I spoke on the Book of Revelation yesterday in a day-long study – taught, preached, taught. It was a long, tiring, but a very satisfying and enriching experience. The audience was receptive and engaged, and I enjoyed the exchanges that took place around this marvelous, but often misunderstood, New Testament book.
During the final Q & A, a very thoughtful and perceptive person who had been listening with care as I traversed the mysteries and metaphors of the Apocalypse asked a question that, quite honestly, brought me up short. Overwhelmed with “information overload” of images and scenes of final judgment and the reckoning “The End” inevitably brings, the individual asked, “But where’s the grace?” I perceived this person to be expressing their long-held but largely unexamined conviction that at bottom Christianity is about grace and that all the images of final judgment and reckoning and “score settling” that fill the pages of the Book of Revelation stood at some distance from what they had come to believe that Christianity was all about.
