The Fourth Sunday After Easter
Revelation 7; John 10:22-30
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I.
We continue this morning with our study of the lectionary readings from Revelation during this Easter season.
The two verses I would like to focus on are Revelation 7:13-14.
Verse 13: “Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, ‘Who are these, clothed in white robes, and whence have they come?’”
Verse 14: “I said to him, ‘Sir, you know.’ And he said to me, ‘These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.’”
There are two points I would like to make about these verses.
The first is to notice the catechetical format of these two verses. This is the second time we have seen this catechetical format in Revelation, and by that, I mean this question-and-answer format, this call and response.
Last week, we heard the “strong angel” of chapter five ask, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?”
To which one of the twenty-four elders replied, “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”
Not only is this format catechetical, but it is also liturgical. That is, it takes the form of a call and response.
There are two times in our own Sunday worship where we do the same thing, during the Call to Worship and again at the Communion. The thing to understand here is that the Church’s worship is patterned on this heavenly prototype that we see in these passages.
One of the principles of the Protestant Reformation of the 16th Century is the idea that the Church’s worship should be biblical, that is, it ought to be regulated by the Bible. This is known as the regulative principle.
Today, I am less concerned about whether Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox worship conforms to this standard—I think a case can be made that it does—but I am concerned about whether Protestant worship still does.
Much contemporary Protestant worship has abandoned these traditional forms, the call and response, the doxologies, and yet that is exactly the pattern we see in Revelation.
We have the call and response, the question and answer of verses 13-14, but immediately before, in verses 11-12, we have a doxology.
The angels, the elders, and the four living creatures fall on their faces to worship God and sing this doxology:
“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God for ever and ever! Amen.”
Doxology is an English word composed of two Greek words that means “words of praise.”
Worship that is patterned on the Book of Revelation is both educational, the question and answer, interspersed by outbursts of words of praise.
The second point I wish to draw your attention to is the active role those “clothed in white robes” play in the great drama of their salvation.
John tells us that the “great multitude” are “they who have come out of the great tribulation.”
But they didn’t simply pass through this tribulation unscathed. They didn’t observe it from the outside looking in. They were not spectators. No, they took an active part. John tells us they “washed their robes.”
Moreover, they took an active role in what is clearly a bloody battle. Not only did they wash their robes but they “made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
II.
Last week, we met this conquering Lamb. This week, we are called to join the fight.
Last week, in Revelation 5, the heavenly liturgy included this catechetical call and response:
Question: “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?”
Answer: “the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”
From this we learned that the Messiah has come to conquer. However, the answer that John heard does not match what he saw. What he saw was a “Lamb standing, as though it had been slain.” This Lamb immediately “went and took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne.”
The connection is clear. The Lion of Judah, the Root of David, the conqueror, and the Lamb who was slain are one and the same.
Now, I think it is clear how the Lamb, Jesus, and the cross all connect, but let me make it plain to you.
Jesus died on the cross and rose again on the third day. John saw a “Lamb standing, as though it had been slain,” so the text links these things together explicitly.
What may not be so clear is who the Lamb is fighting and why.
To understand, let’s go back to Revelation 6:12-17. We learned in chapter five that the Lamb was found worthy to take the scroll and open its seven seals.
We’ve skipped over the opening of the first six seals, but our text this morning doesn’t make sense unless we go back quickly to the opening of the sixth seal:
“When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood….”
John continues with this standard biblical end-of-the-world description for a few more verses until verse 15:
“Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the generals and the rich and the strong, and every one, slave and free, hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, ‘Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand before it?’”
The Lamb is meting out justice. That is why there is such a copious amount of blood in which the great multitude can wash their robes.
This is the blood of vengeance, and we’re supposed to wash our robes in it.
At this point if you aren’t feeling a pit starting to form in your stomach (and maybe starting to squirm a bit in your pews) then I suggest to you that you haven’t quite heard what I am saying or what the text is getting at. Let this sink in.
If we want to be included in that great multitude—and everyone does—after all, every kumbaya vision of heaven that’s been hawked by preachers of Churchianity for the past 100 years paints a rosy picture of a heaven that everyone gets to go to without really trying, complete with the white robes, the palm branches, the harps and the angels singing.
All of that’s there to be sure, we’ve read it in black and white right there in the text this week and last, but there’s a problem: washing our robes in the blood of the Lamb means participating in His war of vengeance.
We’ve got to get our hands dirty in this fight, or, more exactly, we’ve got to sully our clothes, only, in this case, that means bleaching them as white as they can be.
III.
This is shocking language and imagery, so much so that I suspect it’s a major reason you don’t take your salvation as seriously as you should.
It’s one thing to understand, to believe even, that Christ died a torturous death for your sake, that He suffered in your place.
If you watch the film, The Passion of the Christ, it’s likely that you will be moved to tears. Many a man, woman, and child has been reduced to tears at the thought of what Jesus suffered because of what they’ve done and left undone. Regret is a fact of life and of getting older.
But as I preached last week, “tears won’t win.” As I preached during Lent, sorry isn’t good enough for high-handed sins.
So, I know you understand that it takes an awful lot to put things right with God. You understand that forgiveness is costly. It costs you something to forgive your neighbor. It cost God a good deal more to forgive. It cost Him His Son.
That’s as far as most of us get. That’s as far as I suspect John could get.
“Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, ‘Who are these, clothed in white robes, and whence have they come?’”
Did John not know? Or did he begin to suspect there might be more than simply “accepting Jesus as his personal Lord and Savior” to this whole “being Christian” thing?
If there is more, is John prepared to “go there”? Is he prepared to do it? Is he prepared to wash his robes in the Lamb’s blood, the grapes of His wrath? I suspect he’s struggling, as I suspect you are too.
“Who are these, clothed in white robes, and whence have they come?”
John said to the elder, “Sir, you know,” and that’s all John can or will say for the moment.
IV.
If John—and all of us—are asked to participate in the Lamb’s war of vengeance, it might be good to know what we can expect to gain.
The elder makes that clear in verses 15-17.
In verse 15, we are allowed into the presence of God, before the throne, to serve Him day and night.
That is quite a different place than “the kings of the earth and the great men and the generals and the rich and the strong” of chapter six find themselves in.
They are hiding in caves to escape the Lamb’s wrath. We are called to execute that wrath. At the same time, we are told that God will shelter us with His presence.
In verse 16, hunger, thirst, and scorching heat are no more.
In verse 17, the Lamb guides us to water, and God Himself wipes away our tears.
Often preachers preach on substitution, how Jesus took our place on the cross. That’s the first thing we’ve got to put our faith in.
But the next step is to take our place alongside Him, “manfully to fight under his banner,” as the baptismal rite in the old Book of Common Prayer says. Seldom do we make that as explicit as it needs to be.
The elder in our reading today couldn’t be more explicit: “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.” This means two things.
First, it means we must be active in our own salvation.
St. Paul writes in Philippians 2:12, “Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”
This is not a righteousness gained by works. This is not us saving ourselves. This is the obedience we owe to Jesus Christ born of our faith in Him as our savior.
Second, we must enact Christ’s sacrifice in our own lives. We’ve got to experience it, make it our own. This is what St. Paul means in that hard-to-understand passage in Colossians 1:24, “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.”
It’s hard to understand because it seems to suggest that there is something lacking in Christ’s sacrifice.
Elsewhere, Paul is quite explicit. In Hebrews 10:10, he writes, “we are sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”
But elsewhere, in Hebrews 9:28, he writes, “having been offered once to bear the sins of many, [he] will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.”
That is what we are dealing with here. The second appearance. That is when He comes to save us who are waiting for him.
V.
But if we’ve already been saved once from sin, why do we need to be saved a second time, and from what?
Take a step back and look at Revelation 7 as a whole. I haven’t touched much on the first eight verses, that thrilling roll call of all those who are sealed from the tribes of Israel.
Chapter seven is an interlude. The first six seals of the scroll have been broken open, the seventh remains. When the seventh seal is broken, for once it is appropriate to say, “all hell breaks loose.” The First and Second Beast come. The seven last plagues are poured out on the earth. Babylon is fallen, to rise no more.
But first the army of the Lamb must be gathered. The 144,000 are the new recruits. The great multitude is mustered into the ranks.
The elder’s vision is of the future: “These are they who have come out of the great tribulation; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.”
But John is still in the time before the seventh seal is broken, and we are as well. Just because the final battle has yet to commence, does not mean that many skirmishes have not already been fought and are still underway.
In every generation, a symbolic 144,000 is sealed for the Lamb’s army. The Lamb’s army marches forth to tread the grapes of wrath and wash its robes in the blood of vengeance.
Vengeance upon whom? Upon God’s enemies.
Is this a strange language to you? If so, I understand. We haven’t heard it much in our times. It’s been maybe 150 years since it was common.
You may remember these words from the Battle Hymn of the Republic, “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are sown.”
You see, this is how the Church speaks, this is how she sings, when she is on the march.
Looking ahead to Revelation 14, John catches up with this Church Army of the 144,000:
“They sing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the hundred and forty-four thousand who had been redeemed from the earth… it is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes.”
Where does the Lamb go and what does He do?
He goes to conquer: “The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”
He conquers all the earth: “I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.”
We have been saved once from sin so that we can join the Lamb’s army and are thrown into the battle.
John tells us that the army of 144,000 is undefiled, “chaste… redeemed from mankind as first fruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are spotless.”
You see, we can’t fight on the Lord’s side, we are unfit for His army, until we’ve been sealed. Until Jesus says of us what he tells the Jews in today’s gospel reading from John 10, “I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.”
That is what it means to be saved for the first time. To be saved for the second time happens like this.
We are saved from sin. We are put in the battle. We are washing our robes in the blood of the lamb, taking vengeance on God’s enemies. We are struck down, but we do not perish. Death cannot snatch us away from Jesus.
Or it could happen like this. We are saved from sin. We are put in the battle. We are washing out robes in the blood of the lamb, ready to take vengeance on God’s enemies. Then, the seventh seal is broken. We realize we are living in the last days. The Lord Himself returns and brings the final victory. Babylon has fallen and we were there to see it.
Whether we will be among those to see the Lord return, or perish washing our robes in the blood of the Lamb before He comes, I cannot say. “Of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”
But I can say this. The fight is on. The battle rages. If that wasn’t clear in decades past—if that wasn’t clear even just a few years ago—it should be now.
We cannot avoid it. We cannot escape it. We wouldn't want to if we could, because that would mean we were found among those cowering in caves and asking the rocks to cover us, hiding from the wrath of the Lamb.
Instead, may we be found following alongside the Lamb wherever He goes.
Let me close by briefly saying what it means to be found following alongside the Lamb wherever He goes.
First, it means persecution.
Clearly, those who wash their robes in the blood of the Lamb sometimes become martyrs.
Some martyrs give their lives, others are martyred financially and socially. Cancel culture is a kind of martyrdom.
Christ Himself experienced this persecution, this cancellation, this death.
Second, it means joining the fight. Christians who adopt a pacifist approach to the evils of the world don’t seem to recognize the fighting spirit unleashed by Christ’s resurrection.
The Book of Revelation is not merely a prophecy of the distant future, nor does it describe events that were entirely fulfilled in A.D. 70, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem.
It is a book for the here and now. Christ is fighting for His kingdom as we speak. The Protestant Church has always been uniquely equipped to understand this and to act on it.
Historically, we have been focused on home rule, building godly communities, and local accountability.
We can leave the other-worldly and mystical worship to our Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox brothers and sisters.
We can let our dispensationalist brothers and sisters prepare for the rapture.
We have been called “manfully to fight under his banner.”
Protestants understood they were in a fight until about 150 years ago. Nowadays, we’ve let our guard down.
We assumed that the culture would be Christian because we were Christian.
We assumed that our government would reflect our values. After all, we were all American and Americans were, by definition, “good people.” Christian people.
But the times have changed, and we need to wake up.
We need to reestablish our social, cultural, and political clout. That starts at the local level.
We need to identify like-minded churches in every town in this state. We need to work together.
We need to fight for what is right.
If you ask me this will also be the key to our congregation’s recovery and future growth.
John listened in awe as the roll of the new recruits to the Lamb’s army was called: 12,000 from each tribe, 144,000 in total.
Then he turned and looked, “and behold, a great multitude which no man could number.”
To be included in that number we must become active. We must join the Lamb in His fight. We must wash our robes in His blood.
Preached on May 11, 2025 at the First Congregational Church, Woodbury, Connecticut.
Questions for reflection and discussion:
The sermon emphasizes that believers must actively participate in the “Lamb’s war of vengeance” by washing their robes in His blood. How do you reconcile this call to engage in a spiritual battle with the modern emphasis on peace, tolerance, and non-confrontation in Christian communities?
Pastor Dell critiques contemporary Protestant worship for abandoning traditional, biblical forms like call-and-response and doxologies, as seen in Revelation. Do you agree that modern worship has strayed too far from its biblical roots, and what might be the consequences of this shift for the Church’s spiritual vitality?
The sermon suggests that Christians today must reassert their social, cultural, and political influence starting at the local level, implying a need to reclaim a “fighting spirit” lost in recent generations. What practical steps can Christians take to engage in this cultural and spiritual battle without compromising the gospel’s message of love and grace?
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