Salvation for the Nations!

Reading Amount: Revelation 7:1-17

Central Verse:

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

"salvation belongs to our God who is

Seated on the throne, and to the

Lamb!"

Revelation 7:9-10 NRSV

Central Truth:

Salvation has come to all. No one is excluded from God's plan of salvation. The appropriate response to God's salvation is praise to God and the Lamb (note that they both share the throne).

Food For Thought:

Great emphasis has been put on the 144,000 in recent church history. Some groups have emphasized this as an exclusionary tactic claiming that they are the 144,000 and no one else. There are two problems with this view, one is that it forgets the nature of symbolic/metaphorical language. John is using the biggest number he can thing of, in his language it is an astronomical number, but it is also a number of completeness which is perhaps more important. The second problem with being exclusive on the 144,000 is that we see just a few verses later that the throne is also surrounded by a great multitude from every nation. This means that the salvation events described in the New Testament are not exclusive but inclusive with hope of salvation for all peoples.

Connections:

When we feel slighted or hurt we have an automatic desire to exclude and build walls to show how we are not like the person or group that hurt us. For instance during World War Two the U.S. and other nations were shocked by the barbarity of the German nation and the death camps that they owned. This shock was expressed at the same time that the U.S. was filling our own concentration camps with Japanese Americans out of fear of Japan and the war in the pacific. This sad reality of U.S. history is still rarely mentioned in history books.

This section of Revelation shows us that in the eyes of God the intent is to save everyone. That any walls we build up are merely temporary and will be removed when Christ comes in victory. We are going to worship God together with people we don't agree with and don't want to be around. Salvation in Revelation has come to the nations, that is to everyone and it is God who decides who is saved and who is not saved. Attempts have been repeatedly made to say God wants to save some people and not all. In fact some very great theologians have claimed that God's plan of salvation on the cross was a sacrificed for only a few people because there is no way that God could save them all. In other words there has to be some who reject God.

In Revelation we clearly see that God is the master of Theology not the other way around. God decides who is saved and who the plan of salvation is for and that is for everyone. Today if we join in worship with people from other nations, allowing them to express praise to God in their native ways and we join in that praise in our native ways we get a foretaste of what God is seeking here in Revelation.

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