Is Heaven as Scary as It Is in the Book of Revelation?

 Friends, we’re in the last 2 weeks of Stump the Preacher 2025, sermons requested by y’all and then delivered by me. This week’s request was from our dear Fae, who wanted to know if heaven is really as scary as it is in the book of Revelation. Good question, Fae!

And I get it. I read Revelation all the way through for the very first time when I was 12. It was the spring of 1999, and Y2K was coming. Remember that nonsense? It was an era where everyone was getting nutty because they were scared and they were being fed false information…and not for the last time. If you were a younger Christian then, you had Y2K fear mongering coming from the news, or your parents, in one ear, and then the Left Behind book series in the other ear, and we were getting kind of obsessed with this notion that the world might end. And of course, it didn’t, and we’re still here. Please remember that next time you get invited to a fear mongering parade. I read Revelation with my Sunday School teacher, who was all about helping us younger folx find our voices, but who wasn’t all that bookish. Now that I’ve been to seminary I know all kinds of nerdy stuff about Revelation, but I’ll still never forget how my teacher, Missy, made me feel: discombobulated, but safe to learn and explore in the midst of that.

Like me in 1999, John, the pen name of the author of Revelation, was being told the world was going to end. But, unlike me, he had a better reason to think that. He was a First Century Christian, and his closest friends were being tortured, somewhere close to the time of Emperor Nero’s reign over the Roman Empire. Remember that, like Jesus, John’s community was under Roman military occupation, and the State belief in those days was that the Emperor was not only the man in charge, but also a god. If you were outed for professing belief in that weirdo Jesus guy instead, that guy who was executed by Rome a few decades before, you were a traitor to the Emperor, and he had no shortage of creative sadism to inflict upon traitors. Why does this book come off so scary? Because John was scared. But, while he was shaking in his boots, he also had some big visions that he wanted to share with his friends. And since a Roman soldier could be reading over John’s shoulder at any time, and writing “nuts to Rome” could get him killed, he had to write in code. But also, it was a code that the folx around him could figure out. An evil beast conquering all the kingdoms around him, whose number nickname was 666, being defeated by an army of angels and a monster-punching Jesus, who gets the last word, both figuratively and literally. As for the 666 bit, I’ve seen all kinds of folks with way too much time on their hands work the number 666 into everything from Mickey Mouse to Beyonce. Fun story: in January of 1989, when Ronald and Nancy Reagan prepared to vacate the White House, they secured the purchase of a big house in Bel-Air, California, which was perfect except for one problem–the address. 666 St. Cloud Road. They petitioned the town to change the address to 668 St. Cloud Road before they moved in, both because of their own superstitions, and because of their fear of the headlines that might follow if former President Reagan were living under the number 666.

Despite all the conspiracy theories you’ve doubtless heard connected to the number 666, we’re pretty sure it was simply code. In Biblical Greek, if you assign numbers to each letter, and then look at the letters you would use to spell “Nero”, and then find the corresponding numbers, and add them up, you get 666. I’m just going to put out there that he ain’t the first powerful person to be referred to by a number instead of his name. We do this a whole lot, with both good and bad associations. So, attach whatever value you might to number 45/47. When I was a 90s kid in Chicago, 23 was our beloved MJ. 4 was a quarterback up north for the Green Bay Packers. These days, Taylor Swift has enough numerology attached to her to start her own religion, but with a special emphasis on the number 13, because her birthday is December 13th. We could go on all day, but you get the idea. Why didn’t John just tell us that the beast with the dreaded number 666 was really Emperor Nero? Boy would he have spared me from reading some fun stuff on the internet if he had done that. But, if he had, he may not have lived to get this book out. Also, his community understood, in the same way that you understand when you look at political cartoons about donkeys and elephants and Uncle Sam. It was a visual language that the folks around him absorbed like sponges. And what they heard was, Yes, Emperor 666 is awfully scary. But he won’t be here forever. Greedy, evil men die by their own avarice. And, in the end, our world will be made beautiful again, and Jesus will be the one in charge, not some other guy.

As part of this spectacular imagery, we get some amazing descriptions: Jesus with a sword coming out of his mouth, angels that are covered with eyeballs and wings, rooms full of people cloaked in white robes, thunder and lightening and burning torches and some mythical creatures surrounding the throne of heaven that even the trippiest Sci Fi writer you’ve ever read wouldn’t be able to dream up. Oh, and I could keep going, fam. Pro tip: don’t read this book after your large Taco Bell dinner and before going to bed, because you’re gonna have a bad night. And John tells us in a few different places that he’s describing heaven. Oh boy. This brings us back where I started, to Fae’s question. Is this what heaven looks like? Is heaven scary? Because I’m not sure I want to spend eternity in a place where Jesus has a sword coming out of his mouth, even if that’s the Good Place.

John described a heaven that fit what he knew of his faith and his own heart: a no funny business kind of place where, if nothing else, he knows he’s safe from men like Nero. I would argue that there’s also tremendous beauty in John’s description of heaven, but it’s beauty that sits right alongside our deepest fears and our biggest struggles. It’s a kind of beauty we may be unable to understand until we’re actually there, when suddenly everything clicks into place.

Maybe heaven looks like that. But I don’t think I’ll be scared when I go there, or that you will be, either. I have my own vision of what heaven might be like, one that might be too silly for you, and if so, don’t worry about it. But when my Grandma died I imagined that the heaven I’ll see her in someday is like Six Flags. I’ll walk through the turnstile (my version of the Pearly Gates), and Jesus will give me a big hug and a park map. And just like I knew how to find all my favorite roller coasters when I was a kid, someday in heaven I’ll know exactly how to read my park map. Grandma’s Rocking Chair will be in big, bold letters. In another section, there will be Grandpa’s Golf Course. In another, King David’s Music Lounge, where he DJs the psalms as he wrote them. When you get there, you’ll see what you need to, just like how you see in God what you need to. So maybe you’ll see a big field of flowers, or a bunch of clouds, or a mountain of ice cream that you spend eternity eating.

But regardless, the Good News will be the same: Jesus is in charge up there, not some other guy. And this life gets really intense and discombobulating, but you’re going to be ok, even in the midst of it.

Amen.