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by Bob Fraley
Text: Revelation 13:1-10 
Sermon in a Sentence: To understand the breadth of God’s Word, we need to explore “those strange apocalyptic writings.”
We live in a time when the amount of information available has exploded. I believe I have heard it said that it now doubles about every six months. Books have become a major multi-billion-dollar business. There are about 200,000 new books published every year. In fact, go to Borders, Barnes & Noble, B. Dalton, Kroch’s or your favorite local bookstore and there are so many choices that you have to know at least a little about how books are categorized or you’ll be overwhelmed.
To be quite basic, there’s a difference between fiction and nonfiction. And you won’t find children’s books mixed in with those for adult readers. Histories and sports volumes aren’t intermingled. There’s a separate travel section and also one for religions, which has its own obvious divisions, much like there are many different kinds of books about cooking. In short, to find a volume that appeals to you, you want to at least head in a certain general direction.
The best-selling book of all times, the Bible, is a little like this, in that it divides into various sections. These aren’t labeled romance, humor and military. The Bible does contain certain passages about romance and war, and there are a few rather humorous verses, but basically the Bible is about spiritual matters.
Within this broad topic, however, it too has distinct divisions. For example, there’s what’s called the Old Testament and the New Testament, the Old Testament being about events prior to the appearance of the long-awaited Jewish messiah. That word “messiah” is Hebrew, and it means “the anointed of God.” The same word in the Greek language is “Christ.” The actual name of this Christ, or this messiah, the anointed of God, is then revealed in the New Testament to be Jesus, from Nazareth in Galilee.
The Old Testament divides into three major sections – history, poetry and prophecy. The first 17 books are all Jewish histories. That’s Genesis all the way through the book of Esther.
Next, there are five books of Jewish poetry – Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of  Solomon. When we hear the word “poetry”, most of us think of rhyming words. Hebrew poetry, however, is more parallelism, or the repetition of similar ideas. An example would be the psalms, which we would probably call written prayers that, unlike the way we pray, repeat each idea twice. My point is, the psalms certainly don’t read like the earlier books of history, and shouldn’t be expected to be studied in the same way.
The last of the three major Old Testament divisions is prophecy. Once again, these account for 17 books, starting with Isaiah and continuing through to Malachi. Given a chance, you would probably rename this grouping “sermons,” and that’s helpful because we tend to think of prophets as individuals who predict the future. Some of these Old Testament preachers did, but as a group their message was more of a message from the Lord to the people, “Thus sayeth the Lord,” than a message that predicted the future.
Once again, you don’t listen to a sermon with the same set of expectations as you would when attending a history lesson about a nation’s kings. Hearing the works of a poet would also change the way you listened to them being read. So these three divisions – history, poetry and prophecy – set off the kinds of written material found in the Old Testament.
The New Testament also has three basic divisions. The first five New Testament books are history , with the first four being a special kind. They’re short biographies about Jesus. Book number five is Acts, which is the history of the early church.
Next in the New Testament is what normal people would call letters or correspondence. Bible scholars refer to these as epistles. They’re written by different authors, the main one being Paul, and his all come first. They start with his letters to churches – Rome, Corinth, Galatia, and so on. Then to individuals – Timothy, Titus and Philemon. After that come letters from other important New Testament leaders like Peter and John.
Following these letters there is one more book. It is a lot different from the others. We call it Revelation … the Revelation of Jesus Christ. Going back to the Greek, the word for Revelation is apokalypsis. We say “apocalypse,” which refers to writings that unveil truths lying beyond one’s normal way of knowing. So this apocalypse, or Revelation, reveals the true meaning of world events and their outcome, even the heavenly perspective behind what is to take place.
Apocalyptic materials are a literary composition characterized by a particular style that is found only in these writings. They can’t be read like history or letters or sermons or poetry. They belong to a category all their own, and must be approached as such.
Allow me to illustrate what I mean. Today we have many literature categories that would not have been familiar to people in earlier times. A case in point would be what we commonly refer to today as detective stories. Film documentaries are another relatively new form of communication, as are Web sites, cartoon strips, movies, TV, your daily newspaper, all sorts of books and such.
However, in a reverse sense, it is believed that the early Christians understood apocalyptic writings much better than we do. We’re not used to them, but they were. These “revelations” came out of desperate times when there was a need for encouragement. However, the writers and readers had to almost communicate in code, because their very lives were in danger.
End of Short Preview for Sermon #2 |
