Where is the Wine? (Season12 Episode22)

For the past two weeks, we have looked at how Jesus helps us read and understand the Old Testament in more honest and life-giving ways. We spend this Sunday wrapping that up. But our series will be far from done. While the Old Testament contains many uncomfortable stories and passages, the Gospels themselves, and the book of Revelation in particular, gives us some puzzling and scary images of Jesus. What do we do with them?

Jesus does tell a story about a rich man suffering in hell, begging for a drop of water on his tongue. That freaks me out! Or consider that Jesus speaks more about hell than any other person in Scripture. That scares me. What about that oft quoted teaching of his about sheep and goats? That is disconcerting to say the least. And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of scary images we find of Jesus in the book of Revelation. Have you read that book recently? It reads as though someone had a bad acid trip and recorded their hallucinations. If there is one book that terrifies people, it is Revelation: beasts with seven heads, rivers of blood, some kind of final world war to end all world wars. I mean, solving the riddles of the Old Testament still leaves an honest believer with plenty of questions. We are headed to all of them, because we need to sort these things out once and for all.