The End?

This morning the Lord led me to Revelation 19 for my morning reading and it seemed very odd to me. Part of the reason is that lately I have been in Paul's epistles trying to learn about how grace and action work together, the other part is that since moving on from the Alliance church years ago Revelations kind of faded into the background. It has been like I put it back up on the shelf in favor of the other 65 books. This morning though, the Lord took it down, dusted it off for me and got me thinking about perspectives. Revelations 19 is about the marriage of the Lamb and the final defeat of the beast and the false prophet, it is glad tidings to the saints of the final great victory of our King and the revelation of our place in it all. The perspective came in when I realised that it is pretty rare that I think about what those last days will be like for me, or if I go before it happens, what the end of my days will look like. I am not sure if it is the death part that averts my eyes from the latter, but it is a place I rarely go. Truthfully the death part I think about, but the afterward is something that skips away like a rock on still water. I think it will be healthy to start thinking on these things again. The church I am in now focusses a lot on prophecy of the gifting kind and somewhere along the way I forgot about the prophecy of the 'end kind'.


One of our pastors and his wife used to preach about how they would meditate on heaven and what the bible says it will be like as a part of following the rich traditions of our forefathers in the faith. This led them to revelations about the greatness of the hope that is spelled out in the epistles again and again. It caused them to lift their eyes up from this earth as it says in Col. 3:1 and set them in the great reality of God's kingdom. It inflamed their faith. I guess if my hope is placed in something I never look at or think about it will become a weak and trivial thing, unable to look at the world with an active faith. This world will become all and my faith will be but a shade on its face.
The interesting thing about all this is the amount of opposition I can feel inside of me to this whole proposal. There is a great shouting going on all around me (not my kids :) )which is saying that this is too much effort, saying that it is easier to just slide on by and let the end be what it will be. There is a great opposition which tells me that this is the way I should go. The marriage of the Lamb is about invitation not opposition..........yet.