Beside the rivers of Babylon, we sat and wept as we thought of Jerusalem. We put away our harps. For our captors demanded a song from us. Our tormentors insisted, “Sing us one of those songs of Jerusalem!” But how can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a pagan land? -Psalm 137:1-4 (NLT)
That was the question of God’s people, “How can we find joy, here?”
“This is the wrong place; we are with the wrong people. Our dreams have turned to nightmares!”
This week we are going to look at one of the most catastrophic episodes of Israel; it is called “The Exile.” The question we will consider is the question of the Psalm, “How can we find joy when we are stuck?”
There are many people who will give you advice on how to get “unstuck.” But that is not the right question. We should ask, “Is joy possible when there is no getting ‘unstuck?’” Can we find beauty in the now? In the “not yet unstuck, stuckness?”
The answer is, “Yes!” Sunday we will ponder the path to “How?”
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Notes Transcript Video Audio iTunesGrace Fellowship Church
Buddy Hoffman
Series: One Story: Digging Deeper
February 17, 2013
Exile: How to Sing in Sorrow
Psalm 137:1-6, 8-9
If you’re here this morning and you don’t have a Bible with you, slip up your hand. You’re going to want a Bible with you. You’re going to want to be able to look at that, hold that in your hand, and you’re going to want to be able to follow along with that.
We’re going through this One Story, and you might be tempted to go, “Wow! When are we going to get through with that story?” Well, I have news for you. We’re never going to get through with this story. We actually have already gone through this once. Does anybody remember we went through this once? We’re actually coming through it on a deeper level. Probably, we’re going to go back in and do whole series out of specific episodes of that story, because we really want you to know how this whole thing fits together, how this kingdom narrative actually works, and how this one story is our story, and it’s actually headed somewhere.
If you have one of those notebooks… You might have one and left it at home. I don’t blame you at all. We really ought to get a little one we can pop on our phone. We’ve come through the Kingdom Foundations (that’s the tree); the Kingdom Family; exodus, Kingdom Freedom; Kingdom Fighting; Famous Kings; the Fractured Kingdom. Does anybody remember what the symbol was for the Fractured Kingdom? Somebody said it over here. Bull! Because Jeroboam set up as the symbol of their new cult a kind of worship. What did they worship? The bull. How did he get to that place? He counseled himself.
Any time you are your own counselor, you’ll end up with a bunch of bull. I’m sorry for the corny joke. I know it’s corny. It’s not even laughable. That was just a courtesy laugh. I feel it. But maybe it will help you remember what that Fractured Kingdom is about. Then the Fractured Kingdom heads into a period of the Scripture that is extremely important, and that is the Exile.
If you have your Bible, open it up to Psalm 137. We’re going to read that, and I’ll give you a minute to turn to it. If your hand, you have this sheet, and across the top it has the word Exile, and it has the symbol of the bones. The picture I want you to feel is that whole symbolism of dry bones. Where does that remind you of in the Bible? Ezekiel 37. What’s happening with Ezekiel 37? A really kind of horror movie, vision from God.
Ezekiel says, “I found myself walking in this valley of dry bones.” This is the word he uses. “And they were very dry.” Now what is he saying there? He’s like, “I’m walking on bones, and they’re crackling under my feet.” He isn’t walking in and seeing a skeleton. He’s just walking along, and these bones are just fractured to pieces. Then God asked him a question. Do you remember what the question God asked him? “Can these bones live?” It’s a really good question.
Have you ever been in one of those seasons of life that was just really dry, where your soul felt shriveled or your life felt lifeless? That’s the question. Can these bones live? I love Ezekiel’s answer. “Lord, you know.” He doesn’t even have the confidence to say, “Well, yes, God! You’re the God of all power.” I mean, that’s pretty shriveled. That’s pretty dry. That’s pretty dead. He goes, “Lord, you know.”
What you have right here… For some of you, what you’re going to do is you’re going to fold this up and you’re going to stick it in your Bible, and five years from now you’ll take it out of your Bible. But what I want to say to you is what you have in your hand is a treasure map. It is a treasure map to truth.
I have across the top of that sheet the psalm we’re going to look at in just a minute. There are some timelines across the top. Across that first broad line is essentially the time of the exile. That’s that 70 years or so. People get all weirded out about exact dates and exact years, and it’s because we live in this day of the Gregorian calendar, and we think everybody works off this calendar.
People say, “Well, when was Jesus born?” We’ll say, “Well, there’s BC and AD, and Jesus had to be born at 0.” Then somebody comes in and says, “Well, it’s probably more like 4,” and you go, “Maybe it didn’t happen.” Now you have to realize that over the years, different empires have just come in and superimposed calendars.
If you’re all really intense that you have to know the date, you’re in trouble. You’re really not going to get much of any history at all. You’re going to have to go for some, “Well, it happened, and the way they dated it in those days is they hinged it against a major event of history.” Then when you start running back… I don’t want to confuse you at all, but you do know there are lunar years and there are calendar years. Lunar years are based upon the moon, and every few years they…
Like the Muslim community, the Islamic community, still remains on the lunar years. You know about leap year. We have to add a day every four years so we don’t just kind of end up way off schedule. I’m off track here. Okay, I’m just going to leave this alone. The dates are kind of close. That’s all I can say.
Then across that second line are Judah’s kings, but underneath that timeline, I want you to look at these prophets, because these are the primary prophets of exile. Look across here. There is Habakkuk. There’s Obadiah. There’s Jeremiah. There’s Lamentations. There’s Ezekiel. There’s Daniel. If you notice, some of these guys were contemporaries of one another. It’s very possible they actually even knew each other.
We know, with no doubt at all, that Daniel is actually reading the prophecies of Jeremiah when he is in exile. We know Ezekiel and Jeremiah have exchanges there, because they are actually noted in the different passages. So there is that whole thing. By the way, Lamentations, which is a book almost nobody reads, is the blues of the Bible. Just in case you want to dig into it sometime, it is basically written on the Hebraic formula of a eulogy for a king, and it’s written about the death of Jerusalem and how Jerusalem died. A lot of people think that Jeremiah actually wrote that.
Let’s look at this psalm, and let’s think about it for a few minutes, because this is one of the songs that looks back to this time period. “Beside the rivers of Babylon…” (Psalm 137:1) Now that, if you just want to kind of put it geographically in perspective, that’s up in the area of Iraq today. It’s interesting, because literally even today you can go through… I’ve driven through the ruins of Babylon, and all over Iraq there are ruins there of the temple that was built there.
If you go up into the museums of Turkey, they brought out many of the ruins of this great temple there, this palace of Babylon. As you would go through the gates of this massive place, there are lions on either side of the gate in the entrance. “Beside the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept as we thought of Jerusalem. We put away our harps, hanging them on the branches of poplar trees. For our captors demanded a song from us. Our tormentors insisted on a joyful hymn: ‘Sing us one of those songs of Jerusalem!'”
Now look at this question. “But how can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a pagan land?” (Psalm 137:1-4) By the way, that question right there forms the foundation of the entire book of Daniel. Daniel answers the question, “How do we sing and serve the Lord when everything we had hoped and built our life upon comes crashing down upon us?”
What do we do when the things we believed, the things we hoped, when the things we were taught, when the very truths that were our foundational statements, that everything we believed just crashes, and the landscape on which we stand absolutely shifts, and there is a tectonic movement of life, and we find ourselves in an absolutely unfamiliar land, and the place we are now doesn’t look like or believe anything like what we believed? What do we do then?
Is it possible that in a place with a people and a philosophy and a theology of which we deeply disagree in every way, shape, or form, is it possible we can be people of faith in foreign soil? Can the seed of the gospel take root in a hostile environment, hostile in every way? Verse 5: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget how to play the harp. May my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth if I fail to remember you, if I don’t make Jerusalem my greatest joy.” (Psalm 137:5-6)
Why is Jerusalem so important to them? What was in Jerusalem? The temple. The temple was in Jerusalem. What was inside the temple? The shekinah glory. The temple wasn’t just a place where they worshiped; it was a place during the times of Solomon, the Holy Spirit, it became a prefigure of the incarnation of Jesus. The Holy Spirit, the shekinah glory, the presence of God came and dwelt in that place.
When we think of it as a church, we’re really not thinking properly. It’s really the palace of God. When they tore down the temple, it was the same idea in their minds as if somebody took the White House apart and moved the entire White House to a foreign capital somewhere. They moved it to Beijing, or they moved it to Moscow, or they moved it to Saudi Arabia, and they said, “Listen. Your empire doesn’t work. Your government doesn’t work. Your Declaration of Independence doesn’t work. Your system of Capitalism doesn’t work.
You are now under our power. We’re going to move you over here. We’re going to teach you a different language. We’re going to give you a different identity. We’re going to give you a different god to serve. We’re going to give you a different way to live. We’re going to give you a different diet to eat. Here’s what’s going to happen to you.” That not only happened to Daniel; that also happened to Ezekiel. Ezekiel is in that place of exile. Jeremiah had a really tough time during this period. If you’re kind of following your notes there, there are several things.
1. What is exile? Well, technically, it’s this period of time where the kings have done so wickedly. If you’ll remember the book of Kings originally was just one book, and it was written to answer the question, “Is God fair? Is God just?” because he allowed Assyria to come in and take off the northern kingdom and Babylon to take off the southern kingdom. Is God just in what he does?
Those lists of kings are the evidence presented before the cosmos, “God is more than fair. God is just.” God is more than just; God is gracious. He kept giving them chance after chance after chance after chance, generation after generation after generation, and they kept turning their backs on God. Not only turning their backs on God, sacrificing their children, worshiping abominations. It was perversion beyond imagination. God finally said, “That’s it.”
Let me just say something that is so incredibly important. Grace doesn’t make sin safe. Grace doesn’t make sin safe. The fact that God is graceful doesn’t mean that ultimately he will not allow judgment to come in your life. He will. Now what happens (and this is incredibly important) when we are living under God’s blessing… Imagine we’re in this room right here. If we weren’t in this room, what would we be? Cold. Very, very, very cold.
A couple of weeks ago we were in Minneapolis, and where I was staying there was a gym right across the street. I would go and work out and work out my knees. Normally, when I work out my knees, since I’ve had this, I would ice my knee after I worked it out. But the nice thing about it being 27 degrees below zero is you don’t have to ice anything. You could just go sit on the curb. If you go outside, you’re freezing. You come inside, there’s steamy coffee. There’s just nice, warm…
Here’s what the blessings of God is. It’s where we choose to live in the dome of God’s kingdom. We choose to live under that dome of his protection, of his blessing. Here’s what cursed is. It’s when we choose to live outside of that dome, when we decide, “No, I’m going to go on my own. I’m going to go my own way.”
It’s not like God says, “You go outside. I’m going to make you real cold.” No, we just live in a cold land. We live in a cursed land. We live in a land of brokenness, and God, in his graciousness, reaches over even in our broken land and says, “I’m going to put my hand over you. That’s going to protect you. That’s going to guide you.”
There’s actually a term that is used in Job that Satan uses about Job. “Yeah, of course he loves you, because you have put a hedge of protection about him.” He says, “If that hedge is removed, he’ll curse you to your face.” Now whether you realize it or not, when you walk in God’s ways, you are walking between the hedges. You are living under that blessing.
If you get out of that blessing, you are living outside of that blessing. Here’s what happens. God says over and over in the Kings, “If you don’t live justly, if you oppress the poor, if you sacrifice your children, if you serve the abomination of the other gods, I will take my hand of blessing off of that nation, and I will allow the destroyer to come in and destroy you, because I can’t keep my hand of blessing on such injustice and such impurity and such pollution of worship.”
What happens is God lifts his hand off of his people. That is what exile is. Here’s what exile is. I mean, it’s the best definition I can give you. Exile is where God allows you to go physically where you already are spiritually. What happened with the nation of Israel… They had followed that idolatry. They had followed that idolatry in their heart, and God finally says, “Okay, you want to live in idolatry? I’ll take you to the capital of idolatry. I’ll allow you to be transported to where idolatry is everywhere,” and that’s what happens to them.
When you and I move away from what is true and righteous, the first movement is not of the hand; it’s of the heart. If your heart goes there long enough, you’ll go there physically. “Oh no, that’ll never happen to me.” Yes it will. If your heart goes there long enough, that’s where you’re going to end up physically.
2. Who are the primary prophets of exile? They’re listed there. Habakkuk is an amazing prophet, and he’s kind of really even a pre-exile prophet. His period of time extends over into Jeremiah a bit. Habakkuk is that amazing prophet who says this, and he wrestles with the question. He says out loud what we don’t want to say out loud. “God, you’re not fair. God, you’re not just. Why? Because the Babylonians are way worse than we are. How could you possibly use the Babylonians to punish us, because they are way worse than we are?”
If you want to jot this down, Jeremiah is writing from home. He stays in Israel itself. Jeremiah has this really, really hard job. Do you know what his job is? His job is to tell the nation of Israel and the kings and the false prophets that they’re all liars. Much of Jeremiah is, “Listen. Babylon is going to come in here and it’s going to destroy this nation.”
The false prophets were running around going, “Oh, Jeremiah. He’s just a Negative Nelly. He doesn’t see anything good anywhere. He’s just saying stuff. Jeremiah, can’t you see anything positive here?” Jeremiah goes, “I’m positive Babylon is coming in. I’m positive this place is going to be destroyed. I’m absolutely, 100 percent positive this is going to happen.”
They were so horrendously hard on Jeremiah. Jeremiah is a little child when God calls him to be the prophet to the nations. He goes, “I’m just a child. I can’t speak.” He says, “Don’t say you’re a child. You can speak. Go, and you utter the words I tell you to utter.” He’d go down to the temple, and he’d go, “Hey guys, I know you hate Babylon, but they’re going to take us over, and it’s God’s will, and if you resist them, you’re actually resisting God.”
As a matter of fact, one time he sent a scroll to the king, and the king took out a knife and just ripped it into shreds and threw it in the fire. Then one time, he gave the prophecy, and they took him, and they threw him in a well and left him there to die. Some people go down, and they throw a rope down to him, and they put cloths up under his arms and pull him out of the well.
When it comes close to time for Babylon to come in, and finally they come in and they destroy and they burn the temple, and all the captives are chained up, Jeremiah, who Babylon knows has been saying, “You resist Babylon, you’re resisting God,” he’s over there chained up with the captives.
They go over to Jeremiah and they unchain Jeremiah and they say, “Jeremiah, listen. Whatever you want to do. You want to come back with us to Babylon? We’ll take care of you there. We’ll put you up. We’ll take care of you. You want to stay here? The whole land is in front of you. Wherever you want to go, whatever you want to do.”
What we would call that would be, “He’s a traitor. He’s not a patriot. He’s not standing behind our nation. He’s not really a good man because he is colluding with the enemy.” Now I just want to say this to you, because there may come a time in our lifetime where we have to make up our mind, “Is our loyalty to the Word of God or the nation of America?” Oh no, don’t go there, because God bless America. Do you know what? America needs to bless God.
Lincoln said it so very well. When they asked him, “President Lincoln, do you think God is on our side?” he said, “That’s not the question. The question is are we on God’s side?” Okay, I’m just going to get this out of you. Amen? I love America, but if America spits in God’s face, I love God more.
There are times that what we do is we intermingle our patriotism with our worship, and sometimes we don’t even know the difference. That’s incredibly important. Being patriotic is a good thing, but being loyal to God is so much more important, even when people don’t like it, even when it’s not politically popular, even when it’s not PC to say, “This is true and that’s not true, and if you do this, you will remove the hand of blessing upon your people.” Amen, Buddy. That was Jeremiah. That wasn’t me.
Ezekiel goes off to captivity. Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what’s going on with Ezekiel, because he has these visions by the river, and he sees these spinning things. He gets taken off into captivity even before the temple gets burnt. He goes there before Daniel. He’s sitting by the river Euphrates, actually a little tributary. In his vision, he goes and he sees the temple.
What happens in part of Ezekiel is that Ezekiel sees the Holy Spirit, the presence of God coming up above the temple, moving to the threshold of the temple, moving out to the edge of the city. What Ezekiel sees is the vision of God’s glory departing from Jerusalem. It’s a vision. He just sees this happen, and he sits down with the elders, and he said, “Let me tell you what I see. I’ve seen this vision, and this vision is God’s glory moving away.” Isaiah is not living during the time of the exile, but Isaiah 40-66 prophesies the return, and it has to do with the exile.
There are a couple of terms if you’re going to understand the Bible you need to know really well. You need to know what they mean. They need to be part of your vocabulary. If they’re not part of your vocabulary, you’re going to have a hard time understanding the Bible always. I know we like to say, “Oh, we don’t want to get technical.” But if you don’t understand the term touchdown, how much are you going to like football? Huh? If you don’t understand the term first down, if you don’t understand the idea they need a ground game, if you don’t understand the concept of two-minute warning…
Now the good thing about that is that most of us learned those terms sitting with our dads on the couch. Nobody had to sit down and explain those terms to us because we sat… I can remember my granddad pacing back and forth and screaming at the Falcons. “You need a first down! What’s running? You need a running back!” I remember nobody actually ever sat down and said, “Okay…”
By osmosis, watching the Falcons lose year after year, I learned what you weren’t supposed to do in football. The same thing is true in baseball. We learned it sitting on the couch with our parents, and we learned it out in the front yard playing with our friends. We learned it at Little League and Peewee League.
What has happened in America is that moms and dads and churches do not teach people how to read the Bible with any literacy whatsoever, and they read the Bible, and they don’t hear it. You can watch football and not know any of the terms. You can appreciate the athleticism. You can comment on the color of their uniforms. You can enjoy the halftime spectacle. You can even absorb some of the energy of the fans who actually understand the game, but you can’t really for yourself pick a team and actually get engaged emotionally in the game.
Two of the terms you have to understand if you’re going to get engaged in the Bible are exodus… That’s not only a book of the Bible; that is the controlling narrative of the nation of Israel. If you’ve never been to an orthodox-observing Jew’s event of the Passover… If you have any Jewish friends, just ask them sometime, “Can I come to one of your Passover services?” You will be amazed. Our Communion is built upon the foundation of the Passover and the story of redemption.
The other major term that is essential is the exile. This sense of going through a season where we’re in timeout, where it feels like God has absolutely abandoned us, where we don’t feel God’s presence, and we don’t sense God’s power, and we don’t hear God’s voice, and it feels like the forces of darkness have absolutely overwhelmed, and God himself has been defeated.
I would imagine everyone here over the age 40 has experienced some season of exile, some season in your life that you found yourself displaced, and that displacement can come in lots of forms. It can come physically, where you find yourself in a place you really didn’t want to be, with people you didn’t want to be with.
It can come emotionally. I personally am not a depressive person. I get depressed usually in 10-minute increments. I’m just not extremely depressed. Usually, on my birthday, I spend about eight hours depressed. Sometimes on Monday, I’m depressed. But I’m just not naturally depressed. That doesn’t make me better than other people, but I have dear friends who struggle deeply with bouts of depression, those dark nights of the soul.
It can be relational. Maybe your mate abandons you or you go through a time in your life where your kids go off to college and your very identity is shaken. It can be spiritual. It can be vocational. When you go through those times, the prophets of exile are your light in the darkness.
Imagine it this way. Did you ever see that movie Speed with Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves? They’re on a bus, and they’re just careening through the city. Now imagine Israel is the bus. You’re just a passenger on the bus, and you’re just careening through the city. You realize this thing is going to crash or blow up, and you don’t know what to do. That’s what these guys are going through. It does finally just crash, and you find yourself lying on the side of the road bleeding, battered, and you go, “What in the world has happened?”
Or imagine it this way. Imagine you’re a passenger on a ship, and this ship is like the biggest ship ever built, and as a matter of fact, it is such a massive ship and it is so well built that the very tagline is it is unsinkable! Imagine that the captain is the kings of Israel, and they are reckless and they are arrogant and they are headed into dangerous waters. The navigator is the prophet, and he’s saying, “Listen! You’re headed into dangerous waters. You’re headed into space that could have icebergs in it.” The iceberg is Babylon.
Then you see this flicker of lights, and you hear this sound, like, “Wow! I think we’re in trouble here.” Somebody says, “Head for the lifeboats! We’re all in trouble.” That’s the prophets. “Go to the lifeboats! Go to the lifeboats!” Then somebody else says, “Listen. This ship can never sink. Just go back to bed. You’ll be fine. No, let’s get the band, and let’s play some great songs, and let’s have a great party here.” There are false prophets and false voices and there are true prophets and true voices and true lights.
You’re going, “Who am I supposed to believe? What am I supposed to believe?” Then the ship goes down, and you find yourself just deluged, and it’s cold, and you don’t know which way to turn. Now then, here’s how you know who to listen to. Who was saying, “Head for the lifeboats”? Who was saying to you, “We’re going down”? When you hear those voices, those are the prophets of exile. Those are the one we can trust. Each of those prophets invites us onto their lifeboat of truth in the drowning.
In our minds and our hearts, we say, “Well, wait a minute. Jerusalem is lying in smoking ruins.” The prophets go, “Yes, I know. Jerusalem is lying in smoking ruins. Yes, I know the temple has been destroyed. Yes, I know the great wealth of generations has been wasted. Yes, we know the sacred altars have been offered to pagan gods. Yes, we know the walls of the city are cast down. Yes, we know the blood of our families cry out from the ground.
You think you’ve been deserted, and you feel like you are disoriented, and you feel like you will never sing the songs of Zion and hear your mother tongue, and you think all is lost, and you wonder if God has been defeated.” But here is the message of the prophets of the exile…God knows where you are and God still reigns. God not only knows where you are; God is already there. God is already there!
You feel like only God can work here, and God says, “No, listen. I’m already there. I’m there, and here’s what I want you to do. I want you to work with me there. I have a message there. I have people there. I have work for you to do there.” I wish I had time to just dig into it in a massive way.
3. What to do in exile? On your handout sheet, I went through, and there are three things we’re to do in exile.
A. Love and live the truth. Each of those passages demonstrates from one of those prophets how it’s not enough just to say, “Okay, I believe the truth.” No, we have to love the truth and we have to live that truth out.
B. Tell the truth with boldness and love. Both of those are important. Not just with boldness. Not just get up and tell the truth with boldness. That’s important, but to do it with boldness and love. Who does that better than Daniel? Daniel is the master of truth telling, but he does it so kindly.
When Nebuchadnezzar says he has the dream and the stump is cut down, he doesn’t go to Nebuchadnezzar, “Nebuchadnezzar, you’re stupid. You are the stump.” He goes, “Nebuchadnezzar…” and he calls him by all these powerful royal names. He respects his authority.
Jeremiah writes to those who are in exile and he says to them, “I know there are prophets up there who are telling you that you need to get together and rebel and resist the power, but here’s what I’m telling you. Work for the shalom of the city.”
“What? I’m to work for the shalom of Babylon?”
“Yep. Plant. Build. Make it a better place. Raise your kids there. In the shalom of the city will be your shalom.” Some of you have employers you work for, husbands you live with, wives you live with, neighborhood associations you live with, and you just absolutely despise them, but you’ve never really thought about, “How do I cultivate this place God has put me? What if this is not an accident? What if this is really a God thing?”
C. Trust the hand and the heart of God. This is what I really would like to land on hard. Do you know there’s a difference in there? When we trust the heart of God, we go, “God, I trust you, but I don’t trust what you’re doing.” Habakkuk is like that. He’s going Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! and then at the end of Habakkuk, he’s going, “Lord, if the fig tree doesn’t bud, if the oxen cribs are empty, if the olive trees do not bear fruit, I’m going to worship you. I’m going to trust the heart and the hand of God.”
At the end of that psalm, by the way, there’s just a phenomenal verse that blows everybody’s mind. Look at that last verse of Psalm 137. This is a verse that just messes everybody’s mind up. Look at verse 8. “O Babylon, you will be destroyed. Happy is the one who pays you back for what you have done to us. Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks!” (Psalm 137:8-9) That sounds bitter.
How could somebody be in Babylon and work for the shalom of the city and say, “It’s going to be a great day when somebody comes in here and takes your babies and bashes them against the rocks”? How could that even be in the Bible? Sometimes people talk about these imprecatory psalms, how do we even make sense of these psalms?
I’m going to tell you just quickly how you can, because Babylon is a system. It’s not a people; it’s a system. Its birth certificate is Genesis 11. It’s when they build up Babylon. “Is this not great Babylon I’ve built?” It’s a system that is built on injustice. It’s a system that is built on tyranny. It’s a system that is built upon mankind and our ways. That’s its birth certificate.
Its death certificate is Revelation 18. Its death certificate is when, “O Babylon, look what we have done. Look at all the wealth we’ve accumulated. Look at all the power we’ve assimilated. Look at all the ships we have built.” Revelation 19 is where the white horse comes down, and we’re invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb, and the systems and the offspring, the children of all the Babylons are crushed, and the mighty reign of God is established forever and ever and ever.
If you have ever watched TV and seen children who are starving and homes that are blown up and women who are beaten and children who have been abused, and you go, “When will this end?” I’ll tell you when it ends. It ends in Revelation 18, and God says, “All the offspring of Babylon, all that system of injustice is going to be crushed and ground up against the rocks of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.” Let’s pray.
Lord, thank you so much for you. Lord, we thank you that you do reign. Lord, we pray for those this morning who find themselves in Babylon, who find themselves in those cold, drenched waters of life. Lord, we pray we will be a people who trust you even in the darkness, even in the coldness, because you have made some promises, and they are true.
Lord, we pray, as we take a minute or so here, just a few minutes to worship you, that you will speak truth into our hearts, that you are a just God, that you are a kind God, that you reign sovereign and forever will reign sovereign. Lord, let us just open our hands and say, “Lord, this situation I don’t like, I’m going to give it to you because you bring light into darkness, and that’s what I need.” In your name we pray, amen.