Seneca’s observation that “to be everywhere is to be nowhere” is relevant to the Internet. Read a document, go into a particular website and there are links, leading to links leading to further links. Click on a link and on you go. Snippets of information about whatever it is you are making your ‘search’ for and often in the sidebars, advertisements endeavoring to attract your attention. Distraction is the name of the game, the net encourages it and deep thought is constantly vitiated because deep reading cannot be practiced when using this format. We are conducted through pathways that can take us everywhere as far as information about this and that is concerned but often we find that we arrive nowhere at the end of the journey. Apparently we read differently when viewing a document on our computer, in fact, we do not really read the document, instead, our eyes follow what resembles a letter F. We begin with reading right across the top line or two and then begin a descent at the left hand of the page through the lines to the middle at which point we go about halfway across for a line of two and then back to the left and down to the bottom. I have tested myself and found it to be true and even have found that I am in danger of doing it when I hold a book in my hand! The danger of all this is that we really do end up in “The Shallows.”
But what does this have to do with our life as Christian believers, lovers of the Lord and members of His church? A great deal if we are prepared to face it. I have been going through the Book of the Revelation again recently. What a privilege to have time to read, think, meditate and ponder on this amazing bit of literature, the last book of the Bible. I am learning all the time. I have no idea how many times I have gone through it, slowly, swiftly, looking carefully sometimes at a verse or two and then scanning through whole chapters. I find my heart brought back to it again and again, in the last fifteen years or so particularly. I am no expert on it, I have read books about it, some of them have helped and some I have laid to one side as they seem to miss the point, but underlying all has been the desire to understand what it is the Lord is saying to His churches. From the first days it was sent to them almost two thousand years ago right up to the present time and beyond the Lord has vital things to show us through that book. It was relevant to them, when they heard its word they would have instantaneously understood some of the things portrayed in its visions, grasped many elements of its message and rejoiced in its promises. God gave it as a prophetic gift to His church, to warn, comfort and assure her that indeed He reigns and works to finish what He has begun. John, the revelator does not take us everywhere so that we go nowhere but takes us somewhere (the throne of the universe) and focuses us on Someone (He Who sits on the Throne and the Lamb). In the context of the Lord on the throne he then lets us look at beasts and powers and harlot and the dragon, at global warfare, famines and tragedy. There is really a great deal to look at and hear in the Book of the Revelation and it certainly is not the result of a man daisy picking in the field of fascinating ideas nor will it yield its treasures and message to those who read it seeking the instant gratification of neat and tidy answers about ‘end time’ happenings.
But, consider this. If my math serves me correctly there are four hundred and four verses in the Book of the Revelation but well over four hundred direct allusions and quotations from various parts of the Old Testament! Apparently, we are hardly likely to grasp much in this New Testament book if we have not listened to, and (in our case) read, again and again, the Old. This last book of the Bible is all of a piece with the thirty-nine that make up what we know as the Old Testament. And where did the Apostle John get it all from? Did he understand much of what he received in the things he heard and saw as he suffered for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus on the island of Patmos (Revelation1: 9)? He had plenty of time for deep thought and deep reading there. Did it all come as ‘flashes’ of revelation in a day, or was there a sublime mixture as he was “in the Spirit” he saw visions that expanded and corroborated so much stored in his memory, things he had heard and read whilst a Jewish boy and young fisherman and then read and reread as he heard Jesus teach for three and half years and for decades after he had reflected upon as he lived in the Holy Spirit as an apostle ministering amongst the churches? Reader, you may ask me, “What exactly are you getting at?” And I answer, “I am saying this man John was soaked in his Jewish heritage and the Jewish writings and believed and loved God!” From his earliest years he was raised in a Jewish home, his father Zebedee would have made sure his boys went to synagogue Sabbath by Sabbath. The sense of the holy calling of God upon their nation was upon them in their generation. Probably they, as soon as they were old enough, made the journey to Jerusalem for the celebratory feasts. If not, the solemnities and joyful remembrance of the Passover took place in their home involving the death of a lamb for the whole household. For many boys and girls, parents and grandparents in Israel, all this was not vain repetition and boring tradition. They were looking for the Messiah. They knew their history and were soaked in their scriptures, steeped in fact that from them as a nation would come He Who would save the nations. All this means that there was nothing superficial and shallow about John and his compatriots. To them there was but One God and He was in covenant with them and with the whole of His creation. They, like Simeon were “Looking for the consolation of Israel” (Luke2: 25). They were the servant of the Lord and from them THE Servant of the Lord would come. Many in Israel knew that they were not free and yet freedom had been promised by their God, where was their Messiah, how long before He came? They were not dabblers, but were indeed people to whom God had communicated a sense of His choosing and destiny.
Recently I was considering the epistle Paul wrote to the Roman Christians taking particular notice of the way he establishes everything he writes there on the Old Testament. There are numerous quotations; each examined and quoted bearing in mind the particular scriptural setting they come from and these form the bedrock for his whole presentation of the gospel of God. Perhaps the words, “Do not climb up to try to get it, nor burrow down deep to try to find it, the word is here, near to you, not far distant at all” (Romans 10:6-10) express this. It is all the more amazing, when considering this wealth of Old Testament verses upon which Paul builds his masterly thesis about God’s salvation, that those to whom he was writing were predominantly Gentiles who would have had no background in the Jewish scriptures. Yes, there were Jews in the church at Rome and we must accept that both those with that Hebrew heritage and the Spirit filled prophets and teachers God had given the church ministered everything in a way that unfolded the New from the Old, showing the intimate connection between them. It was two halves of one story, they could not be separated, the church is not replacement, but completion. There must have been deep reading, deep thought, meditation and much pondering along with the revelatory work of God’s Spirit all working together to make plain to those first Christians that Christ and the scheme of God’s saving purpose and work was the fulfillment of what was written and told in the books we know as Genesis to Malachi! They had seen themselves to be part of that One New Man the Christ had created in Himself (Ephesians 2:15 in the context of the whole chapter). Paul both in Romans and in the other letters he wrote was assuming that the believers in the churches had done some deep hearing and in some cases deep reading in the Jewish scriptures and saw that they were part of the immense story of God’s salvation of the whole world!
What shall we say to these things? Think about it all and compare the lightweight messages and multitude of schemas that are supposed to be the pathway to becoming an effective church. How many pastors will preach this weekend having gotten their message from all sorts of websites, cobbling together some ideas, and frequently Christianizing some management technique and presenting it with an odd Bible verse to baptize it into some kind of authenticity. I think of one church I know where the church committee chiefly made up of wealthy business people and professionals have insisted that the pastor and all visiting preachers should avoid all semblance of exposition of Bible passages but use a verse or two topically! Can churches be truly what God wants them to be whilst they present a weekly show with a multitude of snippets of this and that bearing but a passing resemblance to the truth of God? The flock cannot be strong when fed a diet of chaff. Churches flit from one idea to another in their oft-sincere search for a key to growth. Yet God sent His Son and in Him became incarnate and the explanation for His life was that He dwelled deep and lived in the bosom of His Father (John 1:18) and from this place He was sent on mission into this world and living from that very same heart of His Father fulfilled His calling even unto the death and became thereby the True and Faithful Witness (Revelation 1:5,3:14,19:11). Jesus, as Man, lived in the story of His Father and the story of His Hebrew forefathers after the flesh. He dwelled deep and remained in the story of God His Father against every distraction and so must we. Faithful witnesses living in that same story of salvation and redemption, those in whose lives the word is becoming flesh so that in a real way the church is an incarnation of the heart of God. Let us examine ourselves lest we become distracted by distractions into an almost permanent state of distractedness by the beep of our cell phone, the email that demands our immediate attention or the notification that tells us someone has posted a new Tweet or sent a Facebook message. Recently I was told of a short term Bible College that has made it compulsory that for the first week of the course all cell phones are confiscated. Apparently many go through what amounts to withdrawal symptoms. It had become an addiction! We may smile, but would it happen to us?
