Dave Burke

Harvest Time

get the pdf here and read at leisure

Revelation 14:6-20

In August 1989 Cathie and I were working with a student group at an illegal camp in a forest near Budapest in Hungary. Christians in that country had been denied freedom since 1945, and held in a kind of political-spiritual prison by the Soviet Union. Christians suffered badly under the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe, which is why our camp was secret and illegal.

During our stay, a few hundred East Germans organised a picnic on the Hungarian border with Austria. After their meal they all stood up and walked across into Austria and the free west. The Hungarian border guards were meant to shoot people who tried to cross the border without visas – this time they did not. Even the police had done with Communism. By the time we left Hungary the secret camp was legal. The Soviet Union, one of the mightiest empires the world has ever seen, simply fell apart in the few months that followed. 1989 was the year I learned that empires can fall with amazing speed.

John’s first readers had been similarly oppressed by the Caesar-worshipping majority in Asia. Their freedom curtailed because they refused to worship the Roman emperor; some were harassed, others imprisoned like John, and some even lost their lives. It must have been hard to believe that this Roman monster – the beast – would ever be destroyed. But in John’s vision the end of the Beast comes as swiftly and surely as that of the Soviet Union.

Three Angels (6-11)

This is announced by three angels (6-9). Each one with a message, more terrifying that the last!

The first angel takes up position of maximum visibility and invites people, one last time, to repent. His voice is loud and he cannot be ignored: the world hears one last call to repent and worship the right God (6-7). If you drive to Marsden Grotto near South Shields (in the North East of England) you will see his words inscribed on the stone wall on the viewing platform looking out on Lot’s Wife, a sea stack just off shore, “Fear God and give him glory for the hour of his judgement has come, worship him who made the heaven and earth, the sea and the fountains of water” (7).

This is grace; what we are about to study, God does not want to happen. The gospel gives every human being the chance to escape his wrath. What follows is their choice – our choice if we neglect his offer of mercy and compassion.

Human beings have a profound need to feel secure, so we huddle together in communities that make us feel safe. The bigger the culture, wealth, power and human ingenuity, the safer we feel. We take comfort in our advanced civilisation; surely we are safe from all harm. And if a crisis does arise, we have the wit to escape it, don’t we? The message of the second angel removes the illusion of safety we derive from our sophisticated cities.

Angel number two announces that the pagan system has fallen – there is no security left – nowhere to hide. It is a brief verse with a massive meaning.

Babylon was an ancient city by the banks of the Euphrates River. It was wealthy, opulent, and stuffed with gorgeous art. Its great families had more money than they knew what to do with, and they had conquered vast tracts of land. The Babylonians believed they were invincible behind their mighty walls. Then a Persian king called Cyrus turned up with his army and the city fell in a night.

John’s Apocalypse is in code, just in case the letter got into the wrong hands. In the language of the first Christians, ‘Babylon’ was code for ‘Rome’. John is seeing a vision of an angel proclaiming the fall of Rome. More than this, even in the Old Testament, Babylon was more than a city on the Euphrates, but a symbol of the whole pagan world in its pride, its sensuality and self-worship.

This angel is announcing the fall of London, New York, Tokyo – the whole world system that marginalises God and worships money, sex and power. Everything the pagan world looks to for reassurance that it is OK to do what you like and kick God into the gutter will one day disintegrate. Look around you – do you feel safe?

Technology, human ingenuity, money and glamour will not protect you. The Soviet Union fell in a few weeks, Babylon fell in few days, we now know that our civilisation could be lost in an afternoons trading on the stock exchange floor. When the second angel announces our doom, there will be nowhere to hide - but the collapse of civilisation is not our worst fear; the third angel introduces the real nightmare facing humanity (9-11).

In 1999 a small publishing company in the UK released a new edition of the Bible; each book was printed separately with an introduction by someone famous and able to comment on the contents. The British writer and cartoonist, Will Self, wrote the introduction to Revelation, 'If Revelation conjures up one single feeling in me,' he writes, 'it is one of superstitious awe. To think this ancient text has survived to become the stuff of modern, psychotic nightmare.'

It would be easy to dismiss the third angel’s message as a psychotic nightmare. We believe that God would be gracious, we may stretch to accepting that he may pull down an oppressive empire, we have seen it in our own lifetime. But we will not have him casting people into hell to be tortured forever – this looks sub-Christian to us[1].

Let me tell you something: there is nothing sub-Christian or primitive about the idea of Hell. You will not find Hell in the Old Testament, neither Moses, nor Isaiah mentions it. The person who introduces the idea into the Bible is Jesus himself – it is sub-Christian to reject his teaching about the fate of those who reject him.

The trouble is that our perception is distorted by our own sinful mindset. Sin is so normal to us that we accept one another as ‘good enough’ when God, who sees our hearts, just sees darkness and selfishness. We think it is astonishing that anyone should be condemned to Hell, but the people who wrote the New Testament never tire of telling us how astonishing it is that anyone escapes Hell, since we are all marked by our active co-operation with the evil in the world.

Imagine growing up in a dark cavern, completely cut off from daylight. Creatures like this get used to very dim light, and even a glow-worm looks brilliant. Then one day an earthquake splits the cavern open and real sunlight floods the cave. The glow-worms, the brightest things we have ever seen, just look dead and lifeless in this brilliant new light: real light. This is an exact picture of the mess we are in – too sinful to see our own sinfulness, too easily impressed with the relative brightness of others, a pathetic brightness when the real thing turns up.

When Jesus returns in all his glory, it will be painfully obvious that we are delusional about our pathetic goodness – none of us will be good enough to cut it on that day.

So we have this is unfamiliar portrait of Jesus (10-11), it is terrifying and faith-testing, but we must look at it. You see, no-one in Hell will ever think of saying, “This is unfair”, in the light of the glory of God my fate will be seen as perfectly just. And no-one in Hell will ever be able to say, “You never gave me a chance”, look at the first angel’s message (7). This is your chance, the best advice you will ever hear, please act upon it now, before it is too late.

The harvest (14-20)

There is a second picture of Jesus in this passage: he is reaping and gathering his people from the ends of the earth. Meanwhile, an angel is reaping the grape harvest, and filling the wine press, and then it is trodden.

All this is still ahead of us (and John’s first readers). The beast’s followers are still in power, Babylon and Rome have gone but the pagan system they represent is still intact. But we are waiting...

Just as the Old Testament prophesied the first coming of Jesus, and he came as promised, so the Bible promises that he will return once more to earth and he will judge the living and the dead. John describes a double harvest; the Son of Man (14) reaps those who have defied the world-system and never worshipped the beast – he takes them to be with himself. The angel harvests those who must face the wrath of God (18-20).

The question you must face is this: which harvest will you be gathered in? There’s a harvest hymn, Come, ye thankful people, come, it is less popular today than it used to be because it picks up this theme:

Maybe it is time to decide, because the first angel is still proclaiming the eternal good news, you can make the change today: whatever is in your past, you must now “Fear God and give him glory... worship him who made the heaven and earth, the sea and the fountains of water”.

Don’t give up!

Sandwiched between those two visions of Jesus, the lamb (9-11) and the Son of Man (14-16) there are two brief words of encouragement for those who follow him.

The first is about endurance (12) – the world system may be doomed, but it is powerful, intimidating and glamorous. Sometimes it is hard not to believe their lies. If you are a Christian, endurance is the name of the game. We are not running a sprint but a marathon and John gives us two training tips:

First, keep the commandments of God – the world will tell you that they are pointless and restrictive, a limit to your freedom. The word tells us that they are given for our life and health and spiritual good, to obey God is true freedom.

Second, keep your faith in Jesus – the world will tell you that he is a Jewish loser who got himself skewered to a cross; that those who follow him are losers too. The word makes it absolutely clear who will lose in the end; and that those who follow him will triumph.

The second encouragement is about your death (13): God approves of you, you enjoy his special favour – that is what ‘blessed’ means. More than that, your deeds follow you to heaven, every sacrifice and act of love, every gift or word of encouragement. All that goes with you and you will not fail to be rewarded.

[1] I got the phrase ‘sub-Christian’ from William Barclay’s commentary on this passage. I admire Barclay greatly and he was a wise scholar, but he struggled with John's description of eternal punishment.