Tuesday 19th December - Revelation 14

Today’s chapter is Revelation 14

Tom writes:

I think this is the same content as Revelation 13, but presented through a different image. You know, like when Jesus spoke of himself as bread one minute and then a shepherd the next. None of us thought he had actually turned into a loaf of bread and then into a sheep-keeper; we understood them to be images conveying the same truth in different ways to pull out certain meanings. Here we have a vision of 144,000 men who have never had sex. Nowhere in the New Testament has having-it-off with your spouse been regarded as a defiling act.  In fact the evidence has been massively to the contrary. (There has also been no suggestion in the New Testament that men are entitled to a higher level of heavenly dwelling than the womenfolk.) And so we embrace this image like we did Jesus as a bread roll; we understand the “144,000 men who kept themselves pure” as symbolic of something. They take us back to the wilderness wanderings of Israel where the women of Moab seduced God’s people into worshipping their foreign gods. Or they take us back to Ezekiel and Hosea who again and again compared idolatry to sexual promiscuity. So we understand the 144,000 men not as a precise count of exalted males but rather as an image of God’s faithful women and men, chosen by him (symbolised by the number 12x12) and perfect in number (symbolised by the number 10x10).

Having understood this image it then tells us what action to take; to patiently endure, obeying God’s commandments and remaining faithful to Jesus (v12). We do this like a husband waiting for his beloved wife to come back from a long trip. We do this like a wife waiting for her happy husband to come home. We do it knowing that we would be susceptible to seduction if we did some silly things but we don’t want to do those silly things, because we love Him and we are his. We have been chosen by him and we have his name written on our heads. Blamelessness has become our birthright. Purity has become our preoccupation. And so we endure through the long and lonely nights and we endure through the difficult days when life feels a bit dull. We endure and we remain faithful because our spouse will return and, when he does, he will set all things right.

Question for reflection

How are you pursuing greater purity in this time?