We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Of Revelation and The Lord of the Rings
Image via Abnormal Anabaptist
As most of you know, Greg has been preaching a sermon series on the book of Revelation. He’s got a very different take on this book than the popular Christian culture that sprouted the Left Behind series. Greg argues that John takes all of the violent images of his day and turns them on their head to reveal Jesus as the Lamb of God who conquers with his own death rather than the death of his enemies. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to them, it would be well worth your time.
Robert Martin wrote a reflection on how this series is changing the way he thinks about this topic. Robert is a big fan of The Lord of the Rings, and he uses this story as a way to illustrate his change in thinking. Brilliant and inspiring.
Here’s a little snippet of his blog post, but you’ll want to check out the entire post to fully get his point.
For those in Middle-Earth who stop looking to the past and look, instead, towards this future, the strivings take on a different tone. No longer are they striving to regain the past. Instead, they are aiming to capture a little bit of that future in the present. There is a hope that they have that comes, not from attempting to regain something lost, but from trying to attain something that is yet to gain. And it is that “not yet” that causes them to make amazing sacrifices.
This is captured in probably one of the more poignant scenes in the movie. The actual words take place a lot earlier in the novels, but Gandalf and Pippin, faced with imminent death, faced with a hopelessness of “why bother if this is the end”, have a moment where Gandalf describes the hope, a hope that he, actually, has seen. Watch this:
Category: General
Tags: Book of Revelation, Eschatology, Hope, Left Behind, Lord of the Rings, Robert Martin
Related Reading
New Feature: We Need YOU!
For the last several years we’ve been running a feature every Friday called Lighten Up. It was fun for a while, but it’s gotten harder and harder to find light-hearted, relevant content. That’s where you come in. We’d like to start something slightly different on Fridays that features content sent to us by YOU! There’s…
God, Why You So Harsh in Revelation? (podcast)
Greg talks about Jezebels and beds of suffering. Episode 512 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0512.mp3
On Our Limits and Our Hope
Martin Gommel via Compfight Are you worn out by the craziness of this last week? Micah J. Murray posted yesterday on the limits of what we can hold when the freight train of tragedies carried on the boxcars of social media bears down on us. There’s only so much we can process, and our emotions…
The Hope of the Cross & Resurrection
In a real sense, God has already “raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms” (Eph 2:6). And while “we do not see everything subject to [us],” the truth of the matter is that, in Christ, we have already been restored to our rightful place as co-rulers with Christ.…
The Longing of Advent
The Advent season is a time of anticipating the coming of God, in Christ, a time of turning our imagination toward the revelation of God’s love for us. This after all is the deepest longing of our heart, and our natural longings always point us to something real. We grow hungry only because there’s such…
Responding to Driscoll’s “Is God a Pacifist?” Part I
I’m sure many of you have read Mark Driscoll’s recent blog titled “Is God a Pacifist?” in which he argues against Christian pacifism. I’ve decided to address this in a series of three posts, not because I think Driscoll’s arguments are particularly noteworthy, but because it provides me with an opportunity to make a case against what I’ve…