Happy Returns, Revelation Thoughts

I am back from vacation, having spent a couple weeks in Kenya. I'm writing about it at Abracadafrica, a blog I started for that purpose. It's perhaps a bit warmer than this blog, and more interesting by half.

I read through the rest of Leviticus while I was gone and started reading Jeremiah, but I haven't taken any notes on them, so I'll probably go back to where I was before and start afresh.


We have been going through Revelation in church in the past several weeks, and this has occasioned a little bit of thought. My own eschatology is not well-developed, and I think that concentrating on it to the exclusion of all else when reading Revelation is a mistake. For the most part, we perceive Revelation as a revelation of what is to happen at the end times.

But the book itself tells us that it is actually a revelation of Jesus Christ (Re 1.1). As such, I think our focus should be more on how he is revealed through the book rather than the overplayed mysticism that seems to accompany any sort of commentary on apocalyptic literature.

And so in the letters to the churches we have seven separate revelations of the person of Christ. We see him revealed, too as God—Jesus says, "I am the one who is." (I wonder if the outline of the book is given in the phrase "I am the one who was, who is, and who is to come." The things which "must take place after this" in Re 4.1 fit nicely, I think, in that theme.) I think there are correlations between what we read through the book and the gospels, too.

It's hard to summarize the several weeks we've been in the book, but I'll be keeping my eyes open for more of these incidentals. I don't expect to comment as much on the eschatological distinctives, except as they pertain to showing us who Christ is. I'm beginning to think that the ultimate thrust of the book is to demonstrate the deity of Christ, though I'll have to run it through the various themes and images that prevail in it.


Hopefully regular posting will resume now that I'm back from my trip and can come to this with a little more frequency. It has been a busy month, and not just for travel.

Vay-Kay

I'm going to be out for a couple weeks on vacation. I'll see you all in mid to late August again, hopefully with some good stories and perhaps some fresh insight.

The Sacrifices

I've been putting some miles in Leviticus, and I have come up for air to discuss just some brief thoughts from the book. And to mention that for the first couple weeks of August I'll be gone, so what irregular posting I write here will be interrupted further.  Also, as a quick aside, Tim Enloe put up an interesting post about science fiction and religion; as a fan of the genre, I found it pretty neat.

There a great many hints of the sacrifice of Christ in the laws concerning the offerings. The obvious ones:

• the death of the innocent lamb, goat, ram, bull in place of the guilty priest, person, nation
  
• grain offerings without leaven (often a symbol of human works)

I think there are some other interesting notes here, though.  The priesthood lived off of the sacrifices.  And we see in the New Testament that we are also a priesthood, and we live off of the sacrifice of Christ.  It is not a mistake that Christ is the bread of life, and we do not celebrate an empty symbol in the eucharist.

Another example is the burnt offering, which was to burn continually.  The fire burned day and night, never to be extinguished.  In a similar way, the sacrifice of Christ is a continual one, and continuously effective.

There are several kinds of offerings, also:  sin, trespass, peace, and burnt.  In each we see, I think, a shadow of the cross.  We see him also as the high priest, making intercession for the people.

There really is a lot there, and it's well worth the time to read through it and try to digest a few things it has to say.