever draws no opposition. He left the room with the
question rather than a list: how is God prompting you to respond?

One more thing

▶ 1:42:39

He had already prayed when he came back to the microphone, unwilling to end where he had
ended. The entire reason Jesus writes to Sardis is that he wants them back. “He’s the one that
pursues us when we’re out of whack. The reason why he chastises is because he loves us. On the
other end of every chastisement is an invitation to restoration, an invitation to fellowship.
That is his goal.”

▶ 1:43:22

Then a story from campus outreach at UT that week, with a person raised Christian who now
calls themselves Buddhist and opened by asking why Matt was still a Christian. Isn’t it selfish
to believe all this is for humanity’s sake? “If God made everything and it belongs to him, it’s
for his glorious sake. I’m not the one at the center of the universe — he is.” Then doesn’t that
make him selfish? “If he’s the best thing around, then him giving himself to us is the best
thing he could do.” Both times the answer came back: yeah, I guess. So the closing line was not
a threat. “He wants us to repent and fall into his arms. He doesn’t want to smash us to pieces.
Compromise might feel good, but there’s nothing like walking in his wholeness.”

▶ 1:07:34

Matt restated the premise of the series before doing anything else, because
the premise is doing all the work. We are reading Revelation because it is a call to
believers to be and remain faithful to Jesus regardless of circumstance — and the engine
behind that call is a revelation of who God is and what he is like. “I don’t think it’s a
comfort based on giving you a sneak peek of what’s going to happen play by play,” he said.
“Instead it’s an encouragement to stay faithful to him because of who he is.”

Where the first two weeks landed

▶ 1:08:56

Two weeks ago the room read through a pile of strange biblical images: cows coming up out
of the Nile, baskets on a man’s head, dreams of statues and trees, a woman sitting in a
basket. The pattern held every time. The weird image means something, and once the Lord
explains it, the meaning is plain. Nobody needs to know what species of cow Pharaoh saw or
which stretch of the Nile it came from; when Joseph gives the explanation, it is years of
plenty and years of famine
(Genesis 41).
“The explanations are sensible and easy,” Matt said. “Even a child could follow it.”

Last week asked the follow-up question: why would God do bizarre things at all? Not to
show off how creative he is, or how slow we are. He does it to get our attention, because
there is a spiritual dullness that can settle over people who have eyes and do not see.
David knew the commandment against adultery perfectly well. He was not listening. It took
Nathan telling a story about a poor man’s lamb to get his heart engaged sideways, and only
then did he feel the weight of what he had done
(2 Samuel 12).

1. The letter is addressed to us too

▶ 1:11:45

Today’s reading was the description of Jesus in Revelation 1 — which is not only the
opening of the book but the launching pad for all seven letters that follow. Each one
reaches back to this heavenly man as the reason the churches should do what he asks.

That blessing is not restricted to the seven congregations named later. Anyone who hears
this and keeps it is blessed — which means we are not merely eavesdropping on somebody
else’s mail. Everything Jesus says to them applies to us, and so does this description of
him.

2. “The ruler of kings on earth”

▶ 1:13:45

John greets them from the one who is and who was and who is to come, and from
Jesus
Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on
earth. Matt slowed down on that last phrase, because it lands very differently depending
on who you are.

Rome had no great love for Judaism but did respect its age, and that bought Jews certain
exemptions in the empire. Early on those protections covered Christians too, simply because
no provincial governor was going to sort out which subgroup of a subgroup anybody belonged
to — they were all Jews to him. But as Jewish leaders distanced themselves from the
Christian movement, Rome eventually caught on, and the tolerance was withdrawn in tandem
with expulsion from the synagogue. John himself is writing from exile on a prison island
(Revelation 1:9–11).
Many of the people hearing this letter were feeling the same pressure economically and
socially. For them, who actually rules the kings is not an abstraction.

3. Dancing around the divine name

▶ 1:16:07

“Who is and who was and who is to come” is how God speaks of himself through Isaiah when
he challenges the idols: “I
am the first, and I am the last.” But Matt pushed further. John is doing something
deliberate with grammar.

Greek-speaking Jews rendered that name a particular way. John reuses their exact wording
in Revelation 1:4 — in a sentence where it is grammatically wrong to do so. “He spelled it
wrong on purpose,” Matt said, waving off the technical detail. That is the whole point:
Jesus is the one who is.

4. A voice like a trumpet

▶ 1:21:22

Why a trumpet? Not a drum, not simply a loud voice. Because there is one place in Israel’s
memory where a trumpet blast keeps getting louder and louder while a mountain smokes and God
answers in thunder — Sinai, after he has brought his people out of slavery
(Exodus 19:16–19).

▶ 1:23:23

The same logic runs through the other sounds. When Ezekiel watches the glory of God
return to the temple, the sound of his coming is
like the
roar of many waters, and Jesus has that voice here and again in
Revelation 14:2.
Matt made sure nobody pictured something pleasant. “Have you ever been next to a really big
waterfall? It’s not a nice trickle. It’s scary — you think, man, if I got under that it
would crush me.”

Every one of these echoes points at the same credential. The God being described is the
one who has already proved he can get his people out from under an empire. That is exactly
the résumé these churches needed to read. And Matt was careful about what it does and does
not mean: “It’s not that God wants to crush Rome, because remember, he wants to save the
centurion.”

5. The Ancient of Days, in a human body

▶ 1:27:43

We have already met the God of the Exodus in this chapter. Now comes a second portrait,
aimed at a different kind of ache — people who feel alone and in exile. Read the description
beside Daniel and it stops looking like decoration.
Daniel 7:9–10
gives the Ancient of Days clothing white as snow, hair like pure wool, a throne of fiery
flames with burning wheels, a stream of fire issuing out from before him, a thousand thousands
serving him and ten thousand times ten thousand standing before him while the court sits in
judgment and the books are opened. John hands those same features to Jesus. “Daniel’s
description of the Ancient of Days matches John’s description for Jesus,” Matt said, “which
makes you want to pause and think about that.” He is being shown as the one who rules, the one
who has authority, the one attended by many. And in Daniel the two are separate characters:

He looks human, which is why he is called a son of man — and he rides the clouds, which,
as Matt put it, “in the ancient Near East meant you’re a God.” The gleaming-metal body comes
from Ezekiel’s vision of a figure with a human appearance seated above a throne like sapphire:
from the waist up and the waist down, fire, “and there was brightness around him like the
appearance of the bow that is in the cloud on the day of rain… such was the appearance of the
likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell on my face”
(Ezekiel 1:26–28).

▶ 1:33:49

One more, and it is the psalm that gives him both the splendor and the chariot:

Exodus and exile, stacked on top of each other — two seasons when God’s people were owned
by someone else or had no home at all. God has a reputation in both: he can care for his
people when they are oppressed, ruled over and harassed, and he can care for them when they
are lost, without a place to call home, without any power at all, afraid and abandoned. Which
is precisely how the seven churches felt. “The mission isn’t called off,” Matt said. “It never
was. It never had to be.”

6. How this King actually won

▶ 1:32:19

So he received dominion and power and a kingdom. How? Watch the life. He conquered
through meekness, obedience and death. Matt would not let the glory and the method come
apart: “We serve a Lord who is not only lamb but lion, meek but mighty. When all things
culminate we will see his dominion and glory established forever, it will never be taken, he
is the actual conqueror — but to remind you, here’s how he won.”

That matters for people being harassed, because it tells them what kind of war they are
in. “He’s not going to win by sending the tanks against Rome. He’s going to win through his
meekness, through his blood, by saving people from the clutches of darkness.” And when he
invites you into his victory, Matt said, “you also know that we wage war the way he does
too.” The reassurance underneath it is blunt: if he has you in his grasp, the powers of
darkness cannot take you. He is the one who directs kings and kingdoms, and he can tear down,
plant, uproot and build as he wishes.

It also clarifies what he is rescuing them from — and Matt made the pressure concrete
before answering. The persecution in view is not only personal; it is threats and physical
violence reaching your mother, your sister, your children. So the churches need to remember
that the one they serve is able and mighty to save, and then be told exactly what he saves
from. Not inconvenience. Not even suffering. What he saves them from is their own sin, the
powers of darkness, the clutches of the enemy. He can say that because of what he says about
himself: he
died, and behold he is alive forevermore. And some of these churches are told plainly
that they will
follow
him into death. They know, Matt said, that inconvenience was never the thing on the
table.

7. The ones who pierced him

▶ 1:36:10

This was the part Matt clearly enjoyed most. In
Zechariah 12:2–4,
Jerusalem becomes a cup of staggering and then a heavy stone; all the nations of the earth
gather against it, and everyone who tries to lift it hurts himself. The rescue in that chapter
is aimed deliberately at the weakest people in it: the Lord saves the tents of Judah first, so
that no one’s glory outstrips anyone else’s, and
“the
feeblest among them on that day shall be like David” — with the house of David like God,
like the angel of the Lord going before them. Then God says how the rescue will actually
look:

Read the grammar slowly. God is speaking. They will look on me — on him
whom they have pierced. Matt kept asking the room the same questions rather than answering
them: who is talking, who are they looking at, why are they mourning — did he die? And how on
earth is a death the great rescue? All that power in a stone too heavy to lift, and he is
pierced.

▶ 1:41:04

Now watch what John does with that prophecy. In
Revelation 1:5–7
— “to him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood” — he is coming with the
clouds, every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the
earth will wail on account of him. In Zechariah the mourners were Jerusalem. In
Revelation they are everybody. “The very enemies who rallied against this rock are now the
beneficiaries of his death,” Matt said. Repentant Gentiles are the ones fulfilling the
prophecy of grace and mercy. It is not the Gentile oppressors God wants to destroy; it is
precisely them he wants to pour grace and mercy on. Which means the Romans pressing down on
these churches are not finally their enemies at all — they are the people God intends to
redeem. And that decides how these believers fight for their families and endure the trial:
by beholding the glorious Lord who conquered through his meek death, and walking with him.

8. Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth

▶ 1:43:25

John blends Zechariah’s prophecy with this one, and the reach of it is the point. All the
ends of the earth — “that includes centurions, that includes Babylonians, oppressors, the
powerful and the weak.” Matt refused to let anyone grade the rescue: “There’s no rescue for
the powerful that’s different for the weak. There is only one rescuer; there is no other.”
Then the application, quietly: “You can hold that in your heart as you feel weak, depressed,
oppressed, lonely, excluded, threatened.”

What this asks of us

▶ 1:45:48

Two things came out of the message. The main one: behold this Lord of glory, and let what
encouraged an oppressed church encourage us — especially when we feel powerless, or hopeless
about a nation we would rather God simply blew up. “Really,” Matt said, “we want him to save
the centurions, to conquer through his meekness and grace and mercy.” The secondary one, which
he ranked lower but plainly loves: notice how much Old Testament is packed into these sixteen
verses, and assume it is deliberate. “In my opinion the best context for the Book of Revelation
is the Old Testament, not necessarily the news.”

▶ 1:46:35

He closed on the surprise at the center of it. God knew the nations would gather against
the rock. What nobody saw coming — not even the powers of darkness — was that he would use
the death of an only child to bless those same nations with grace and mercy. “God is clever,
he’s tricky, but he’s good. He’s powerful — remember, the voice of a trumpet — but he’s also
meek and gentle, and he overcomes the way he wants to. He’s the original life-from-the-death
overcomer.”

Which makes the encouragement of Revelation something sturdier than optimism. It is not
“don’t worry, everything’s going to turn out fine.” It is: be and stay faithful regardless of
what happens, and you will get a crown of glory, walking in the footsteps of a master who
conquered by dying. Nobody can take those dominions and glories and powers from him, because
he is the actual King over all — and that is the story we are living in, Matt said, not the
story of mankind, one army against another army, this is how things work. Or, as he put it in
the last line before he prayed — stick with Jesus no matter what things look like. It is worth
it. We need to remember that too.