Day 3
THE GOD WHO SPEAKS
Revelation 1:10-11
I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day, and I heard behind me a loud voice like a trumpet saying, ‘Write in a book what you see and send it to the seven churches…’
From the Ugandan trumpet horn known as the eng’ombe, through the great brass trumpets in wedding processions in India to the Maori trumpet of
welcome, the Pūkāea, wherever and whenever they are blown trumpets demand our attention. In other cultures, including the Dinka people of South Sudan, drums play a similar role. They are not to be ignored. They may sound a warning, celebrate a long-awaited happy event, proclaim a welcome, or be a call to readiness for battle; but they are never to be ignored.
John, in exile on Patmos, cut off from his friends and church family, no doubt wondering what possible ministry he could still exercise, suddenly has the peace of his Sunday worship shattered by the most glorious noise; the precious sound of the voice of the glorified Lord Jesus. The same Jesus, who was both his saviour and his best friend, reassures the apostle that, far from his work being over, there is new ministry to do.
The result of his listening is the book Revelation which says in its opening verses ‘God blesses all who listen to its message and obey what it says.’ In some parts of the world, that is deeply counter-cultural. As a note in the African Study Bible puts it: ‘In many places, Christians are ridiculed, and the Bible is disparaged.’
The trumpet of the Bible, what the Reformation martyr, Archbishop Cranmer, called ‘God’s Word written’, never stops sounding. But whilst it can never be
Renewal Conference, Diocese of Trinidad and Tobago
silenced, we can stop listening. It is so easy to find that making time each day to read the Bible and to ask the Holy Spirit to apply it to our lives, gets crowded out by all the other things that press in on us. These things are often good in themselves – sport, children’s activities, time with friends, and the hours many need to work to balance the family budget – but they can’t be allowed to take the place of God’s word.
In some cultures, the world around us wants us to take a scalpel to Scripture and cut out the bits it doesn’t like: the parts that challenge our selfishness and sin. Let us place Scripture above our culture. For example, where the culture encourages revenge and also the idea of ‘an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth’, we need to teach that God’s word says we should never avenge ourselves but leave it to the wrath of God, for He says that ‘vengeance is mine’ (Romans 12:19). The reality about vengeance is that it promotes a cycle of vengeance. Mahatma Gandhi is quoted as saying, ‘An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind’.
As we pray for our five friends today, pray that, for them and us, we would hear God’s word to us distinctly and definitively. As Archbishop Cranmer put it ‘Wherein whatsoever is found, must be taken for a most sure ground and an infallible truth.’
Paul