Continuing chapter one of Conversations About God, by Graham Maxwell, edited from the oral text by Jon Paulien.
Conversations About God 1:3
Whether we want to be or not, all of us are now caught up in the consequences of this cosmic conflict regarding the character and government of God. Everyone in the universe is unavoidably involved. And the future of God’s family, to which we all belong, depends upon the outcome of this war. Compared with God’s solution of this problem, our own personal salvation, while important, is relatively inconsequential. For if God does not win this war, who would want to be saved?
For God to win this war, however, does not leave out our salvation. The way God has worked to win you and me is the same as the way in which He won the war among the angels. In other words, the methods that God has used to win us back to repentance and faith (trust) are the same methods that have led the unfallen universe to tell Him He’s absolutely trustworthy. Even if He should fail to win you and me, they will trust and worship Him for the rest of eternity because of the demonstration of His goodness and trustworthiness.
So as much as God wants to save all of us, He could fail to do this and still not lose the war. For in heavenly places the war was already won two thousand years ago. All through the book of Revelation, angels are celebrating God’s victory in the war. They never cease telling Him that He’s proved Himself to be righteous and holy and just and good and infinitely worthy of their trust (Rev 5:9-12; 15:3-4). And that victory is the foundation of our salvation.
The early Christians sorely needed Revelation’s encouraging picture of the angels celebrating, because there were several serious crises among them at that time. For one thing, the Second Coming seemed to be indefinitely delayed. They thought He would come around 50 A.D. and Paul had to tell them, “No, not yet” (2 Thess 2:1-3). There were still more things to happen (2 Thess 2:4-12). But by the 90’s Jesus had still not returned. And besides this, there were heresies in the church. Some, for example, were teaching that Christ had not really come in human form. He had not really suffered and died. He had faked it all. For that reason, they were sometimes called the Docetists (from the Greek word for “seeming to be”). And then there was great opposition, and serious persecution. Not only that, the apostles were all dead, except one. And he was the elderly John, now a prisoner on the Isle of Patmos. What good news was there to encourage the early Christians?
You can count on God, when things are that bleak, to send a message of encouragement and explanation to His people. He surely wouldn’t send a book of mysteries and dates and schedules of events that they could not possibly understand. Rather, the sixty-sixth Bible book that God did send is titled “Revelation,” or “Clarity.” The book of Revelation is an invitation to discouraged early Christians to look a little higher, to take the larger view of things. It helped them see how they’d all been caught up in a vast conflict that affects the whole universe! And that it’s a conflict over God’s own character and government.
Not only that, as you read through the book of Revelation you see that God has already won this war, and the angels in heaven all agree with Him. This is the good news. Revelation also invites us to join in the celebration; and then to go out to the world and invite all who are willing to listen, to join in God’s victory in the war. When Christians discover this larger view of things, they don’t need to be on the defensive all the time; they have good news to tell. There is no way God and His side can lose. The invitation of the Bible’s sixty-sixth book is to join the winning side.
The book of Revelation also says that you can count on God to wait until this truth about Him, this good news about His character and government, has been spread all over the world. God is the kind of person who will wait until His children have had an opportunity to understand the issues in the war. He wants them to be ready for the awesome events the Bible describes as taking place before Jesus’ return. The highest privilege of God’s friends on this planet today is to understand and to present the plan of salvation in the larger setting of the great controversy.
Summing up, the first step in the journey of faith is to recognize that we are sinners and that we need to be saved. It is understandable, therefore, that at first we might be preoccupied with what God has done in order that we might be saved. But as we grow in the journey of faith, and our knowledge of the Bible deepens, and we learn to take the Bible as a whole. It then becomes apparent that our own personal salvation (important as that is) is only a small part of a far larger picture that involves the peace and security of the whole vast universe. It involves the confirmation of the truth about our God Himself.