God’s Comfort

What is the “seal” in today’s reading? While we don’t know exactly what, we do know why. In John’s day, a seal represented authority, protection, and ownership. Someone who carried a seal acted with the authority and under the protection of someone greater. The seal was a guarantee that the “someon…

The Seven Seals

In 2004, a devastating tsunami swept across the Indian Ocean at the speed of a jet airplane. A train in Sri Lanka was driven off the tracks. A boat off the shore of Thailand was thrown more than a mile inland. Triggered by a magnitude-9.1 earthquake, the tsunami killed nearly 250,000 people. Natur…

Worship the Lamb

Scripture often pictures God as our Shepherd (Psalm 23), including Jesus as our Good Shepherd (John 10). John the Baptist also called Him “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). This is probably a reference to the Passover lamb, which foreshadowed Christ (1 Cor. 5:7; Isa…

Holy, Holy, Holy

Church tradition for various reasons has assigned four symbols to the four Gospels: Matthew is a man. Mark is a lion. Luke is an ox or calf. John is an eagle. Historically, these pictures are found in illuminated manuscripts, paintings, and church architecture details. Together all four are called …

Special Delivery

If you located the seven churches of Revelation chapters 2 and 3 on a map, they would form a rough geographical circle, starting at Ephesus and going clockwise to Laodicea. This is also the order a courier or messenger would likely have delivered the original copies of this book. The Roman province…

Letters to the Seven Churches

Doubtless, we’ve all read one or more of the 21 letters, or epistles, in the New Testament. In each one, the author was writing to a specific church, including greetings, personal names, and specific spiritual issues. The “mini-epistles” we find in Revelation 2–3 are shorter but otherwise the same.…

Vision of Christ

John Newton, eighteenth-century slave-ship-captain-turned-abolitionist and hymn writer, wrote of Jesus, “In [Christ], I have an offering, an altar, a temple, a priest, a sun, a shield, a Savior, a Shepherd, a hiding place, a resting place, food, medicine, riches, honor, wisdom, righteousness, holin…

Greetings from John

The author of Revelation, John, was one of the original twelve disciples called by Jesus. John and his brother James, along with Peter and Andrew, were fishermen whom Jesus invited to follow Him—“I will send you out to fish for people” (Matt. 4:18–22). John became “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (J…

Stand Firm

In Eat This Book, Eugene Peterson warned: “[W]e live in an age in which the authority of Scripture in our lives has been replaced by the authority of the self: we are encouraged on all sides to take charge of our lives and use our own experience as the authoritative text by which to live. The alarm…

Conclusion: Stay Equipped

The end of every journey provides a moment for reflection. You’ve arrived at your destination. If you’ve been on this two-month journey with us, I encourage you to take a moment and consider what you’ve learned. We have touched almost every book of the Old Testament and every book of the New Testam…