Big Question: What is a Saint?

[This message was shared during worship with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio today.]

Revelation 7:9-17
Today is All Saints’ Sunday. But what exactly is a saint?

This isn’t just some academic question. The answer has eternal consequences for all of us here this morning, in fact for everyone in the world.

To find out what a saint is, we’ll turn today to the New Testament book of Revelation 7:9-17, our first lesson.

Revelation, you know, is based on a series of visions given to the apostle John about sixty years after Jesus’ resurrection.

Beginning at chapter 6, John sees Jesus, the second Person of the one God, open the first six of seven seals. With the opening of each seal, John sees this creation moving closer to its inevitable end.

He also sees glimmers of the new creation that the risen and ascended Jesus will finally and fully usher in when He returns to claim His kingdom from our enemies, sin, death, and the devil.

Jesus’ return will bring celebration and relief to all who have turned from sin and who have believed in Christ.

But, as the last verse of Revelation 6 points out, the return of Jesus won’t be universally welcomed. (Just as He is far from universally welcomed today.)

Those who have rejected Christ and the Holy Spirit’s call to repent for sin and trust in Him alone for life, will ask the caves, mountains, and rocks for help. “‘Fall on us,’ they will beg, ‘and hide us from the face of him who sits on the throne and from the wrath of the Lamb [the Lamb being Jesus, Who, Revelation also describes as the Lion]!’ For the great day of their wrath has come, and who can withstand it?”

Then, just before the opening of the seventh and final seal, John is allowed to see two scenes which he records in Revelation, chapter 7.

The first scene comes in Revelation 7:1-8, right before today’s lesson. The location of this scene is this world. God assigns four angels to hold back the final destruction of the old creation. “Don’t damage the earth,” God tells the angels, “until we’ve marked all of the servants of God with a seal on their foreheads.” (Like the seal of the Holy Spirit which the Baptized receive on the day they are made new by water and the Spirit.)

Then the numbers of those sealed for salvation are counted out. The total comes to 144,000.

Don’t be worried by this number, though! The Bible is not saying that a measly 144,000 people out of all human history will be part of God’s eternal kingdom!

The number 144 is derived from multiplying the 12 tribes of Israel times the 12 apostles Jesus chose to lead the post-resurrection church. For John, it would have been a number implying perfection and completeness.

And, tacking three zeroes onto the back of 144, making it 144,000,  would be a bit like one of us talking about “a gazillion” people showing up for Black Friday sales at Macy’s or Target.

We see how symbolic a number this 144,000 is when we look at the first verse of our lesson, Revelation 7:9. John writes, “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count…”

I can hardly read those words without getting chills! This is no little crowd of 144,000! It’s a multitude!

But what brings me chills is the phrase saying that the crowd was so big, “no one could count.”

Here’s why it’s so moving: On a starlit night 4000 years ago, an elderly man to whom God had promised the impossible struggled to believe that God could overcome change, decay, and death to give him a son and a future to his descendants. The man’s name at the time was Abram. (Later to be changed by God to Abraham, a name that means “father of nations.”)

Turn to page 9 in one of the sanctuary Bibles and read what God did in Genesis 15:5 to help Abram believe: “[God took Abram] outside and said, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’” "Abram," God was saying, "I Who made more stars than any mortal could ever count is capable of keeping My promise to you. I will give you a son. And not only that, your descendants will dwarf the numbers of stars you see in the sky right now."

The multitude from every nation that John is shown in His vision of heaven after the life of this old world has come to an end are the descendants of Abram, the very descendants God had promised on that starry night so long ago.

And each of those descendants came to be part of the kingdom of God—they came to be the saints of God—not because they were the genealogical descendants of Abraham and his wife Sarah. They became saints in just the way that Abram came to be a saint. Genesis 15:6 says that when Abram heard God’s promise, “Abram believed the Lord, and [God] credited it to [Abram] as righteousness.”

Abram--Abraham--was saved by grace through faith in the God of promise. That God has since revealed Himself definitively to all the world in the crucified and risen Jesus.

“If you know Me,” Jesus says, “you will know My Father also.” 

And He says, “The Father and I are one.” 

And, “No one comes to the Father except through Me.”

Jesus is the God Who gave Abraham that promise four millennia ago.

And He is the God Who promises that everyone who turns from sin and believes in Him becomes a descendant of Abraham. They are saints.

What gives me the chills when I read the vision that the risen Jesus gave to John is the realization that God has never changed. In God, there is, James 1:17 tells us, “no variation or shadow due to change.”

God has always wanted to rescue His fallen children from sin and death and to give them life.

And His plan has always been the same: to give eternal life in His new creation to all who will trust, not in their own achievements, smarts, money, shrewdness, health, or anything else, but who trust only in Him. 

Saints are those who trust God to give them the free gifts that come to all who turn from sin and believe in Jesus: gifts like forgiveness of sin, eternal life, the power to live each day for His purposes.

But if sainthood is a free gift from God, we must not think for a moment that sainthood is easy. We see this from just four words in our lesson from Revelation today.

The first two of those words appear at the beginning of verse 9: “After this.” After what, exactly? John saw the multitude of saints after an event that’s mentioned in verse 14.

That’s where you can read two more important words: “great tribulation.”

Despite the propaganda who misconstrue Revelation, "the great tribulation" does not refer to some endtime cataclysm. It’s the common experience through which every believer in Jesus goes, in big ways and small.

We live in a world filled with beauty and wonder. But with its beauty and wonder marred by human sin, death, and even the suffering of the saints, this world can, at its best, still only give us nothing more than a glimmer of the beauty and the wonder—the perfection—that await all who persevere in following Jesus as their only God and King to the end.

After completing life in this world, the saints who have kept on trusting Jesus, will be met by the Savior, Who will make them clean forever, Who will dry their tears, Who will feed their hunger and quench their thirst for the righteous life only He can give, and lead them into the new creation for which each of us were made.

For now, we live in an in-between time in which, as Paul writes Romans 8, both we and the whole of creation wait with eager longing for Christ to reveal Himself and His children.

Here's a fact you may not have noticed: Life is hard.

Even in the best of times, life can be a struggle.

And sometimes, our struggles are made even harder because we believe in Jesus Christ. How much easier the lives of so many here today might have been had they, when confronted by evil and false teaching in another church a few years ago, stood with the shifting mores of the world instead of with the truth and grace of God revealed in His Word?

And I am personally convinced, by my experience of moving from being an atheist who rarely had a troubled conscience to being a follower of Jesus Who wants to please the God Who loved me all the way to the cross, that the devil couldn’t care less about tempting or testing those who live their lives without faith in Christ or fear and respect for God.

Instead, the devil tests, tempts, and tries the saints.

And every believer in Christ will, eventually, bear the scars—physical, emotional, or relational—that come to those who put following Jesus first in their lives.

Mark it well: Follow Christ and He will most certainly thwart you in some of your most heartfelt desires because He’s less interested in giving you momentary happiness than He is in fitting and forging you and your character for eternal life with Him.

Our own personal “great ordeals” may include persecution, chronic or fatal illness, disagreements over priorities with those we love or with whom we work, or the conflicts that happen within us when a sin tantalizes us and we know that we must choose God’s way and not our own.

A member of our parish in Cincinnati, Karen, spoke for millions of Christians after she’d gotten yet another poor report on the cancers that would eventually take her life. We were sitting alone when she remarked, “I just can’t seem to catch a break.” There was nothing I could say to make her situation understandable. I couldn’t understand it.

Yet, despite her disappointment and mystification, Karen, an environmental scientist who was exceedingly intelligent, persisted in her faith, confident that while the many prayers for her healing weren’t being answered in this life, she would, because of her faith in Christ, experience the ultimate healing when, in eternity, she would be sheltered forever from all disappointment and pain by God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, along with all the saints who, like her, put their trust in Jesus. 

What is a saint?

Saints are people who trust their whole lives to Jesus. Sometimes haltingly. Always imperfectly. At times even resentfully. But no matter how their hearts may wander, they always know to come back to Christ.

They know to Whom they belong and they know where they’re headed.

They know that this life is not perfect.

But they have a purpose in this life: To live for and to let the whole world know about the Lamb Jesus, Who will, after the last page has been closed in the last chapter of this world's story, welcome all who have trusted in Him to His new creation.

In the meantime, dear saints of God, do not be afraid!

Trust in Jesus.

Know His love and power for you even in the midst of life’s greatest tribulations and know for a fact that, if you remain steadfast in following Jesus, like saints before us, Jesus will welcome you in His heavenly kingdom.

If we remain faithful to Christ, you and I will one day join our fellow saints, along with God’s messengers, the angels, in singing and savoring the glories of our loving God and all who have persistently, perseveringly, enduringly followed their Savior in this world will hear the Lord say to them in the next world, “Well done, good and faithful servant!” Amen!

Understanding Revelation, Part 3 (Revelation 7:9-17)

[This was shared during worship with the people of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church in Logan, Ohio, this morning.]

Revelation 7:9-17
The junior high years of my life were, in many ways, awful. At least they seemed that way to me at the time. If you can imagine it, I was a mouthy kid, one of the smallest in my class, and surely among the least physically coordinated. All of that taken together, especially my mouthiness, were like open invitations—even to otherwise good kids from really good homes—to insult me, taunt me, hit me, knock my books out from my arms, smash my lunch bags, pick fights, or, and this is the thing I think I hated the most, smack me on the back of the head---for you NCIS fans, Jethro Gibbs-style.

I hated going to school during those years. But walking home in the afternoon was often just as awful as the school day had been, as three or four guys would make my life miserable for three-quarters or more of the way home. Eventually on those walks home though, something wonderful would happen. I would get to my home street in the Westgate area and it was as though everything bad was lifted from my shoulders. When I was thirteen, walking down that street, coming home from school, I truly thought to myself, "This is the most perfect place in the world!" It was my shelter.

In this third installment of our sermon series on the book of Revelation, we come to a point in the book at which its first readers and hearers in churches from first-century western Turkey, may have needed   soothing words promising them shelter against the uncontrollable storms of life.

In chapter 6, the part of the book that follows our lesson from last Sunday, those early Christians would have learned of how, in the vision given to John the Evangelist on the island of Patmos, Jesus, the Lamb of God, opened the first six of the seven seals mentioned in last week’s Bible lesson. To these churches, just then beginning to suffer sporadic persecution for their faith in Jesus Christ, John gave a message that can basically be boiled down to this: “Don’t worry. Things are going to get worse.”

That is the message from the seals on the scroll of the future broken open by the risen and ascended Jesus. With the breaking of the first four seals, the famed four horses and riders of the apocalypse are unleashed. (They didn’t play football for Notre Dame, by the way.) They represent all the violence and disasters we suffer in this fallen, imperfect world. When the fifth seal was broken, John says that he saw all those killed for their adherence to the Word of God and heard them cry out, “How long will it be, O Lord, before You avenge our blood?” With the opening of the sixth seal, a great earthquake came, the sun went black, the moon was like blood, the stars fell to the earth “as the fig tree drops its winter fruit when shaken by a gale.” (This image of the fruit of the fig tree would have been especially interesting to the first recipients of Revelation, because the ancient rabbis always taught that the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam and Eve was a fig, not an apple.) Then the sky vanished. Mountains and islands were moved from their places. The powerful and wealthy, along with the rest of humanity, overwhelmed by the entire cosmos in its convulsive death throes, asked to be spared the impending wrath of the Lamb of God, Jesus.

As chapter 7 begins, God’s people—believers in Jesus—are gathered as if prepared for some final struggle, some terrible ordeal, some great suffering.  As you read apocalyptic literature, as you consider things Jesus said, and as you pay attention to how Revelation unfolds, you realize that John isn’t just describing future events. War and hatred, violence and natural disasters are happening today. The killing of Christians for their faith is happening today. (In fact, during the twentieth century, more people were martyred for their faith in Jesus Christ than in the preceding nineteen centuries combined! That anti-Christian violence continues in this century.)

This world was plunged into sin and descended into its inevitable decline into death the moment that Adam and Eve bit into the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It has been dying ever since. Jesus came into this world to call all people to repentance and renewal so that we could have everlasting life with God beyond the inevitable death of this world, beyond our own inevitable deaths.

In the midst of these grim visions, before recounting how the Lamb of God broke the seventh seal and before going on to tell of other foreboding visions, John presents another picture, one filled with hope and joy. It constitutes our lesson from Revelation for this morning and takes place before the throne of God and of the Lamb, the Father and the Son, Who share a single throne. In his vision, John sees a multitude drawn from every nationality and race, people who have trusted in Jesus Christ as God, Savior, and Shepherd. They wear white robes of purity, made clean by the sacrificed blood of Jesus on the cross. They carry palm leaves, symbol of victory. (Interestingly, the Gospel of John is the only one of the New Testament Gospels who specifically mentions palm leaves being waved on the first Palm Sunday.) Then, the white-robed multitude sings praises to Jesus. They praise Jesus in seven different ways. "Blessing and glory and wisdom," they begin. In Jewish tradition, whenever lists like this were made, the middle item is the most important. And that holds true here as well. The multitude, above all, gives its thanksgiving to the Lamb Whose death on the cross opens up eternity to all who believe in Him!

Then, like a Socratic teacher seeking to help a student own the lesson being taught, one of the heavenly elders asks John, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” John says he doesn’t know. So, the elder tells him: “These are the ones coming out of the great affliction…” These are the ones who have endured all the challenges and tragedies seen with the breaking of those seals by Jesus the Lamb. These are the people who, in spite of everything, have continued to turn from their sin—to repent—and to trust in the God of grace we know in Jesus Christ.

Part of our mission as Saint Matthew Lutheran Church is to share the Good News with those not presently connected with Christ and His Church, telling them and showing them that God wants them to be part of that multitude of faithful believers in eternity who, by the power of God’s Holy Spirit, have turned their backs to sin and trusted in Jesus. That’s why your invitations to others to be with us for Friend Day next Sunday are so important. We want all of our friends to be with us when we stand before the Lamb of God!

Beyond that, here’s what I want to make sure to underscore in your minds and hearts this morning. Listen to what the elder says of this white-robed multitude: “they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.” The Lamb of God would shelter them and, as Isaiah had long ago written, He would also “be their shepherd, and…guide them to springs of the water of life, and [would] wipe away every tear from their eyes.” In eternity, God’s people will be sheltered for all eternity.

But the word translated as shelter in today’s lesson means more than protection and love. The word in the original Greek is skeinosei. Literally, it means tabernacled. It’s another form of a word that appears in John 1:14, where we’re told that the Word of God, Jesus, was made flesh and tabernacled—or dwelt or lived—among human beings on earth. These terms are related to a Hebrew word from the Old Testament: shekinah. Shekinah means home or dwelling place, but was most often used of the dwelling place of God. It denoted the very presence of God. God lived or tabernacled in the temple’s holy of holies.

The use of the word tabernacled by the elder who spoke to John the prophet must have been deliberate. Today, as the New Testament tells us, we walk by faith and not by sight; today, we see Christ only partially, but one day we will see Him face to face.

There are blessings in this life, of course! We live on a planet of majestic beauty, filled with intricate patterns and breathtaking wonder. We have family and friends with whom to share all of life's joys and challenges. We have talents, abilities, and passions that give our lives meaning and fulfillment. All of these blessings and many others are ways in which God extends His shelter to us even in this imperfect world.

And, those who belong to Christ know that our lives today are imbued with purpose and hope from God. It's in pursuit of our purpose as disciples of Jesus that our young people are going to serve our neighbors this summer, that we're all going to do the community food drive next month. It was from a sense of God's purpose for them that, decades ago, people from Saint Matthew had the vision to begin broadcasting our Sunday worship service. Today, this broadcast is the longest-running radio program in Ohio. We pursue our purpose as followers of Jesus is what also recently compelled us to join other Lutherans in helping the people in Haiti rebuild their lives following the earthquake of 102 days ago.

But as purposeful and wonderful as life with God is here today, one day, all who believe in Jesus Christ will, along with the white-robed multitude of John's vision, live in God’s perfect shelter, in what is truly the most perfect place. Every blessing you and I have ever experienced in this life, no matter how great, is but a small, whispering preview of what those who follow Jesus have to look forward to in eternity. All our tears and sorrows will be ended and all around us, we will see among the white-robed multitude people with whom we shared Jesus. Our hearts will soar when we hear our Lord tell us of our lives here, “Well done, good and faithful student!”

But even now God is with us. He shelters from sin and death all who dare to run from sin and run to Him. Even in the convulsions of a dying world, those who dare to turn to Christ are touched by the Lamb and sense eternity breaking into their lives. I’ve mentioned before Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who, on April 9, 1945, was executed for opposing the cruel insanity of Nazi Germany. On the brink of his final ordeal, as the executioner slipped a rope around his neck, Bonhoeffer considered the scene he was about to see and experience as a follower of Jesus. He had already known the shelter of love and grace God extended to him while he was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis. Now he knew that he was going into the eternal shelter of the Lamb, where life would once more be the way God intended it for His children. Bonhoeffer said, “"This is the end - for me the beginning of life."

Life can sometimes bring great affliction. I don’t have to tell that to many of you. You know it better than I do. But even when we consider the end of this life, you and I can live in the knowledge that the God Who shields His children from all that would tempt us from trusting in Him, will, at the moment we draw our last breaths, greet us in eternity and let us live in His shelter forevermore.

“Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen!"