In our baptism, as the free gift of God, by casting ourselves upon the Jesus as our savior, we have all become sons of God. And when you hear the word “son" in the context of baptism, we really ought to think of Jesus's baptism and the voice that speaks from heaven: this is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.

Jesus comes as light into the deep darkness of the world, and he comes with the power of creation, of life, and with the presence of God. His arrival is an invitation for us to lay down the weapons of darkness that we use to protect ourselves and to trust him to be our rescuer.

The wonder of the Incarnation is that God came all the way down to dwell with us… we could not climb to heaven to see him, could not even enter the holy place, and so the holy one tore down the gates of the world and brought his holiness out into our wilderness. He descended and descended and descended until the word that was spoken became the Word in flesh one night in Judea.

Jesus came to show us the Father and to open blind eyes. Our call as his people is to look away from the distractions around us (both good and bad) and turn our opened eyes toward God.

“Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you.” In Jesus, we see God’s welcome and we are invited to repent of our ways and live like the good king who came to serve.

What the end of Revelation shows us—what the end of the whole cosmos shows us—is that everything in creation, from the beginning to the end, was designed by God to tell the story of Jesus Christ. Marriage and civilization, days and seasons—all of it has always been about Jesus.

God made us in all the complexity of our relationships to image him, to shine his glory as it reflects off of our God-shaped lives, and what is coming for us is better than even our best longings.

The wonders of our great inheritance in Jesus Christ are so majestic and incomprehensible that we need divine help to grasp them.

This is the purpose of God: to cast down injustice and cruelty and put an end to them; and to prepare us a feast. He invites us as guests, he washes us, and he clothes us in costly garments of righteousness not our own to give us renewed identities as image-bearers.

The Lord announces to all who have ears to hear: fallen fallen is Babylon the great. The cup of her abominations is not for you — come instead to the marriage supper of the Lamb, and drink the wine of true celebration. Yes, blood, but not blood stolen in violence, blood poured out in love as a gift to wash us of our own impurity.

Wrong worship isn't a small thing, it's the main thing. It's profanity, the defiling and desecration of creation. And so when John tells us the story again, this time he shows us that it's about restoring the cosmos to the right worship of the true God.

Babylon is John’s name for every empire that stands in opposition to the rule of King Jesus. All the concentrated powers of the world that harm the innocent oppress the weak and distort the image of God in us will be cast down by the good ruler of the world.

This is the war of the dragon against the followers of Christ — to gather up the economic, political, and religious systems of the world and to clothe them in images and symbols that appear to point to Jesus and look like God’s rightful authority. But this false lamb speaks with the voice of the dragon, and his intention is not to make worshippers of God, but instead to turn the hearts of all people away from God and toward himself.

The church of God has a prophetic witness to proclaim, like Moses, like Elijah. And that witness is itself a part of the trumpet blast warning to the world. What we’ve already seen is recast here as the prophetic witness of the faithful church, who stand both in the presence of God and in the rebellious city of the world.

The answer to the tension of chapter 9 is that God does not write off rebellious humanity but instead sends out his people to proclaim the mystery of Christ: to invite the repentance of all and to show forth the nature of God's love by living lives like Jesus’ life.