The Grand Coherence, Chapter 18: The Promises of God

This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.

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The metaphor with which I ended the last chapter served a certain purpose, but it needs correction. It pivoted us from one question, what we desire, which had just been settled, to another, whether we can possibly get it, which I proposed to study next. The metaphor expresses our need– we are hungry– and our hope that God will meet that need. But our position is much more helpless and desperate than that of a restaurant patron. So let's try another metaphor to make that point.

A huge hotel is burning. A thousand guests have been evacuated into the chilly night, and watch as the fire hoses spray thousands of gallons with little effect. Then there's a heartrending sound: a young child crying out, from deep within the hotel, doubtless in some still unburnt oasis amidst the general conflagration. The firefighters dash forward, hoping for a rescue, trying door after door, only to face deadly heat and collapsing structures everywhere they go. 

Just then, the world's greatest acrobat appears on the scene. Scaling a tall tree at lightning speed, he surveys the flaming ruins, then comes down and tells his plan. He'll save the child, he says, if only the firemen can catapult him onto that wire, along which he'll walk to get to that turret… and so on, a mad escapade of leaps and ropes and climbs and balancing, weaving through the less burning areas to reach that fateful room… and then a similar way back, carrying the child. The firefighters are flabbergasted by the impossible proposal. Yet there's no other option and nothing to lose, except the acrobat's life, which he's apparently ready to risk. The fire chief finally says, "All right, good luck!"

The crowd watches in wonder and horror as the acrobat is hurled through the air, catches the wire and swings over it twice before standing erect and beginning his perilous tightrope walk above the leaping flames. As he passes out of sight, still alive so far against all odds, the child's mother, standing amidst the crowd after cursing herself for earlier accepting mistaken assurances that her child had been removed from the building, begins desperately Googling the acrobat's career for signs of whether this rash hero really has any hope of succeeding.

It is with something of the trepidation of that mother that I look into the biblical record and study the history of God's promises and their fulfillment. For God has promised to save us, some of us at least, from the ruin to which we and the world are naturally, constantly, and it would seem inexorably tending, and to give us immortality and eternal bliss. But again, can He really do it? Can He carry out the rescue? 

If the acrobat reaches the one unburnt room amidst the flames, he won't exactly ask the child's permission to rescue him. He knows what must be done. He may cajole, or give orders, depending on what will work. If the child, understandably afraid to leave the temporary safety, refuses to come, the acrobat might take him by force. And God's persuasions, too, can be forceful up to a point. If some things attach us to this world too much, God might send disasters to destroy those things. But in the end, we have to come freely. So it might be with the acrobat, too. There may come a time during the rescue when it's no use even to try to go forward carrying a struggling and resisting child. He would be certain to lose his balance and fall into the flames. The only hope is for the child to be docile and obedient. So it is with our salvation. We couldn't come close to achieving it on our own, and we can't even imagine how it could be done. We have to take it on faith that God knows how, and take orders from His Church. But we can prevent it. It can't be accomplished over our stubborn resistance, our clinging to pride and worldly pleasure and self-interest.

Much of the Bible is written in the future tense. It is a book about the future as much as it is a book about the past. God is constantly predicting and promising. Some of those promises were made very long ago, so we can try to see whether and how they were fulfilled. If salvation seems impossible, does God have a track record of doing what seems impossible?

You might wonder how God can face such long odds when He's omnipotent. But as I mentioned before, omnipotence is of limited value here, for force can't make a free being love. Somehow, He has to work with us and through us, even with our consent in some fashion, to achieve His ends, if His ends include saving our souls. That's where the acrobatics come in, the great skill and the great courage of God that is displayed nowhere in all creation so much as in the way He labors to save human souls. He has to weave all the stories through one another, and make as many of them as possible turn out well, even as the free characters in those stories constantly spoil them. He's playing all sorts of subtle games with your soul, and mine, to awaken us to hope, to open our eyes to our sins just enough to make us repent but not despair, and to give us opportunities to do good and to shine with virtue, so that we'll have a story fit to tell in eternity. One of the more audacious moves He makes in this high-stakes game for souls is to predict the future. 

How can God predict the future, if people are free? How, for example, could He make the promise to Abraham from which the long career of the "chosen people," the Jews, began?

“Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you," [said God to Abraham]. "I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:1-3)

A very general problem with predicting the future, even when God's the one doing it, is that we have free will, and the future depends on our choices, choices that haven't taken place yet and aren't predetermined. It would seem to follow that the future isn't like a line that cannot be seen, but like a line that hasn't been drawn yet. It isn't there. It doesn't exist.

Some predictions of the future are still possible, based on inexorable laws of physics whose continued operation human choices, in the ordinary course of things, cannot change. God could also, presumably, promise to do things, and trust Himself to carry out those promises. But how can God promise that Abraham will be a blessing to all people on earth, when whether he will or not depends on Abraham's own choices? That's why the feat seems impossible. 

When the book of Revelation says that the moon will turn red, the skies will roll up like a scroll, and finally heaven and earth will pass away, there’s no difficulty about God being able to do those things. Physics foresees a slow, sad end of the world, but that's mere extrapolation, and it stands to reason that the Being that began the universe with the Big Bang can end it in sudden, drastic ways, too, at the time of His choosing. Why should the end of the world be any more explicable by the principles of physics than the beginning was? It shouldn't really be surprising if the Second Law of Thermodynamics was only a phase, since as it's a one-directional movement, it can't have been going on forever. But as no amount of violent transformation of the material universe could mend the fabric of our souls and make us fit for Paradise, it would seem that no miracle external to Abraham's own human free will could make him play the part that would bless all mankind in the end. So how is it that God could promise that?

The difficulty is greatly mitigated, though, by the vagueness of the promise. Abraham could become a blessing to all peoples in many different ways, and God might adjust the way that He fulfilled His promise based on the choices of Abraham and many others. The promise leaves God lots of room to improvise and adjust His plans to human choices. Like an acrobat, God does what would seem impossible, but if we examine it closely, we can make an educated guess why it isn’t. Yet it still seems like a strange method of working. Why does He make promises that get Him entangled in the tortuous affairs of sinful mankind, and become so complicated and subtle to fulfill? Well, many people get hope and comfort from the promises of God. Others are prevented from doing evil by the threats of God, and a threat is just a different kind of promise. God's promises often influence human conduct for the better.

God’s promises raise an old paradox about omnipotence, which can become a challenge to the faith. The skeptic asks: can God make a rock so heavy that He cannot lift it? If so, there is something that God can't do, namely, lift that rock. If not, there is again something that God can't do, namely, make that rock. That’s flippant, but the same problem arises in a much more serious way whenever God creates a free being. Can God create a person that He can't control? Again, either answer would superficially refute God's omnipotence, since either He can't control that person or He can't make that person. 

The challenge fails because it assumes intertemporal inconsistency in the will of God, as if God changes His mind. It is part of the perfection of God that He doesn’t change His mind. God wouldn’t desire today to lift a rock that yesterday He desired should never be lifted. God doesn't create people that He can't control so much as people that He wills not to control, and so His omnipotence is not proved self-contradictory. But there is still a striking kind of abdication about God creating freedom, and letting other people make the choices that were His prerogative. We are free by a kind of divine promise. He could control us, but He has forsworn that. Perhaps even the souls in Hell are secure in their freedom by divine promise, although alas, they only use that freedom to reject Him, to their own infinite cost. That terrible truth underscores how risky divine promises are. And yet God keeps making them, committing Himself in ever more tortuous and complicated ways, until we can't imagine how the Acrobat can possibly get through the maze He has made for himself. But He has managed difficult things before.

During most of Abraham's lifetime, God's promise to him kept looking more and more foolish. He was promised descendants like the sands of the sea (Genesis 22:17), yet he passed into old age without even one son, his wife being barren. Later, his descendants became numerous, but they were slaves in Egypt. And then God made good part of His promise to Abraham through the dramatic events of Exodus, when Egypt was smitten with ten terrible plagues to compel Phaoroh to let the Hebrews go, and then the Red Sea opened to let the Hebrews through and closed again to swallow Phaoroh’s chariots, and the Hebrews were led to the Promised Land. But even a thousand years after Abraham, though by that time his descendants had become a small nation, the promise about all peoples on Earth being blessed through him didn't seem any closer to being fulfilled. The Jews guarded their own mystery and did not proselytize. Only with the worldwide spread of the Christian Church was the promise to Abraham finally fulfilled.

Of Jesus's prophecies and promises, as once was true of God’s promises to Abraham, some have proven prescient, while others seem by now long overdue, and a little embarrassing. When we read that Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to a mustard seed, which begins as the smallest of seeds, but grows into a great tree with birds nesting in its branches, the figure seems like a wonderfully wise description of the growth of the Church. But when, after a series of what seemed to be descriptions of the end of the world, Jesus says, "Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened" (Matthew 24:34), readers are left scratching their heads and wondering what went wrong. Everyone who heard those words has passed away, and the Second Coming hasn't happened yet. That prophecy seems to have led Christians during the lifetime of the apostles to expect that the Apocalypse was very imminent, in vain. Two thousand years later, we're still waiting, and Christian writers that I trust say that what Jesus really meant by this generation was "the generation of Christians," so Jesus was simply prophesying that Christianity would remain until his Second Coming. That’s both important and (so far) true. Still, such apparent prophetic misses challenge Christians' faith as they once challenged Abraham's. Let us take hope from the way God did finally fulfill His promise to Abraham after all.

I should mention in passing that people these days often underrate the evidence of fulfilled prophecy because their minds are affected by vague rumors emanating from learned biblical critics who claim that all the biblical prophecies were written after their fulfillment. By this account, there seems to have been a whole industry of forged prophecies, carrying on for centuries, writing poetic descriptions of events after they occurred and pretending that they had been written earlier, implying by this fraud that their accuracy had involved miraculous foresight, and then claiming prophetic authority for a few more predictions still in future. What the motive for such forgeries might be is never made very clear. And what credulity must be imputed to the hearers of such fake prophecies! One must suppose that they were told that an old prophetic document no one had heard of had suddenly come to light, immediately believed in its authenticity, and were impressed by the accuracy of its predictions to date. But wouldn't they get suspicious when the prophecies proved right only about events that had already occurred before the prophecy was discovered, and then proved wrong about everything after that? It takes a lot of degrees and letters after one's name to be able to spin such fanciful tales and not be laughed at. But the real proof of the genuineness of the prophecies is how often they seem to miss. Forgeries would have pseudo-foretold the past with more obvious accuracy. And yet the prophecies still prove stunningly wise uncannily often.

Genesis 1 and Revelation bookend the Bible, and since Genesis 1 looks back to the beginning of the world, and Revelation looks forward to its end, the Bible offers a kind of complete beginning-to-end story of the world, though obviously very selective and interspersed with other material. But at first glance, Revelation looks as useless as a guide to the future as Genesis 1 seems to be for the past. After 2,000 years, none of what it predicts seems to have happened, except what is completely par for the course, such as some wars and plagues and famines. That doesn’t falsify Revelation, strictly speaking, since there’s no sell-by date on its prophecies. But it might sow reasonable doubt. 

Unlike in the past, Revelation now agrees with science on at least one thing: the world as we know it will end. A few other details may fit. For example, Revelation 6:12 predicts that the sun will turn black. Science predicts that the sun will eventually run out of fuel and dramatically collapse, ultimately turning black. But for the most part, Revelation predicts a very different end of the world than science does. And if we had to choose between the end of the world foretold by science and that foretold by Revelation, the future predicted by Revelation is the one we should hope for, because, for all its horrors, it ends with happy saints rejoicing around the throne of God forever, whereas science predicts only universal death and darkness. But if there is a loving God, why should the future have so much catastrophe in store for us as Revelation describes? If mainstream scientific liberals see a godless world and predict a bright future of progress, at least for a while, why should Christians, after telling us that there is a loving God, go on to foretell a future full of plagues, famines, wars, invasions and cosmic destruction, all resulting from God's wrath? But all the optimistic futures sometimes foretold by scientific, secular liberals are temporary, for they will ultimately unravel in the face of growing entropy and end in the heat death of the universe. And that may justify the drama and horror of Revelation, for if the world is so firmly and inexorably on track for a descent into chaos, but God wants something different, it might take some very strong and extreme medicine to change the outcome. 

As I said before, adversity can purge what is harmful and purify what is good. The proverbial refining fire purifies gold. It takes an irritating grain of sand to make an oyster make a pearl. Physicians cure cancer by exposing patients deliberately to noxious radiation, which hurts healthy cells but kills cancer cells. Presumably, if God will carry out such terrifying calamities as Revelation describes, it's because that's what's necessary to purge the world's evil and make what is left fit for eternal life. The book of Revelation describes, so to speak, the radiation therapy that will purge the cancer of evil from the world. For us to blame God for the calamities of Revelation and ask for any easier future is like a cancer patient blaming the doctor for prescribing radiation therapy and asking for an easier treatment. If the doctor says radiation therapy is the only hope of survival, the patient had better heed the advice 

Which of the events in Revelation, when (or for skeptics, if) they occur, will seem obviously supernatural when they happen, and which will seem explicable within the framework of science and the laws of physics? Which of them will actually be miraculous, in the sense of violating the physical order of the universe and the laws of nature? That’s not a question that preoccupied John. But it’s natural for a modern Christian to ask it, and I don’t think it does any harm. There might at least be a mnemonic value in trying to guess. It seems to me that many of the early events in Revelation could easily be, or seem, merely natural, e.g., a conqueror, wars, mass death, whereas near the end of Revelation, it’s clear that a complete disruption of the laws of nature is taking place. In between, there are some events that might seem supernatural, while actually having natural causes consistent with the ordinary laws of physics. 

For example, at the end of chapter 6, when the sky is rolled up like a scroll, the sun becomes black and the moon like blood and stars will fall, and the mountains and islands are moved out of their places, that seems like a breakdown in the natural order. Revelation suggests that it will strike people as supernatural at the time, for they will cry out to the mountains to fall on them and “hide us from the face of Him Who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb" (Revelation 6:16). And yet I wonder if all of this might be a vivid description of what a catastrophic shower of giant asteroids, on the order of the one that killed the dinosaurs, will look like. We're still early in the book of Revelation at this point, so if the book is interpreted as chronologically organized, this isn't the final calamity. Later mentions of things like cities and merchandise suggest that civilization survives. And we are told shortly afterwards of another plague in which just a third of the sun is struck, and a third of the stars fall. So it seems there are still stars in the sky, and the sun is still shining, and the cosmic disturbances in chapter 6 were not the end of the world as we know it. On the other hand, perhaps Revelation isn’t being chronological, and later chapters are circling back and filling things in. It's hard to say.

Again, in chapter 9, the events start to sound pretty supernatural. A star falls from heaven and is given "the key to the bottomless pit," from which comes smoke and a plague of "locusts," which, however, are shaped like "horses prepared for battle," with faces like men, hair like women's hair, and tails like scorpions. But could someone take this description as the point of departure for a sci-fi novel, and tell of a realistic future, fully compatible with the laws of physics, of which the plague of locusts called forth by the fifth trumpet in Revelation would be a good description? Sure they could. It could be a description of an invasion by extraterrestrial aliens, or some kind of monstrous genetically modified organisms created in military laboratories, or futuristic war machines. In general, I think most of the calamities in Revelation are more or less possible to physics, though some, such as the sea turning to blood, might have to be interpreted with some poetic liberty to be scientifically explicable. What is impossible to physics are the blessings in Revelation. Physics can allow war and plague and cosmic destruction, but it has no room for a new heaven and a new earth, or for the saints rejoicing forever around the throne of God.

I'd better give a whirlwind tour of Revelation just so readers can get a sense for how crowded the book is with spectacular events and disasters. When the stars fall and the sun turns black, that is the sixth of seven "seals," and the locusts are the fifth of seven "trumpets," while later there are seven "bowls" of the wrath of God. These are not just odd names for these series of calamities, but the heavenly events that trigger the earthly catastrophes. The first series of disasters occurs as the Lamb, that is, Jesus, opens the seals on a certain scroll. The second series occurs as angels blow trumpets. And the third series occurs as angels pour out bowls of the wrath of God.

The "seals" cause: first, a conqueror; second, conflict among men; third, famine; fourth, widespread death; fifth, the cry of the martyrs; sixth, the falling stars and other cosmic disturbances, as discussed above. Then, after a glimpse of the "sealing" of righteous Israelites and the rejoicing of saints of many nations around the throne of God, the seventh seal is opened, and the long-awaited scroll can be read… yet we are told nothing of its contents except that "there was silence in heaven for about half an hour."  

The "trumpets" cause: first, fire that kills a third of the trees and all the grass; second, a burning mountain that turns a third of the sea to blood and destroys a third of aquatic life and a third of the ships; third, a star that falls and turns a third of the rivers and streams bitter, killing many men; fourth, a third of the sun, moon, and stars becoming dark; fifth, as described above, the locusts from the bottomless pit; sixth, an army of two hundred million "horsemen," who seem to breathe fire and have tails like serpents with heads that do harm, that ravages the Earth. Then, after an interlude in which John is given a little book by an angel, and after two prophets preach on Earth, and are killed by "the beast that ascends out of the bottomless pit" (Revelation 11:7) and then resurrected, the seventh trumpet sounds, and it is proclaimed that "the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!" (Revelation 11:15) 

Later on, the "bowls" cause: first, loathsome sores; second, the sea, all of it this time, turning to blood; third, springs and rivers turning to blood; fourth, men being scorched with great heat; fifth, a flood of darkness in which men "gnaw their tongues because of the pain"; sixth, the drying up of the Euphrates, and three unclean spirits in the form of frogs; and seventh, a loud voice from Heaven announcing "It is done!" followed by lightning and hail, and "every island fled away, and the mountains were not found" (Revelation 16:20). 

In the midst of this, there emerges a theme of war by a great enemy against the believers. In chapter 12, we meet a "woman," traditionally taken to signify the Church, though also very reminiscent of the Virgin Mary, and a "dragon," representing Satan. The woman gives birth to a "male Child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron" (Revelation 12:5), that is, Jesus, whom the dragon wants to devour, so she flees into the wilderness. This description of the Church as a woman giving birth to Christ is consistent with Christians' belief that the bread and wine in communion become the body and blood of Christ. The dragon persecutes the woman and tries to drown her, but she escapes, so he makes war on her offspring. Then there comes a "beast" from the sea, who gets his authority from the dragon and causes men to worship him, and he makes war on the saints and overcomes them. There follows another "beast" from the earth, who causes men to worship the first beast, and perform signs and wonders. Revelation 13:17 contains a detail about his rule that seems remarkably plausible for our day, reminiscent of Communist China's "social credit" system or "cancel culture" in the West: "no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or name of the beast." 

By the end of chapter 13, Satan seems to be winning. We are even told that "it was granted to" the beast from the sea "to make war on the saints and overcome them" (Revelation 13:7), and in general, nowhere in the Bible does God promise Christians victory in war. But there follows in chapter 14 a glimpse of the Lamb on Mount Zion with 144,000 of the righteous of Israel, seeming somehow untouched by the "dragon" and the "beasts" who have so much power and deceive so many. Through much of Revelation, the saints seem to lead a hidden, irrelevant life, mysteriously protected as earthly affairs go from bad to worse. Even being made war upon and overcome doesn't seem to put an end to them. There's an aspect of this that's true to life even today, for so often the life of the Church seems to worldly people marginal, antiquated and irrelevant, to the point where its existence can be safely forgotten, yet if you turn aside from the world and penetrate that life, you find a joy and triumph and contentment there that is indifferent to its own irrelevance to the world. 

Later, we meet a different kind of enemy, "the great harlot who sits on many waters, with whom the kings of the earth committed fornication" (Revelation 17:1-2), not a ruler but a corrupter, who in turn is identified with "Babylon," full of wealth and merchandise, but tainted with blood. But by that time, the tide seems to be turning. In chapter 14, angels began to "reap the Earth's harvest," echoing Jesus's parable about the kingdom of Heaven, a sign of the end of the age, and grapes are thrown into "the great winepress of the wrath of God." Then in chapters 18 and 19, the fall of "Babylon" is, oddly enough, foretold very eloquently and at great length, including the lamentations of the kings of the earth who "fornicated" with her, and God's people are exhorted to come out of it, yet never consummated. We are never exactly told of Babylon's fall actually taking place. Perhaps that event is lost sight of amidst the battle that follows, when "heaven opens" and Christ on "a white horse" comes forth, followed by "the armies in heaven," and the beast and the kings of the earth make war on him, but the beast and his false prophet are captured and thrown into a lake of fire. Is it possible that Babylon, the playground of the worldlings, never exactly falls, but is swept into an irrelevant corner to decay forever? It doesn't matter. The point is that the saints are urged: "Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues" (Revelation 18:4).

In the course of these events, it seems that the supernatural world, both good and evil, is gradually being revealed and becoming more visible. The two prophets who are resurrected in chapter 11 are taken up to heaven in a cloud, and unlike Jesus, who seems to have been witnessed after the Resurrection by, and ascended in the presence of, His faithful disciples only, of these prophets' ascension we are told that "their enemies saw them" after the resurrection and during their ascension. In chapter 12, "a great sign appeared in heaven." In chapter 14 there is the "reaping" of the Earth, and in chapter 16, the islands "flee away" and the mountains are "not found." All this will presumably be rather discombobulating for those who expected the routines of nature to continue indefinitely. And then in chapter 20, heaven and earth flee away from the great white throne of God. It seems as if the workings of Heaven and Hell in this world will become steadily more obvious and visible in the course of all these events, while the merely natural order that scientific materialists take for the whole of reality will be steadily eclipsed.

In rushing through Revelation like this, of course, I've had to omit much that is evidently significant, and summarize things I hardly understand, but I ought to mention that there is an impressive coherence of Revelation with the rest of scripture. In many ways, it resembles Exodus, with all its plagues, with good people escaping into the wilderness, with wicked monarchs ruling the Earth but being defeated in the end by the chosen people of God. Revelation puts an odd emphasis on numbers, splashing the reader with moments of weird numerical precision amidst the sweeping grandiosity of the story: forty-two, three-and-a-half, one thousand two hundred and sixty. These are often allusive, echoing other parts of scripture. For example, the fact that the seals and the trumpets and the bows all number seven, the number of "days" in creation, give a kind of poetic pattern to the Bible with Revelation as a fitting climax. There are also many points of agreement between Revelation and Jesus's own prophecies. For example, Jesus tells his disciples to be glad that their names are written in heaven, while Revelation describes the last judgment as the moment when it is discovered whose names have been written in the Book of Life. Again, the resurrection described in Revelation was foretold before by the prophet Ezekiel, and was already a widespread belief among the Jews by the time of Jesus. There are many more examples. Revelation is a fitting end to the Bible, thematically consistent with it and giving it completeness.

If we believe that God is love, all these disasters must serve the purposes of that love. God wants to save as many people as possible, and presumably all the disasters help with that. We've seen already how adversity can be such a school of virtue. It seems as if God starts with the low-hanging fruit, saving first those who are easiest to save, and protects them in heaven or in the wilderness, or in the midst of civilization by a "seal" that protects them from evil. Later, the conversions become more difficult. We are told after the sixth trumpet, and the army of two hundred million horsemen, that "the rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands, [and continued to] worship demons, and idols of gold, silver, brass, stone, and wood, which can neither see nor hear nor walk" (Revelation 9:20). Well, what was the point then? We are rarely if ever told that anyone is converted. But I have to suppose that some are being converted during these trials, turning to God in panic, or looking to Heaven for meaning and hope when earthly addictions or honors are taken away, and joining the ranks of the saints. For the Last Judgment, when the books are opened and the names in the Book of Life are revealed, is still to come.

By the next-to-last chapter of Revelation, we are told that John saw "a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away" (Revelation 21:1). When did that happen? It was easy to miss that when it occurred a few verses before, in Revelation 20:11, when John "saw a great white throne and Him who sat on it, from whom heaven and earth fled away. And there was found no place for them." It seems at first merely like one of those strange details of which Revelation is full, which the mind may skip over or treat as mere flourishes because their significance is too overwhelming to be understood. But it seems that as the Last Judgment is taking place, as the dead are brought forth from the seas and from Hades, as the books are opened and they are judged by their works, the heaven and earth that we know, already battered and changed perhaps beyond recognition by so many calamities, will, in the background of the Last Judgment, be quietly passing away once and for all, and a new heaven and earth being created. Perhaps, like John, we won't even notice it as it happens, so enthralled will our attention be by the opening of the books of history and the Book of Life, and the recounting of everything that has happened, the full truth of history and of every human story, in a way that makes clear what shall be harvested and remembered and honored into eternity, and what shall be finally condemned and forgotten. 

Now, I should mention here that there is a long tradition of interpreting Revelation symbolically or allegorically. For example, when the Sun goes dark in chapter 6, Bede, the 8th century English saint, comments that "it is as if the power of Christ were hidden, or His doctrine temporarily obscured, when the servants of Antichrist are brought to attack the servants of Christ." But I think we need this new heaven and new earth to be solidly real, a physical fact, for the heaven and earth that we know are pervaded by mortality, decay, unraveling, and the dread curse of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, doomed to ultimate dissolution. Some better future is needed than the heat death of the universe. Revelation has one to offer. This entropy-ridden, mortal, decaying heaven and earth that we know will flee away before the throne of God, but the saved saints will still be there, and for them a new heaven and a new earth will be made, and they will enter the eternal city, with streets of gold and gates of many kinds of precious stone, where there will be no temple, for all is holy, and no sun or moon, for the Lord will be its light. And there (but now I suppose we are probably dealing in symbols again) a river of the water of life flows from the throne of God, and on its banks the tree of life, ever bearing fruit, whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.

Now all this mighty train of events began when, in chapter 5, Jesus began to open the seals on a scroll with seven seals that was held in the right hand of God. Seven seals! That's very mysterious! Before the scroll begins to be opened, there is a moment of suspense, because "no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll, or to look at it" (Revelation 5:3). And John writes that "I wept, because no one was found worthy to open the scroll" (Revelation 5:4). But then one is found worthy: Jesus, figuratively described here as both "the Lion of Judah" and "a Lamb, as though it had been slain." What follows reminds me a little of the Greek myth of Pandora's box, for John had wanted the scroll to be opened so much that he wept for it, yet immediately, as the seals begin to be opened, the disasters begin to befall. 

The faint-hearted might suppose that, as the lesson of Pandora is not to let curiosity make you open the box, so the takeaway in Revelation is: for heaven's sake, whatever you do, leave that scroll alone! Don't open it! Silence, John, your foolish curiosity, and let well enough, or even ill enough, alone! What would you do? Would you wish for the scroll to be opened, and the terrifying transformation of the world to begin? Would you be so eager for it as to weep when, for a moment, no one was found worthy? Would you settle for this beautiful, decaying world, and enjoy it while it lasts, rather than ask for the apocalypse to be set in motion?

I think all of us have moments when we would rather settle for the old routines than take the great adventure. Let the world slowly run down if it must. We'll keep on making the best of what's left while we can, and then dissolve away with the dissolving world. It's a little sad, but never mind. We'll make do. We'll settle. We'll lower our expectations a little, then lower them again. Try not to think about death. Distract yourself. Eat, drink, and be merry as best you can, for sooner or later, we'll all die. Take the easy, broad, descending road, for even if it leads only to destruction, the journey there is long yet. And how do we know that there is anything better to be had?

But I think we all have other moments, or at least we have had them, sometime or other, when voices from beyond the world call us, call us up, onto wild heights, and our hearts dance, and our imaginations fly, and we love, and we are brave, and we would dare any and every adventure for the sake of something that we cannot name, but that we glimpse in a sunset or a mountain or a scene of battlefield heroism or even of maternal grief. We are full of a feeling that descends on us like a crown. What we want is as mysterious to us as a scroll with seven seals in the right hand of God, and we are not worthy to open it. But we desire it, and even if we desire almost without hope, the desire is sweet. We feel, as the poet Wordsworth said, "intimations of immortality," a divine discontent with the routines of decay, and the sad, prudent economy of this world. And then we would choose the way that leads to life, no matter how narrow and difficult it might be. We would weep if there were found no one worthy to open the scroll, and we would pay the price of apocalypse to see the face of God.

When the acrobat told the fire chief how he would rescue the child from the burning hotel, his plan seemed mad. But he had done amazing feats before. And there was no other choice. God has told us, in the Bible, in Revelation, how He plans to rescue us from this disintegrating world, and His plans seem mad. But He has fulfilled many amazing promises before. And what do we have to lose? Who else offers any hope to escape the curse of death? So let's put our faith in him, as well as we can, and hope for the best.

And what are we putting out faith in? At the heart of God's desperate, inscrutable plan to save the world, and us, from the labyrinthine ruin into which we are inexorably descending, was the Incarnation. God became man. How? Why? We'll never fully understand, but we can do our best. To that we turn next.