As the Author reads the final sentences of this world’s story, as the final sheep steps into the fold, as the last martyr’s blood spills to the ground, we hear heaven suddenly swell — with silence.

The hallelujahs halt. As a “darkness to be felt” stretched over the land of Egypt (Exodus 10:21), now a silence to be felt stretches over heaven itself. The burning ones bite their tongues from screaming “Holy, holy, holy!” Saints momentarily quiet their songs about the crucified Lamb. The apostle John reports “silence in heaven for about half an hour” (Revelation 8:1). Heaven, that place of highest praise, sinks into the solemn stillness of an army on the eve of battle.

As all quiets onstage, trumpets are distributed to seven archangels, and the spotlight shines on a priestly angel (possibly the Lord Jesus himself), who wades through silence to stand at an altar with a golden censer and much incense. He is to burn the incense before the throne. He performs what the Old Testament priests once did in the temple, when the gathered people went silent, and the fragrant smell of burning incense rose into heaven. But what cloud of aromas now rises before the Lord? Incense from the golden bowls, the prayers of the saints (Revelation 5:8).

At the end of this world, heaven quiets itself to solemnize the prayers of God’s people, rising as worship before God. John writes, “And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel” (Revelation 8:4).

And for what do these prayers plead? In one word: justice.

Appeals of the Apocalypse

The hushed scene picks up from the intermission of chapter 6, where John sees the ascended Lamb break the seven seals one by one. The breaking of the first four seals unleashes different horsemen, who bring violence, famine, and sickness (Revelation 6:2–6). Hades gallops close behind (verses 7–8). Saints are slaughtered during this period of broken seals.

At the breaking of the fifth seal, John sees their host, “under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne” (Revelation 6:9). In silence, overhear the theme of their prayer:

They cried out with a loud voice, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:10)

“Then they were each given a white robe and told to rest a little longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brothers should be complete, who were to be killed as they themselves had been” (Revelation 6:11). That moment arrives in chapter 8. Silence to hear solemn appeals of murdered saints now crying out for God to avenge their blood.

Commentator Grant Osborne strikes the vital note: “The silence in heaven is an expectant hush awaiting the action of God, but that is not to be just an outpouring of wrath but God’s answer to the imprecatory prayers of the saints (6:9–11 recapitulated in 8:3–4). Thus there is worship (the golden censer with incense) behind the justice” (Revelation, 339). The scent of worship will soon rise from the wrath. God’s sentence against the impenitent persecutors is not just a response to sin’s penalty, but to his saint’s prayers.

Before this volcano, mouths do not open, eyes do not shut. How does God respond?

Then the angel took the censer and filled it with fire from the altar and threw it on the earth, and there were peals of thunder, rumblings, flashes of lightning, and an earthquake. (Revelation 8:5)

Fire falling, thunder crashing, rumblings, lightning lashing, earth quaking — “Be silent, all flesh, before the Lord, for he has roused himself from his holy dwelling” (Zechariah 2:13). And so begins the final judgment, for verse 5, writes G.K. Beale, “is to be interpreted as the final judgment, not as some trial preliminary to that judgment” (Revelation: A Shorter Commentary, 169).

Prayers to End the World

Again, God’s wrath against the impenitent is not just a response to sin’s penalty, but a response to his saint’s prayers. His children’s pleadings escort that judgment, beckon it forth. “The utterly astonishing thing about this text,” comments John Piper,

is that it portrays the prayers of the saints as the instrument God uses to usher in the end of the world with great divine judgments. It pictures the prayers of the saints accumulating on the altar before the throne of God until the appointed time when they are taken up like fire from the altar and thrown upon the earth to bring about the consummation of God’s kingdom. (The Prayers of the Saints and the End of the World)

Do we find this astonishing? Are we more prone to interrogate (rather than to appreciate) such prayers? “Do our prayers,” asks Beale, “come out of a sacrificial life, or do we come asking God only to throw us life-preservers to rescue us from our own foolishness? The prayers of the saints as pictured there focus on the holiness and truthfulness of God and a desire for that to be manifested in the execution of his justice. Are our prayers directed toward obtaining benefit for ourselves or glory for God?” (168).

Sheltered from much persecution, the sweetness of this incense has not yet pleased me as deeply as it might. It hasn’t needed to. Egypt’s whips have not struck my wife’s back. Pharoah has not tossed my children into the Nile. The unjust judge has not yet denied me a hearing. Romans 12:19 hasn’t met any existential crisis: “Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’” But it has for many saints who have been more profoundly inflicted by injustice and scarred by sin.

Hesitations about imprecatory prayers, especially in the West, often expose (among other things) a lack of sympathy with our persecuted brothers and sisters around the world and throughout history.

Venerating His Vengeance

Whether you and I can relate circumstantially to these prayers for justice, such judgments have their place in our worship. The first thing we see Israel doing after deliverance from Egypt is gathering at the Red Sea, tears of gratitude flowing down their cheeks, voices joining in song to praise God for saving them by sinking their foes like a stone (Exodus 15:5). Saints of old could see the crushing of their enemies as God’s covenant love for them:

Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,     for his steadfast love endures forever . . .to him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt,     for his steadfast love endures forever; . . .to him who divided the Red Sea in two,     for his steadfast love endures forever;and made Israel pass through the midst of it,     for his steadfast love endures forever;but overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea,     for his steadfast love endures forever. (Psalm 136:1, 10, 13–15)

The psalmist can’t finish sentences detailing God’s righteous judgments without inserting praise for God’s love to his people displayed in the same act. Thus, after the prayed-for judgment falls at the end of time, we hear the loud voice of a great multitude in heaven, crying out,

Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for his judgments are true and just; for he has judged the great prostitute who corrupted the earth with her immorality, and has avenged on her the blood of his servants. (Revelation 19:1–2)

Thy Kingdom Come

When the priestly angel reaches into his golden bowl, will he find our prayer there? While many of us may not often have prayed for God’s retribution to fall upon the wicked, Jesus teaches us to fill up that bowl in the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9–10).

Martin Luther once taught us that this is to place all that opposes our God’s dominion into a pile and pray: “Curses, maledictions, and disgrace upon every other name and every other kingdom. May they be ruined and torn apart, and may all their schemes and wisdom and plans run aground” (Luther’s Works [1956], 21:101). “Thy kingdom come” is the positive way of praying, “Destroy every other kingdom that resists your will or stands in your way.”

Or as Piper exults,

What we have in Revelation 8:1–5 is an explanation of what has happened to the millions upon millions of prayers over the last 2,000 years as the saints have cried out again and again, ‘Thy kingdom come. Thy kingdom come.’ Not one of these prayers, prayed in faith, has been ignored. Not one is lost or forgotten. Not one has been ineffectual or pointless. They all have been gathering on the altar before the throne of God.

We pray for God’s dominion, a dominion that will overthrow all others. We pray for King Jesus to return, knowing judgment must come with his heaven (Revelation 1:7). We desire God’s righteous justice to be satisfied — at the cross or in hell. And we desire most of all that our Savior come so that the dwelling place of God is again with man — thy kingdom come!

Not one of our prayers for Christ to come, to bring his kingdom, and to make all our deepest wrongs right will be lost. They are gathered in a bowl, soon to be burned as incense before the throne and scattered as fire upon our enemies. Some of us stare at the skies, joining that solemn silence, groaning for justice, and aching for home. He will not disappoint. He will not delay a moment longer than his Father determines. As we wait, we close the distance and assault the interval with one beautiful weapon: prayer. Come, Lord Jesus!

Audio Transcript

We close the week on this Friday looking forward to our next sermons, Sunday morning. This is because, in just about every Bible text, we face unanswerable questions, things we simply don’t know. So, what do preachers and teachers do with those uncertainties? Do we take creative license? Do we guess and make up things? Do we speculate? Or do we just tell people that we don’t know? It’s a great practical question from Mark who lives in Montana.

“Dear Pastor John, hello! Jesus tells us in John 12:49, ‘I have not spoken on my own authority, but the Father who sent me has himself given me a commandment — what to say and what to speak.’ And we trust that ‘all Scripture is breathed out by God’ (2 Timothy 3:16). So, I have long struggled with how much embellishment and speculation we should bring into the pulpit. Scripture does not include every possible detail for us. And the church through the ages has, in many cases, tried to fill in these gaps. Commentaries frequently say things like ‘this may refer to.’ Or they use qualifiers like ‘possibly’ and ‘probably’ to explain meanings that are uncertain. So, here’s my question. Is it okay for teachers and preachers to conjecture about what the Bible doesn’t say? How much speculation should we bring into our sermons?”

Well, let’s start with the easy part.

Preachers Must Tell the Truth

A pastor, a preacher, above all things, should be honest. If he’s not honest, none of his other qualities — not even his faith or his love — will count for anything because the people simply won’t be able to trust him. They won’t be able to trust that he has faith or trust that he really loves them. A dishonest pastor can’t make up for dishonesty by other virtues because it’s foundational, and it’s foundational because truth is foundational. Honesty means telling the truth. Preachers must tell the truth.

“A preacher, above all things, should be honest.”

And what that means here in the context of this question is that he can’t say he knows what he doesn’t know. It would be a lie, and God won’t honor that. In other words, if he’s not sure what a word or a phrase or a sentence in the sermon text means, he must not say he is sure what it means.

So, the first principle of how much uncertainty you admit into a sermon is that you admit as much as you must in order to be honest with what the people need to know. Now, that doesn’t mean that you need to mention every single thing you don’t know — that would take way too long. The problem is not that there are many things we preachers don’t understand and won’t understand until Jesus comes. That’s not the problem. That’s true of all preachers. The problem is with stating as true what you don’t know to be true.

Now, that’s the easy part.

Honesty in Interpretation

Mark is asking not mainly about presenting speculations as true, which is dishonest, but about presenting speculations at all. That’s more complicated. And even though you don’t have to tell your people every Sunday everything you don’t know about the text, you probably will have to tell them some things you don’t know about the text.

“Over time, we will lose the trust of our people if we are constantly skipping difficult sentences.”

At least, if your people have grown to expect that you are a faithful expositor, and you don’t skip over hard things just because they’re hard, then they’ll want to know what your explanation is for the next sentence in the biblical text. And you might skip some things because you’re dealing with some large text, say, and you can’t touch on everything. But over time, we will lose the trust of our people if we are constantly skipping difficult sentences because we’re not sure what they mean.

So, what do you do? If you see something in the text and you’re not sure what it means — some words, some phrase, some logic — what do you do? You tell people honestly that you’re not sure what this word or phrase or logic or situation means. Then you tell them what you think it means, and you give them the reasons why you think what you do that they can see in the text.

And then you tell them one or two of the other possible understandings and why you don’t lean toward them. And then, if you can, you show them elsewhere in the Bible that these two or three alternative interpretations are all true to reality. They’re true to reality, even though you’re not sure which of those realities is being referred to in this text. In other words, you’re not going to say that one of the possible interpretations is contradictory to the reality that other passages in the Bible clearly teach. You’re not going to fault the Bible as contradictory. You’re going to give your people the possible interpretations, which in fact could be true given what is taught elsewhere in the Bible.

Emissaries of Infallible Truth

Now, there’s one other angle on this issue of bringing speculation into Christian preaching that I want to mention. And I think Mark is getting at this in one of his concerns as well.

It has to do with the use that preachers make of sociological, or philosophical, or psychological, or even canonical backgrounds to what the text says, which may or may not be the case. And it’s not obvious from the text. So a preacher might say, “Paul got this emphasis from the stoic philosophers, and then he Christianized it.” Maybe, maybe not. Or they might say that such and such a paragraph is an early Christian hymn. Well, maybe, maybe not. Or they might say that Paul was fond of attending the Olympic games. Well, maybe, maybe not. Or they might speculate that Paul was a widower, or they might venture that he was a type-A personality and would be an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs. Or they might say that every reference to the Son of Man is an allusion to Daniel 7.

Now, my guess is that what’s going on in some preaching is that the preacher has ceased to think of himself as an accountable emissary of God’s infallible truth, whose job is to call people to believe things for which they’re willing to risk their lives. And instead, he’s fallen into the pattern — a kind of academic pattern or public-communicator pattern — of seeing himself as an interesting communicator who needs to hold people’s attention with fascinating details that may or may not be the case.

They Come to Hear God

So, my closing warning would be this: to the degree that a preacher builds his sermons with materials that people cannot see for themselves in the Bible, to that degree he loses authority, and he loses the power to build faith, and he has passed over into entertainment — even theologically rich entertainment, canonically captivating entertainment, which he thinks the people will find interesting, fascinating, intriguing, whether they see it in the text or not.

In fact, one of the yellow flags that I spot in preaching is when the pastor says, “Well, I find it intriguing that . . .” and then he gives me an interesting twist on the text with no support that I can build my life on. And I want to stand up and shout — I never have, but maybe I will — “We’re not here to learn what you find intriguing, Mr. Pastor. We have come to hear the word of God. Tell us what God has to say to us, and if you don’t know, tell us you don’t know. And then go back to your study and get on your knees over your books and your Bible, and wrestle until your hip is out of joint. And then when you’ve got a message from God, bring it to us and we will be very, very thankful.”

Audio Transcript

Good morning on this Christmas Day. We’re honored to share this holiday together with you. And for you, Pastor John, on such a day, I actually have no question for you. I want to clear the decks and let you take it from here, to share front-burner thoughts with us. What’s on your mind as you think about Scripture and meditate on such a glorious day like today?

On this Christmas Day, what I would like to do is to try and help you, all our listeners, to marvel at the coming of the eternal Son of God into the world. I want to help you marvel today. Jesus is coming back to this earth, the Bible says, “to be marveled at among all who have believed” (2 Thessalonians 1:10). That’s his destiny — to be marveled at by millions on that day.

And Christmas is a great day for rehearsing what it will be like to marvel at Jesus on that day — because Christmas rivets our attention on four stupendous realities, which, if we see them for what they really are, will cause our hearts to marvel at

the mysterious greatness of God, who was simply there before there was anything else,
the fact that this infinite, eternal Creator entered his creation as the God-man, Jesus Christ,
the happy reason for why he came to creation, a creation in high treason against him, and
the boundless joy offered to all because of what Jesus did when he came.

Let’s take these four realities one at a time and see if we can awaken in our souls Christmas marveling, last-day marveling in advance.

1. God is and always was.

The first Christmas marvel is the mysterious greatness of God, who was simply there before there was anything else. When God commissioned Moses in Exodus 3:14 to tell the people of Israel who had sent him, God said, “I Am Who I Am. . . . Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I Am has sent me to you.’” What does that mean?

It means that the God of the Bible, the God over all history and all reality, simply is and always was. He is absolute reality: “I am who I am. I simply am.” He had no beginning; he will have no ending. There was no reality before him; there is no reality outside him unless he wills it and creates it. Before creation, he is all that was: no space, no universe, no emptiness, no dark, no cold and endless vastness — only God. God was and is absolute reality. All else, from galaxies to subatomic particles, is secondary.

We tend to think that the material universe, with all its vastness, is the main reality. It’s not. It’s secondary — secondary at the most. God is reality. He carries the universe, so to speak, like a peanut in his pocket. Everything that the James Webb Space Telescope or the electron microscope shows us is as nothing compared to God. Let this sink in, because if we don’t start with this staggering reality and marvel, nothing else will have the wonder that it should. Nothing else will be marvelous the way it should be.

2. The Creator entered creation.

The second Christmas marvel is the wonder that this infinite, eternal Creator entered his creation in the person of Jesus — truly man, truly God. Jesus said to the Pharisees, “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” They responded, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have you seen Abraham?” And Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:56–58).

You’re kidding me. “Before Abraham was, I am.” He could have said, “Before Abraham was, I was.” That would have been spectacular enough. But he didn’t. He said, “Before Abraham was, I am,” because he is the great “I Am” of Exodus 3:14, very God of very God, absolute being in the flesh. “He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:17) — absolute being. I Am Who I Am “became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14).

This has happened by a divine conception in the womb of a virgin, Mary. She was staggered at the news and said, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy — the Son of God” (Luke 1:34–35). “Before Abraham was, I am.” At Christmas, I Am Who I Am became a man.

3. Jesus came to die and to save.

The third Christmas marvel is the unspeakably happy reason for why he came into this creation in high treason against him. Why did he enter the very creation that regarded him so lightly — indeed, with such dishonor? Here’s the simplicity and beauty and glory of Paul’s simple, straightforward answer: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). Or the words of Jesus himself: “The Son of Man came . . . to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

How can that be? God can’t die. But the God-man can die. So, Hebrews 2:14–15 says he took on a human nature “that through death” — because you can’t die if you don’t have the right nature to die. He took on a human nature “that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death . . . and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.” The great I Am Who I Am came into the world, into this rebellious creation, to die and to save.

4. Christmas is for everyone.

Finally, the fourth Christmas marvel is that the gift of the Christmas incarnation is for everyone.

“Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:43).
“Whoever hears [Jesus’s] word and believes him who sent [Jesus] . . . does not come into judgment” (John 5:24).
“Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life” (John 3:36).
“[He] died for us so that . . . we might live with him” (1 Thessalonians 5:10).

That is, so that we might live with the inexhaustibly satisfying, great I Am forever and ever, in whose presence “is fullness of joy” and at whose “right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11).

Oh, let us marvel together on this Christmas Day that the great and only God simply is: “I Am Who I Am.” That this I Am became the God-man Jesus Christ. That he came not to destroy, but to save his treasonous creatures. And that by faith in him, our sins are forgiven, and our judgment is passed. We will live forever in the presence of this infinite, kind, all-satisfying I Am. May I wish you this kind of Merry Christmas.