The Picture of Unity
Revelation 7:9-12 ·November 27, 2022· Joel Passmore
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I'm wondering if there can be any anywhere. We do see people come together around sports teams, around political views, around hobbies, around having the same causes. We want more unity, but what should we base our unity on? What should unity really be centered upon? We're going to see that today by looking at a passage of Scripture that's a picture of the future. When I was a kid, and frankly when I'm, you know, even now as an adult, I love time travel movies.
There's something about that genre I just love. I love this idea that somebody goes into the future, sees something, sees a vision of the real future and it comes back and now kind of can live their life knowing what the future is going to be like. Or maybe they go back in the past and they tell everyone this is what it's going to be like. The book of Revelation is the closest thing we have in the Bible to time travel, basically. It is someone who has given an actual vision of the future and he brings it back to the present so that people can live differently, can live with hope, can live with purpose, can know how to order their lives, can know where they're going.
It's a glorious future that it doesn't depend on our success. It's something that God is going to accomplish. And so we're propelled forward not by some prospect of a conditional future, but by the certainty of a promised future. That's what the book of Revelation is, basically. We're going to read one little short passage from it. I love this passage. It's really great. We learn a lot from it. And we really can be changed by it and our church can be influenced by it.
And that's what I am hoping and wanting today. This passage gives us a true vision of the future of the redeemed people of God all gathered together. So let's read that. Revelation 7. It's in your bulletin. It's up on the screen behind me. This is Revelation 7, verses 9 through 12.
And church, this is the word of God for us today. Let's pay attention to it. Let's receive it as trustworthy and true words from our Savior. After this, I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.
And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God, saying, Amen. Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Pray with me. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, will you please make the going forth of your word fruit-bearing in our hearts. Help it to land on soft ground. Ground that you have prepared so that we can be changed by it.
Lord, help us all to receive it, to see you more clearly, God. God, to see the future that you have for us, held out, promised, and help that to change the way that we live, the way that we go about building this church and living as a community together. Jesus, we pray this in your name.
Okay, the title of my sermon today is The Picture of Unity. That's what this is, The Picture of Unity. The main point is, in Christ, really different people are really united. That's the point. If you get that point, you've gotten the main point for today. That's what this passage tells us. Really different people are really united in Christ. The first section is this. These people are diverse in composition. Now, let me give you a little bit of context before I dive into Revelation here.
Long ago, God promised Abraham that he would give him a son and a large family. This was incredible for Abraham to hear because he and his wife were very, very old. Way past childbearing age. But even more incredible than that promise to him of a child and a family was what God would do through that family. This is what God says. In your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. This is way back in Genesis. God is promising to bless all the nations through this one family.
But God's people in the Old Testament, just like we do, we have this thing called selective hearing. And they did it too. As the family of Abraham grew into 12 tribes and into a full-fledged nation, a huge nation, they celebrated. Yay! God's made us into a great people. He fulfilled His promise. But they forgot, largely, about this blessing that God promised to happen through them to all nations. They started focusing on themselves. They forgot about the all nations blessing and promise.
Fast forward a long time to when we get to the Scripture reading that we heard earlier. Some Greeks come up to the disciples and they say, we want to see Jesus. And the disciples are like, uh, I think you got the wrong guy. This is our Savior. Maybe there's some other Savior for you. We don't know. We just know that He's Jewish. We're Jewish. He's our promised Messiah. So they come to Jesus. Jesus, what should we do with this? Some Greeks want to see.
Why would Greeks want to see you, Jesus? We don't understand. And Jesus sees that and He goes, I know what this is all about. This is indicating that my time has almost come. Because the seed is going to go into the ground and is going to bear much fruit and is going to fulfill what God promised in Genesis to reach all nations. He knew what was happening. They didn't. When I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself. That's what the passage said.
All people, meaning the whole world, Gentiles as well as Jews. All nations. His work on the cross would propel the salvation message outward. Fast forward it a little bit further. Maybe 30, 40, 50 years after that passage in John that we read earlier and you get this revelation to John. Where God Himself is showing him this is what it's going to be like. The final fulfillment of God's redemptive work. After this I looked and behold a great multitude that no one could number from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages.
This is the fulfillment of the Genesis promise. In you shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. These are the people of God. All those who have repented and put their faith in Jesus from all time. This is after redemption has been completed. They have their resurrected bodies. And here's the incredible part. John sees that they have outward differences. They have distinctions between them. After the resurrection, let that sink in for a minute.
In the new heavens and the new earth, when all the redeemed people of God are gathered together and resurrected with their glorified bodies, they're not just spirits floating around. This is the final end state. The new heavens and the new earth. Our spirit and our resurrected body united together for all time. The distinguishing characteristics of people groups are still observable. They're still there. You can still see them. That's pretty incredible.
Look at the list. From every nation. The Greek word is ethnos. This is the word that we get ethnicity from. Here's the definition. A body of persons united by kinship, culture, and common traditions. It's from all tribes. This Greek means a subgroup of a nation distinguished by an actual bloodline. He sees peoples, people with common cultural bonds, people that are tied to a specific territory on earth, and languages, different vocabularies, different syntaxes, different alphabets.
All these distinctions are still seen among God's people in the new heavens and the new earth. Forever. Sin has been done away with, and since these distinctions persist, we are left with only one conclusion that these distinctions are part of God's good design. He designed it that way. Sin is gone, the distinctions remain.
This is one of the first takeaways from us from this passage. God is not colorblind. He made people differently. He made people with distinctions. He built us with genes that could produce all of the variations that we see on earth. And he built us with different strengths, so we build different cultures. We make different people groups. Those distinctions still exist in the new heavens and the new earth. Everyone bears his image. Sin impacts us all.
Okay? Sin impacts everyone on earth, and everyone needs the salvation offered in Christ. but this passage tells us that after his redemptive work is complete and his glorified, redeemed people stand before him, they still display the beautiful diversity of design that he made them with for all eternity. This magnifies his glory because he is going to bring forth a beautiful, diverse bride that we are a part of, that you're a part of if you belong to him in repentance and faith.
You're part of this diverse, capital B, bride of Christ, the church he is bringing together from all nations and tribes and tongues. When you combine different elements together, it makes the composition more complex, more wonderful. If you're a chef, you might add something sweet to a savory dish to make it better. If you're a musician, you might bring in a borrowed chord or a subdominant major chord so that you can make your composition more complex, more interesting.
And if you're a painter, well, a painter gets creative too. I want to show you, I want to tell you about something. George Surratt is a painter. He developed a technique. He wanted to develop something new in painting. Rather than do brush strokes, he started painting with dots, little tiny dots. Not a stroke, a dot. So this is one of his paintings. Actually, that's a little deceiving. That is a one inch by one inch piece of one of his paintings.
You can see all the dots, right? It doesn't look like much. He was working on this thing. It came to be called pointillism. Very creative name. So he's painting these little dots, right? He thinks that there's something to this about putting different colored dots next to each other. You see how different that is? All right, go to the next slide. We're going to scale out just a little bit. That's maybe a foot by a foot. No, not even that. Maybe six inches by six inches.
You still can't really tell what that is. All right, let's zoom out again. Now this is more like a foot by a foot. So we're starting to see something now, right? Now let's scale out all the way. This is the painting. It's actually much bigger than this. It's 17 feet by 10 feet. Millions and millions and millions of little tiny dots. That's how he painted the entire thing. You can't see those dots now, can you? It looks beautiful. It's amazing.
Here's the idea. Here's what he learned. This was his theory that he tried to prove with these paintings. Different colored dots placed next to one another trick the human eye into blending them. And they create luminescence and shape. Each individual dot is improved by its proximity to another dot. When seen from a distance, the whole thing is vibrant and illuminated, almost like there's light behind it. I've seen this painting in person and it's true.
It almost seems three-dimensional. Now God is a much more skilled artist than George Surratt was. His work of redemption is beautiful in part because of the diversity of creation and the diversity of redemption. He's creating a beautiful, diverse people that like this painting, when you stand from a distance and see it, it's going to be a work to behold. Each individual making the next individual shine because of their differences.
This is what God is working towards and it's the right thing for us to work towards as well. God's redeemed people are diverse in their composition, but let's not miss this. There's the other thing in this passage and it's this. They are unified in Christ. They're unified in Christ. Let's talk about that. It's not just the differences that John saw when God gave him this vision. He also saw that they were alike in important ways. Here are all the ways that this multitude shows unity.
Okay? They have a common healing. They're all standing. They're all standing before the throne. There's no diversity of physical ability or handicap. There's no wheelchairs. There's no hospital beds. I have a cousin that's passed away now. He was born with spina bifida. He was born way back when there was no way to do surgery in the womb. So he was born and he was wheelchair. He was bound to a wheelchair from as early as he could use one until he died.
My cousin is not going to be in a wheelchair in the new heavens and the new earth. He trusted the Lord. There's not going to be any wheelchairs there. No crutches. Everyone is standing. Everyone is healed. They've received their glorified eternal bodies. They have a common worship. They're before the Lamb. They're giving him their praise. There's no diversity of belief. There's no pantheon of gods. There's no different methods of salvation. All alike are worshiping Jesus.
They have a common righteousness. They're clothed in white robes. These white robes are a symbol of their holiness. There's no variety in sinfulness of temptations, of fallenness. They're all alike, redeemed, and righteous before God. They have a common status. They have palm branches in their hands. Palm branches is a symbol of victory in this culture. They're all waving these palm branches because there's no mixture of winners and losers here. There's no class or rank or status difference.
There's no rich and poor. All alike are sharing in the conquest that Jesus gave to them over sin and death. And lastly, they have a common proclamation. They're all crying out with a loud voice. Somehow, I don't know how this works, somehow though they have many different languages, they are testifying in unison to their Savior. There's one declaration from this diverse people, but the most important element of their unity is this. The one that establishes all the others is this.
They have a common salvation. When they cry out together, this is what they say. Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb. Together, they testify that God alone saves. It belongs to Him. Salvation belongs to our God and He gives it in Christ.
Now this vision of the future is meant to influence our present. The diversity part and the unity part. Next week, we're going to explore how to practice our unity in Christ. The practical side of it. For today, we just need to let this passage challenge us on all of the ways we tend to build unity that are not going to last. We need to have this passage push us towards building unity in the Spirit and in Christ. That's the center point of our unity.
It's part of the image of God in us to both admire diversity and build unity. To want diversity but also want to strive for unity. We want both of those things. I think that we all do at some level. We very much want to harmonize these two concepts but we can't do it. This is the problem.
Think about this. Something happens in this world where people try to get the diversity and the unity together and it never ever works. Sometimes, it's superficial unity over something trivial. This is what we get in sports, in songs. Do you know how many songs there are about everybody get together? Go and search for that. Everybody get together. It sounds great. If it's got a great beat, it'll be a hit but over what? Does it ever happen? Brands try this all the time.
Do you want different people to come together in harmony? Then try Coca-Cola. There's a song back in the 70s called I Want to Teach the World to Sing in Perfect Harmony. That actually was a jingle before it was a hip-hop song. It was written because somebody saw in some kind of hotel, not a hotel, an airport lounge, people whose plane had been delayed. They were all grumpy together but they were sharing stories and they were drinking Coke. And he's like, oh, that's good.
That'll sell. So he gets a song writing team together and they write, I'd like to buy the world a Coke. And then later they wanted to make it into an actual song so they changed the words. But it started as a jingle. I mean, how preposterous is that? People will get together and really sort out their differences over a nice, cool glass of Coke. But those are the lies we tell ourselves all the time. Maybe it's this, maybe it's that that's finally going to bring us together.
Soda. Really? It's a nice photo op but it doesn't satisfy anyone. But then there's the other side of it and sometimes there is real substantive unity but it's brought about by gathering people who are already pretty similar. Right? They're the same class or the same background, the same ideology, the same point of view on something or the other. This is what you get in politics. This is what you get in nations. And what eventually happens is that people who are outside the group are seen as threats.
Threats to your unity. That's unity at the expense of diversity. It's us versus them. Church, do you see? These are the only two options the world has to offer you. Superficial unity that brings a lot of people together but does not satisfy us or do anything or real unity that accomplishes something usually at the expense of some other people.
Revelation is offering us a completely different picture. God is offering us a third way. Here in Revelation 7 we see something completely different and completely better and it challenges us not to give up. Never to give up. It pushes us to not settle for a togetherness that is built on sameness. Christian unity is not homogeneity.
The statement accompanying our core value of unity says this, through the spirit diverse people are made into a new family by faith in Christ rather than by a shared human culture or characteristic. That first sentence is basically Revelation 7, 9 through 12, rephrased. Here's the next sentence, we base our fellowship on biblical truths and in matters of Christian liberty we humbly serve others ahead of ourselves because unity is God's gift to us and a testimony to the world.
It is much, much easier to build a church by just finding people who are basically the same and bringing them together. This is what at one time was called the homogenous unit principle. It actually was a strategy for church planting. It was taught, this is what you do to start a new church. You get a bunch of people together that are basically the same in this regard or that regard and boom, you got a church. It is sad because it does not reflect Revelation 7.
Revelation 7, the commonality was in Christ. It was not because we all went to the same college or because we all do basically the same kind of work or because we're all from the same one town.
There is one big problem with the whole homogenous unit principle and it is not biblical. We have this picture of the future state but for another thing, we have New Testament letter after New Testament letter after New Testament letter and these are churches that are filled with very, very different people, rich and poor, young and old, men and women, Gentile, Jew, educated, common, elite, former slaves and former masters in the same church. And all of these New Testament letters are telling them this is how you live together in a healthy way.
So many of the applications of the gospel to these churches are this is how you live, people. This is how you come together. There is no shadow in any of Paul's writings of, well, maybe you all are just better off separate.
There is a diversity that frankly is untouched by most American churches in the New Testament churches and they are constantly called to come together, to be one in Christ.
He is not going to erase distinctives when he gathers his people together and neither should we. Let's not build unity on a common background or culture. It is not going to last, it doesn't satisfy, it makes us resistant to other people who come in the door and it is not what God has in mind for his church. Let's build unity that we have in Christ, our new relationship as a family. When we focus on that, on our common bonds, our family bonds as brothers and sisters in Christ, different traditions and cultures, they are no longer seen as threats to us.
Different ways of doing things are not dangerous. We can listen to each other. We can seek Christ together, we can read the word of God together, we can encourage and correct each other according to that, not according to, well, I've always done it this way, not according to, well, I just grew up doing this, according to the Bible, in Christ together. And let me remind you, church, the world is watching. We have an opportunity, every church, every church has an opportunity to build a testimony to the world.
What the world should say, what someone who's not a Christian should say when they walk past a church is, I never would have pictured all those people being together, much less doing anything together productively, much less enjoying it, but look at them, people who I never would have pictured being together, working together and enjoying it. Something must be going on here. That's what the world should say when they look at every church, and I hope that that's what they say about this church.
this path is opened up by Jesus alone. He's the only one that can make this happen. He ransomed people from across the world, and he brought them together in himself. He didn't do it by teaching them. He didn't do it by training them. He did it by dying for them in their place. His blood is what washed them and made them clean. He gives righteousness and victory. His conquest over sin and death, he gives to his people, to everyone who trusts in him, and he, even now, even now, he is gathering together a people from every tribe, tongue, and nation, from every language, and he's making them one in him, redeemed, secure, full of worship, and crying out, salvation belongs to our God.
When the angels hear this, they're going to respond this way, amen, blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever. Church, let's pursue this blood-bought unity while we display the beautiful diversity of God's redeemed people. Pray with me.
Lord Jesus, we need your help because the differences that we have tend to divide us. It's much easier for me and for everyone here to have fellowship and to work together with people that think like us, that have the same traditions as us, that have the same culture as us. Lord, though there's nothing wrong with finding things in common with people, we just pray and hope that by your spirit, this church would be built on the common foundation, the unity point, that we are one in Christ by your blood.
And we pray, Lord, that you would help us in those hard times of having conversations and working together where there are different points of view. Lord, help us to come together, Lord, under your word and in your spirit. Lord, help us to be a church that welcomes people of different cultures and backgrounds, that is able to move towards them. Help this church to be hospitable and home to many different types of people. Lord, help us to be aware of these differences.
Help us to rejoice in them, Lord. Lord, it's challenging. To find our center point in you, Jesus, we would much rather find it in something else. Will you continually push us and challenge us on this? Thank you for this picture. Lord, were it not for this picture, we might not even believe that it's possible. But when we see what John saw in Revelation 7, we know that it's not just possible, but that it's promised. And Lord, we need your help as we center on that vision and move towards that.
name, amen.