This is really good Jason. Very happy to see someone else preaching the Gospel from Revelation. It is my opinion that if we will take the dark and difficult parts of Scripture and preach the Gospel from them that the difficulty will go away faster than we think. I'm going to copypasta here a piece of my sermon, 'Left Behind, Just don't call me late for dinner' where I attempt much the same thing that you did here. https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/left-behind-just-dont-call-me-late-forhtml
'When He invited us to Resurrection we only saw the Death that is the door through which we must pass to that Resurrection. When He invited us to enjoy Him, we only saw that we must lose ourselves. He offers us Heaven and we are too busy grieving the loss of Earth to appreciate the offer. And don't imagine that you and I aren't in that number for as it says, the kings, the great, the rich, the mighty, every slave and every free, it is hard to find an exception to that set. This is the Judgment. That we prefer our life which is death to the death of Christ which is life,our darkness to His light. There is a sort of understated irony which is very characteristic of the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth, which I find in the phrase "wrath of the Lamb" Although sheep are much more common in the Old World than they are in the American South, the word used here is a little lamb and would have felt much the same to the first readers of this story as it does to us. There is a clear portrayal of passive helplessness, and of course Jewish readers would have felt the sacrificial tones of the word lamb quite as much as we do. What animal could be less inclined to show wrath than a little lamb? Of course as John has already pointed out in chapter 5 this lamb is dead, dead to wrath and alive to grace. I don't know much about Greek but it seems to me that there is another bit of irony in the word translated throughout Revelation as "wrath". When I was studying all of this I became curious about this wrath and looked it up. It describes feelings so strong that they can't be contained and an alternate translation is passion. Hide us from the Passion of Christ. When this was written the end of Christ's life hadn't yet come to be called His Passion but I think that that illustrates the problem we have with the Apocalypse rather nicely. His way of Salvation is a way that features a guilty verdict, suffering, Death, and Hell, it has all of the external characteristics of wrath, it is only when you get inside that you can perceive it as passion. Which I think is why at the Seventh Seal there is silence in Heaven. Christ has stooped down to open the knowledge of God to us and we have made excuses not to take Him up on the offer. He set the Scroll that is the Express Image of God right before us and we were too attached to our own notions of who God is to take a look. It is the silence of shock and awe. Not shock and awe though at our stubborn stupidity but at the lengths to which Christ is about to go to get guests at His party.'
Thank you Jason!! I know you spent some hours writing this sermon. Use it often. And dream how we can join with all seekers of New Age, like on the Uniting Higher Consciousness Symposium, and all those with Tom Oord and Open and Relational Theology and have a new evolution of LOVE INCARNATE expressing in every person....knowing we have been freed from fear of death, hell and the grave. This would be the Kingdom of God, the kindom of God, on earth as it is in heaven.
This is really good Jason. Very happy to see someone else preaching the Gospel from Revelation. It is my opinion that if we will take the dark and difficult parts of Scripture and preach the Gospel from them that the difficulty will go away faster than we think. I'm going to copypasta here a piece of my sermon, 'Left Behind, Just don't call me late for dinner' where I attempt much the same thing that you did here. https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/left-behind-just-dont-call-me-late-forhtml
'When He invited us to Resurrection we only saw the Death that is the door through which we must pass to that Resurrection. When He invited us to enjoy Him, we only saw that we must lose ourselves. He offers us Heaven and we are too busy grieving the loss of Earth to appreciate the offer. And don't imagine that you and I aren't in that number for as it says, the kings, the great, the rich, the mighty, every slave and every free, it is hard to find an exception to that set. This is the Judgment. That we prefer our life which is death to the death of Christ which is life,our darkness to His light. There is a sort of understated irony which is very characteristic of the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth, which I find in the phrase "wrath of the Lamb" Although sheep are much more common in the Old World than they are in the American South, the word used here is a little lamb and would have felt much the same to the first readers of this story as it does to us. There is a clear portrayal of passive helplessness, and of course Jewish readers would have felt the sacrificial tones of the word lamb quite as much as we do. What animal could be less inclined to show wrath than a little lamb? Of course as John has already pointed out in chapter 5 this lamb is dead, dead to wrath and alive to grace. I don't know much about Greek but it seems to me that there is another bit of irony in the word translated throughout Revelation as "wrath". When I was studying all of this I became curious about this wrath and looked it up. It describes feelings so strong that they can't be contained and an alternate translation is passion. Hide us from the Passion of Christ. When this was written the end of Christ's life hadn't yet come to be called His Passion but I think that that illustrates the problem we have with the Apocalypse rather nicely. His way of Salvation is a way that features a guilty verdict, suffering, Death, and Hell, it has all of the external characteristics of wrath, it is only when you get inside that you can perceive it as passion. Which I think is why at the Seventh Seal there is silence in Heaven. Christ has stooped down to open the knowledge of God to us and we have made excuses not to take Him up on the offer. He set the Scroll that is the Express Image of God right before us and we were too attached to our own notions of who God is to take a look. It is the silence of shock and awe. Not shock and awe though at our stubborn stupidity but at the lengths to which Christ is about to go to get guests at His party.'
Thank you Jason!! I know you spent some hours writing this sermon. Use it often. And dream how we can join with all seekers of New Age, like on the Uniting Higher Consciousness Symposium, and all those with Tom Oord and Open and Relational Theology and have a new evolution of LOVE INCARNATE expressing in every person....knowing we have been freed from fear of death, hell and the grave. This would be the Kingdom of God, the kindom of God, on earth as it is in heaven.
Thank you for this message!