The Lion who is the Lamb
God has to deal with the fundamental cause of the rot in his world, which is sin. As the Puritan, Richard Sibbes wrote, ‘Sin defiles our souls and takes away the sweet communion with God. It puts a sting in all our troubles, grieves the Spirit of God and does more harm that everything else in the world – nothing hurts us but sin, because nothing but sin separates us from God.’ This vision, and especially that of the ‘bloodied Lamb’, should bring home to us the seriousness of sin in the light of the holiness of God. The Bible provides us with what Charles Taylor calls the ‘social imaginary’, the totality of the way we look at the world, make sense of it and how we behave in it. It was the historian Herbert Butterfield who perceptively said, ‘If we imagine the world of generally righteous men with - at any given moment - only one especially wicked nation in it, we shall never envisage the seriousness of that situation with which Christianity sets out to deal.’ The Book of Revelation disabuses us of such Pollyanna optimism and presents the world as God sees it and as Christians should see it- broken and shameful.
